Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection)

The Young Person's Guide to the Organism (Variations and Fugue on a Classical Theme)

THEME: ORGANISM

(ALLEGRO MAESTOSO E LARGAMENTE)

(WITH GOOD SPEED, MAJESTIC AND SWEEPING)

A treat. Come to the window. An Organism is passing the Outpost.

There, where my claw points. It is very faint. It is nearly invisible because its skin absorbs almost all the electromagnetic radiation it receives. Do you know what I mean by electromagnetic radiation? And what else besides light? And what else? And what else? Gamma rays, child. Gamma rays.

When you sleep tonight, I will see that you dream of physics.

You cannot tell from this view, but the Organism is very large. Twelve kilometers long, ten kilometers in diameter at its midsection. That is comparable to the Outpost itself. It is larger than any ship or orbital yet constructed by your race.

If you look closely, you will see that from time to time its skin glistens slightly with thin ghosts of color. It is beautiful, is it not? A thing of splendor, though it is nearly invisible. It is black, but comely.

Can you identify my allusion? The Song of Solomon. From a human celebration text. I have made a study of such texts, child; they hearten me. Whenever I despair that your race is entirely consumed by pettiness, the celebration texts remind me that humans also recognize greatness.

Recognize the greatness of this Organism, child. It is magnificent: huge, ancient, serene. When such an Organism passes by, ephemeral species like yours will dream dreams and see visions. Its presence stirs a resonance within you; some races claim these creatures are the shadows of gods, slowly gliding through our universe.

We do not know where this Organism comes from. It has been in deep space for centuries. If it does not choose to settle down in Sol's system, it will travel many more centuries before it reaches another star. It has been alone a long time.

No…why should we stop it? We have no right to interfere. Once it is past the Outpost, it is within human jurisdiction.

I don't understand your question. Why should it matter whether the humans can "handle" the Organism? This is their system—they are its children and its masters. We will not tamper with human affairs, not even "for their own good." We have neither the right nor the wisdom to meddle. You know that.

Yes, you are human yourself, child, but only in the coils of your DNA. In your brain and heart and soul, you are the chosen envoy of the League of Peoples. By the time humans step beyond the edge of their system, you will be ready to serve as intermediary between our two races. But before you can act, you must learn; and in order to learn, you must observe.

Observe the Organism as it passes, child. We do not know where it came from, nor can we predict where it goes. We cannot tell how much it is moved by instinct, how much by intellect…yet I say unto you, Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these. Yes, another allusion. And unfair to Solomon. I expect he was a marvel himself.

VARIATION A: LEVIATHAN

(PRESTO)

(VERY QUICKLY)

CONTACT: MAY 2038

Not so long ago, my darling girl, every freighter flying the Red Run had one cargo pod doing duty as an Environment. You wouldn't know what that was, would you? (Whoops, Granddah spilled a bit on your bib, didn't he? Let me wipe it off. Ahh, get your fingers out of it. It's the tiniest fingers in the world you have, yes, Colleen, yes, you do.)

An Environment was a piece of Earth, that's what it was. A sim-u-la-tion. Which is a big word even for those of us who've mastered words like Mama and Dada and Granddah. (Granddah. Grannnn-daaahhh. No? Oh, well.)

We sometimes had trouble with Mudside investors who thought the Environment was a waste of our freight space, but those damned moneylenders had their thumbs up their…they were notoriously shortsighted, that's what they were. You put yourself in the place of those miners on Mars. Which would you rather have? Another few tons of bouillon and toothpaste? Or a walk through a rose garden smelling of perfume and peat moss, maybe a night forest rustling with rabbits and squirrels, or a marsh with red-winged blackbirds fluting away Cheeee-ri-ohhhhh! (Oh, you like that? Cheeee-ri-ohhhh! Cheeee-ri-oh-oo-oh!)

Anyway, how it was, your ship was its Environment. (Take a big mouthful, that's my girl.) The Environment was your ship's trademark and you lived up to it. I remember a Japanese ship called the Edo Maru—had a pretty little Shinto shrine, copy of a famous one on Mt. Fuji, I forget the temple's name. But very pleasant and tranquil. Trouble was, the captain was this Swede, nice fellow really, but hearty, you know, with the loudest voice God ever foisted on someone who didn't sing opera. Sort of gave the ship a split personality. No one could take it serious.

Don't know what happened to the Edo. Got old, got sold, I guess. Not many alternatives to that story, are there?

Our ship was called the Peregrine, and our Environment was the deck of a China clipper. A bit different from the back-to-nature Environments, but very popular. We had sun, waves, gulls, fresh-picked oolong in the hold. The kids could climb up into the rigging. Adults too, for that matter—miners would get one whiff of the breeze carrying the salt smell of the Pacific and they'd be clambering up the mast, forgetting the mines and the cold red desert, stretching those muscles that only get stretched when body and soul reach up together.

Once every docking, we'd run a storm—never broadcast when it would be, just let the sky start to turn gray…and the excitement! The looks on the faces of the visitors when the clouds began to cover the sun and folks knew they'd hit the right time! Then a lightning flash in the distance, a count of five, the rumble of thunder…waves heaping up and capping over, the wind rising to squall, the deck rocking, our crew lashing everyone to the railings as rollers came crashing over the bough…well, we were a legend. Peregrine wasn't a clunk of a freighter looking like a sow dangling twenty full teats, but an honest-to-God clipper ship.

Not an easy image to maintain, I tell you. Like the old masted clipper White Cloud, we couldn't ever be late, or the mystique would be shattered. Other ships—Coventry, that was the one with the rose garden—Coventry never docked on schedule. Once we saw it parked behind Phobos, passing time till it was overdue. It had its reputation, we had ours.

All of which is preamble to the story I'm going to tell you, soon as you have another spoonful of these beans. Or peas. This green sludge that looks like it came out of some…out of the wrong end of a herbivore. Mmmmm, yes, it's good, isn't it?

We may have had some beans and peas on board for the run I'm going to tell about. I don't know. The manifests said we were carrying perishables, which meant they'd only be good for three or four months in a refrigeration pod. The contract called for docking at Mars-Wheel within ninety days of departure, with a late penalty of ten percent of total fees per day…which was tough terms, let me tell you. But we were the Peregrine and we had our reputation to uphold. Not to mention raking in a pretty packet if we pulled the trick off.

We ran stripped, without a thimble more fuel than we needed and without a single spare part. Normally we'd carry enough gear to rebuild the entire engine if need be, not to mention duplicate navigation and life support systems. But that meant extra mass, and to make the Red Run in ninety days, given the relative positions of the Earth and Mars at that point…well, you don't want to hear this. Anyway, I don't want to talk about it, which amounts to the same thing, don't it?

We'd run stripped twice before, and didn't like it any better the third time. Superstitious types in the mess—and there are always superstitious types in the mess, that's as sure as death and taxes—they said you couldn't get away lucky three times in a row. All of us were jumpy, and me…it was my last trip before retirement, and I thought sure the fates would cut me down. Passing a watch alone in the control room, I'd say to myself, O'Neil, didn't you just hear the whine of the engines change? Shouldn't the pitch of the turbines sound lower? And isn't there maybe a kind of sour smell in the air, not exactly like something burning, but maybe the tiniest leak in a liquid fuel canister…and I'd stare at all the gauges, tap them sharp in case the needles were stuck, run diagnostics over and over again wondering what I'd do if I actually found something wrong, when all along, I knew the answer was just bend over and kiss my…life good-bye.

So. It was the sixty-fifth day and I was the only one awake on the ship. Well, considering how badly we were all sleeping that's probably not true, but I was the only crew member on duty, sitting in the control room and fretting over imagined catastrophes. I thought I was so keyed up I'd leap at shadows; but suddenly, it dawned on me I'd been staring at a blip on the proximity screen for over a minute without realizing what that blip meant.

I jerked into action, grabbed a radio headset with shaking hands, and nearly shouted into the mouthpiece, "Attention, nearby vessel, this is merchant freighter Peregrine traveling stripped, repeat stripped, en route to Mars-Wheel. Please yield. Repeat, please yield. Over." Which meant I wanted the other vessel to do whatever maneuvering was needed to avoid collision, because we intended to keep dead on course.

There was a silence that felt long, but I wasn't near calm enough to wait more than a heartbeat. I repeated myself three times without getting an answer, all the while watching the blip. It seemed to be growing, a speck that grew like a grain of rice in water and kept growing, to maggot, to beetle, to moth; but faint, ghostly faint, as if it was barely there. Too big for another freighter, but nothing like an asteroid, nothing like any chunk of space debris I'd ever seen. My hand hovered over the klaxon button, ready to send a panic through the ship, but I was too scared and unsure to sound the alarm. I doubted what I saw. I kept saying under my breath, I'm dreaming, I've snapped, it can't be.

It took a long time for the object to show on the visual monitors. When it did, it was a huge egg, bigger than Mars-Wheel itself, but so black I could only see it as a blot lumbering across the starscape. It was the biggest damned ship my eyes ever saw, and I knew it hadn't been constructed by human hands.

We passed within ten klicks of it, and I did nothing but watch. Never turned on the video recorders. Never called another soul as witness. I don't know why. After the edge dulled on my terror, I was overall calm. I didn't want to share this thing. It was something like a miracle, and I saw it as a promise the run would end all right. Ah, my darling, I was the man in the clipper's crow's nest catching sight of Leviathan itself in the quiet dark, and taking comfort there are great and strange mysteries in the places between shores. The deeps are unfathomable, which is a pun and a promise and a treasure and a truth. Near ten years have passed, but the wonder's still in me. And maybe it'll rub off on you, Colleen, my other wonder. Yes. Yes.

Now we'll mop off this pretty little mouth and say all gone, get rid of the nice bib that Granddah messed up, and then we'll see if we can find where your mother hides the diapers. All right? All right.

VARIATION B: NESSIE

(LENTO)

(SLOWLY)

CONTACT: JULY 2038

My Dear Grandchild Ashworth,

The doctors tell me I shall not live to see you born; and although a sensible man puts as much faith in doctors as he does in palm-readers and politicians, I am inclined to believe them in this particular matter. When I lie awake at night, I can feel the loosening of the strings that tie me to life. They unravel quietly; I have yet to decide if death is being gentle or merely stealthy.

But to the business at hand. Have you read those stories where someone puts a message in a bottle and throws it into the sea? As a boy, I loved those tales. We lived a hundred miles from the coast and had no money for traveling; but one autumn day when I was twelve, I tucked an old wine bottle into my knapsack and thumbed a ride with a lorry heading toward the ocean.

Two hours later I was standing on the edge of a deserted beach where a long cement pier stretched over the water. It was overcast and cold—I hadn't thought to bring a sweater—but my blood was singing with exhilaration. I ran along the sand and danced with the waves, each breaker different, each filled with water from a distant shore. It was one of the two perfect moments in my life.

When I had burned off the hottest fires of my elation, I threw myself down at the end of the pier and watched flotsam nudge against the pylons below me. After a while, I got out my bottle, my pen, and a notepad, and tried to decide what to write for my note. You may laugh at me (I do myself now and then), but I'd given no thought to this aspect of the adventure. The important thing, you see, was just to send some tiny bit of myself off into the unknown…to think that my bottle might be retrieved by a pearl diver off Honshu, or tangle itself in a mackerel net on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, or founder in a storm rounding the Cape of Good Hope. I could point to any spot on the globe and think, there, right there, a part of me could be there.

Do you know what I finally wrote? HA HA. IT'S ME. HELLO!!!

I didn't even sign my name. In the back of my mind, I worried someone might find the bottle, track me down, and say, "Well, boy, your bottle got all the way to Brazil, isn't that splendid?" But it wouldn't be splendid at all. It would collapse my dream to some tiny reality. I wanted the world, not one paltry patch of sand.

Years later, I found myself owner and master of the good ship Coventry, a merchant freighter plying the silent dark between Earth and Mars with cargoes of tea and silk and spice…not to mention toothpicks, pencils, toilet tissue, and other mundane needs of life. It was a staid and genteel existence: months of slow calm followed by a cheerful arrival at the colony, where everyone was your friend and happy to meet you. The Coventry was always eagerly awaited.

Like most lives, I suppose, my life rolled along uneventfully. Our contracts were unashamedly pedestrian—I left to others the dangerous chemicals, the refined fission tubes, the lucrative perishables. Other ships might save money by gambling that an aging guidance system would last one more run; but the owners of those ships didn't ride in them. We spent more money on maintenance than we had to, but we never found ourselves stopped in the middle of a million miles of emptiness.

Except once. And that was by my command.

Halfway through an unexceptional run, I was summoned to the bridge by our second mate, a mercurial sort of woman named Rachel who amused the wardroom by taking up a new hobby on every run: oil painting, algebraic topology, playing the oboe…it was something different each time. This particular trip, she'd been dabbling with some of the new long-range sensor equipment that was just then coming onto the market (Lord knows where she got the money to buy it) and she'd detected a large anomaly some three hundred miles off our course. Did she have my permission to investigate? Well, certainly; our schedule was flexibility itself.

I can't say what we expected to find. Humanity was new enough to spacefaring that we constantly encountered oddities, most of them falling into the category of "yet another oddly pitted rock with a mildly unusual radar profile." However, when we finally closed on the anomaly, we discovered it was anything but mundane.

It was a giant: teardrop-shaped, black as the night it drifted through…all the grandeur and mystery of the universe made solid and riding silently before us. Like meeting the dear old Loch Ness monster—something that ought to exist, even if it's impossible.

Almost twenty years have passed and still I cannot decide if it was a ship or a single giant creature, if it was alive or dead. One thing I know: it was not some oddly pitted rock.

Rachel looked at it with something like terror in her eyes. She could not bring herself to speak.

"Dock by it," I said without hesitation. "Tell the crew it's only a drill. I want this kept secret."

"Is it safe?" she asked.

"Do what I ask, please, Rachel. Let's consider this an order, shall we?"

While she brought the ship about and matched velocities with the anomaly, I put on a Vac/suit and found some chalk. I was in a state of burning excitement, fully alive for the second time in my life.

Yes, child. I went out the airlock, leapt through the void to the anomaly's flesh, and scrawled huge letters on its midnight scales: HA HA. IT'S ME. HELLO!!!

Now I, Gerald Ashworth, own the universe. That's how I feel. Perhaps the mystery will reach some far-off planet and start some new life cycle; perhaps it will fall into a sun or black hole; perhaps it will simply drift on until the great enfolding embrace of the cosmos reunites all matter and energy at the end of time. A little piece of me rides through the universe's depths, and makes them pregnant with possibility.

Only you and I know this secret. I was out of sight of the Coventry when I wrote the message; Rachel must have been curious, but didn't ask questions. I begged her to tell no one what we had seen, and she agreed.

So, you may ask, why am I telling this to an unborn grandchild when I've kept it secret from everyone else? Because you are a complete unknown. Maybe you'll be a great leader, or an artist, or a scientist; maybe you'll be a modest factory worker; maybe you'll be a criminal, or a lunatic, or a doctor. A world of possibility.

I shall put this letter into an envelope and leave it for you to open on your eighteenth birthday. I own the Earth and I own the universe. Through you, I can own the future.

HA HA. IT'S ME. HELLO!!!

VARIATION C: ANGEL

(FURIOSO)

(FURIOUSLY)

CONTACT: JULY 2038

I am in hell you are in hell this is hell we are all in hell. Amen.

Say amen.

Say it!

Your voice sounds young today, demon. What are you pretending to be this time?

Simon Esteban. A student. Student of what, psychology or demonology? Never mind, that was a joke. I have a lot of psychology students visit me, Simon Esteban. You'd think I was the only madwoman on Mars.

Yes I know I'm on Mars and I know I'm in hell. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large…I contain multitudes. My name is Legion, for many demons have entered me.

That's in the gospels. "Gospel" means "good news."

My other name is Rachel. "Rachel" means "Gentle innocent."

I enjoy irony as much as the next person.

I'm not what you expected, am I, Simon Esteban? Different from textbooks, different from case studies, different from typical profiles.

I can't imagine you'll ask any of the right questions. You'll start on my childhood, toilet-training, who fucked me first, and all that sewage. Do you want to know why I blinded myself? Do you want to know why I dug fishhooks into my eyes and pulled with all my strength, yes picture that, Simon Esteban, you with your eyes whole and round, picture the sight of the points hovering a hairs-breadth away, the clean dividing line between past and future as the points touch the corneas, the moment of resistance from the lens, then dig, pull, shred, so fast and strong the pain can't stop you soon enough, and the little sucking slurping pop as it is all over and sight gushes out in a flood…do you want to know why I did it? Because Oedipus did. The real Oedipus: not your puerile Freudian infant mooning over his mommy and playing with his pee-pee, but the King of Thebes, the hero who answered the Sphinx, the man who faced what he had done and knew he had to cleanse himself regardless of the cost.

When you're dirty, you must cleanse yourself, Simon Esteban. Or else you go mad.

Haven't they told you the story? Or are you simply lying in the hope I'll reveal myself?

I killed an Angel.

Rachel, Gentle Innocent, was sent an Angel in the darkness of the deepest night, and she slew it in cowardice, out of fear and envy and hatred.

I won't tell you what it looked like. That's a secret God wants me to keep. God won't always hate me. Someday I'll cleanse myself totally. You can't watch me forever. Only the Angels watch forever.

In the darkness of space, the Angel first appeared unto me and me alone, in all its beauty and mystery. But when I saw it, I was sore afraid. I feared its strangeness and faltered.

Another went forth to greet it, and walked with it, and talked with it, and when he returned his face shone and his countenance was transformed. Then in my heart I hated the Angel, for I had feared it and had not taken its hand. And I envied him who had touched its being and basked in its glory; him also did I hate.

Then did we leave the Angel and travel on to safe harbor, where I fled unto the Legions of Caesar; and there did I tell them of the Angel and where it could be found. I told them also lies, that it had hidden in dark ambush and attacked our ship with fierce beams of light that bid fair to destroy us. Then Caesar sent out ships of war to do battle with the Angel and destroy it. And from that day to this, the Angel has never been seen again.

Only after the Angel's destruction did I see what I had done. And seeing what I had done after seeing what I saw, I wished that I could no longer see. And so it was done.

Amen.

Say amen.

You don't know what to believe, do you, Simon Esteban? Is it a lie or delusion or metaphor or truth? Lie, delusion, metaphor, truth, metaphor, delusion, lie, back and forth, up and down, doh, mi, so, doh, so, mi, doh, the hateful arpeggio, lie, delusion, metaphor, truth, metaphor, delusion, lie.

I can't tell them apart anymore. That means I'm mad.

When I talk, no one else can tell them apart either.

I don't know what that means.

VARIATION D: BOGEY

(ALLEGRO ALLA MARCIA)

(QUICK MARCH TEMP)

CONTACT: NOVEMBER 2038

I know it's easy to hate the military….

Jenny, would you look at me?

Would you look at me, please?

No, I won't go away. Your father was my best friend and he would have wanted me to explain why he died. Frankly, your feelings don't enter into it at all.

Yes, I suppose that is a typical military attitude.

Let me say this: I'm about to tell you a military secret. If someone finds out, I'll be imprisoned for life. Maybe even executed. And I'm going to tell you anyway, even though you hate my guts and might turn me in when I'm finished. I'll do what needs doing, without balking at the consequences or deluding myself it will be appreciated. And that's a typical military attitude too.

A second mate on a Mars-Earth freighter came to us and reported her ship had been subjected to laser fire from a non-Terran-attributable source. Of course we were skeptical—she was a high-strung, frantic sort of woman, and obviously close to some kind of breakdown. The point was, had she seen a bogey because she was unstable, or was she unstable because she'd seen a bogey?

We questioned the rest of the crew. They told us the woman performed unscheduled maneuvers at one point in the journey, claiming they were some sort of drill. When we questioned the captain about this so-called drill, his evasiveness suggested he was concealing some pertinent information. Regrettably, he was a foreign national and his ship had foreign registry, so we had no legitimate way to lever further data from him.

You're determined to hate us, aren't you, Jenny? To be honest, we tried to get him drunk. It didn't work. That was the limit of our unorthodox coercion methods.

After due deliberation, we decided to send a frigate to investigate, under the command of Captain John Harrison. Your father. He volunteered for the mission. I was in charge of ground communication on Mars.

We'd gone on wild-goose chases before; sailors were forever seeing strange-shaped asteroids and reporting alien invasion fleets. We expected this to be another false alarm. However, as per standing orders, the operation was conducted under the tightest secrecy.

Our informant had given us detailed information on the bogey's course; if it was there, we'd find it. To our surprise, we did.

I won't tell you what it looked like. Suffice it to say, it was larger than Mars-Wheel and Venus-Wheel combined. It was virtually invisible on all spectral bands; if the informant hadn't told us exactly where to look, we wouldn't have found it. In comparison, the vessel your father commanded glowed like a beacon. The bogey must have perceived the frigate clearly, but took no hostile action.

After tracking the bogey for several hours, your father attempted communication using everything from radio to signal flashers. There was no response of any kind.

We consulted with higher authority. The very highest. Everyone was inclined to leave the bogey alone…or more accurately, to turn responsibility over to the scientific arm and let them investigate to their hearts' content. But we had that report saying the bogey had fired on a freighter; and trajectory calculations showed the thing was heading into the main shipping lanes on a near-collision course with Earth.

Do you understand how it was, Jenny? It was heading for Earth and no one knew why. We didn't know if it was an invasion army, or a bomb, or just some harmless piece of junk. We didn't know.

A decision was made to destroy it. I didn't make it, your father didn't make it, but we agreed one hundred percent.

You say that as if we were all vicious killers. You knew your father; you know he wasn't like that. He was the man on the spot, that's all. He had to carry out the mission.

Do you think no one considered the alternatives? Yes, the bogey might have been peaceful. Yes, it might have blessed humanity in unimaginable ways. Yes, it might simply have drifted past in total indifference. Believe me, our superiors didn't make the decision casually.

But they had no choice. The bogey would pass through the space lanes. It would be seen. It would be a destabilizing influence. There would be panic, hysteria, people killed in riots…and that's if the bogey just flew by without taking action.. Maybe it would turn out to be hostile after all. We had to face that possibility. What would humanity think of the fleet if we let such a thing reach Earth without opposition?

I want you to understand this, Jenny. Your father would want you to understand. No one could take that chance. We had to do the hard thing. The hard thing is not killing or dying, it's making the choice. Making the choice that is cruel and necessary and irrevocable.

The worst part is knowing you'll never find out if you were right.

The bogey drank up laser fire like water—your father drained his weapon batteries without burning a square inch of the thing's skin. Contrary to insinuations from the press, our forces are respecting the Selene treaty and your father had no nuclear weapons aboard. Therefore, after consultation with our superior officers and in full agreement with their decision, your father commanded his men to evacuate the vessel in life-pods, and then, alone at the helm, rammed the bogey at maximum velocity.

We don't know if the bogey was destroyed. Perhaps it was only diverted from its course. Other ships searched the area, but space is large. They found less than a third of the remains from your father's ship. They found nothing at all of the bogey.

To me, Jenny, your father died a hero. Not because he was willing to die—there are millions of fools who think dying somehow justifies their cause. Believe me, that's bullshit: your father knew dying doesn't prove anything. But he died anyway, eyes open, full of doubt but doing the job.

They told you your father died in some kind of accident. I thought you should know the truth. Too many things happen by accident in the world. It's time people realized some things happen by human choice.

VARIATION E: DAEMON

(BRILLANTE)

(SPARKLING, LIVELY)

CONTACT: NOVEMBER 2038

Sit down and quit whining.

I don't care if you were going riding. I've decided it's time to pontificate.

Honestly, Maria, didn't they teach you anything in that private school I sent you to? Pontificate. Look it up. Show a little initiative, for God's sake.

That's what I want to talk about: initiative. There are two types of people in the world—the ones who are alive and the ones who aren't. The quick and the dead. The open and the closed.

Here. Catch.

Know what that is?

A false fingernail? Did you say a false fingernail? Hell, that false fingernail is the Petrozowski Whole Spectrum Collector Cell. That's what pays for your wardrobe, your boyfriends, and your goddamned horse.

Sometimes, Maria, I don't think you're really my daughter. Sometimes I think your mother, God rest her soul, had a fling with some pretty playboy while I was busy at the office. I know, she wasn't that kind of a woman. I'm just trying to dodge the blame.

Now here…take a look at this.

No, it's not the same thing. That, my dear, is a scale from the hide of my personal daemon.

Daemon, not demon! My guardian spirit. My source of inspiration.

No, your old man isn't cracking up. Although people might think so, if they knew what I'm about to do.

I'm going to give you total control over Petrozowski Energy. Have fun with it.

Stop whining. Stop right now.

The business world is losing its novelty for me. I foresee that in the not-too-distant future, I'll be bored to the edge of madness. So I'm taking a one-man yacht into space and I'm going to find the daemon again.

I've thought about this a long time. I could go through the motions of running the company till the day I die, or I could say to hell with the rat race and pursue another dream.

I hate the jaded way I feel some days, Maria. I want to be excited about something again. I want to feel the tingle of magic.

You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?

Thirty-five years ago, daughter dear, I was a lowly navy tech baby-sitting the solar energy cells of a frigate named the Coherent. It was a stupid job. I'd enlisted because I wanted to get off Earth. "Out of the cradle and into the rest of the universe," that's what the recruiters told me. I should have realized the purpose of the fleet wasn't to widen our horizons but to bring the cosmos down to our own size.

One afternoon I was standing my watch when I felt the jolt of our guns firing and saw our battery levels dropping. Fifteen minutes later, the charge in the batteries red-lined dead bottom. An hour later, we were ordered to abandon ship. That was it. No one felt it necessary to explain what was going on. Need to know and all that.

I ejected in the nearest escape pod and found myself shooting toward the biggest damned hulk I'd ever seen. I couldn't tell you what it was. I've thought about it most of my life.

In my dreams, sometimes I get inside the thing, and it's always different. Sometimes I meet these glowing little men who sit me down and tell me things that make me understand myself and the universe. Sometimes it's filled with monsters and I find myself with pistol in one hand and saber in the other, shooting and slashing to save the human race. Sometimes I'm just walking through this huge cavity and I look up and there's this huge heart beating slowly overhead, booming like thunder.

But I didn't get inside the daemon; I only smacked into its hide. A rough landing…the daemon had a gravity almost as strong as Earth's and it sucked me right down. I can't explain the gravity—artificial maybe. I managed to brake most of my speed with the retros, but the escape pod still slammed against the daemon with a clang like a great Chinese gong. CLLAAANNNGGGG!!!

I did that to catch your attention. Here and now, girl! Keep your head in the here and now!

The first thing I did after landing was put on a suit and go out—I wanted to know what I'd landed on. The surface was broad and black, very slightly rounded and pebbly with scales. Overhead floated the Coherent, bright and silver like the moon above dark autumn fields.

I knelt and examined the daemon's hide. Blacker than black, each scale was angled toward the Coherent, an audience of a billion eyes watching.

Then, slowly, the nearest eyes turned to look at me.

If I hadn't been a solar cell technician, I might have run screaming in terror back to the pod…but I'd worked among our own solar collectors and seen them slowly turn their gaze on me as the robot controllers picked up my body heat and swiveled to drink it in. Absorbing the IR my own flesh emitted.

I pried loose as many of those little eyes as I could. They had to be energy collector cells and for some reason, I knew—knew!—they were orders of magnitude more efficient than anything we humans had developed. And indeed they were, my darling daughter, indeed they were.

Perhaps if I'd had more time, I could have found some way to enter the daemon…but as I knelt there plucking up eyes, I saw some of them turn away from me and I glanced back to see what they'd noticed.

The Coherent, engines streaming out a fiery cloud, was speeding through the night like a torpedo on a collision course with my daemon. I suppose in the back of my mind, I must have realized this would happen—why else would they have ordered us to abandon ship? But for a moment I was staggered and frozen by the utter stupidity of the military mind. It was the ultimate evil: trying to kill something wonderful and magic and new.

I was paralyzed only for a moment, but it was almost a moment too long. I barely had time to get back inside my pod and slam the outer hatch before the Coherent hit and exploded. The daemon pitched wildly; my pod was bucked off, rolling end over end and tossing me around inside like a man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Through the pod's viewport, I caught one last glimpse of the daemon before it vanished into the blackness. It was on a new heading…I don't know if it had simply been knocked off course by the collision or if it had changed direction on its own. I couldn't tell if it'd been damaged; it vanished as quickly as a coin in the hands of a magician.

Well, you can fill in the rest of the story. I kept the scales to myself till I got out of the navy, then analyzed them and reproduced them as well as I could. The reproduction wasn't perfect, but it was generations ahead of anything else on the market; and as the money flowed in, I could afford to hire a team of the best eggheads, and patent by patent, they came closer to a full duplication of…well, a flake of my daemon's skin.

I could also afford to hire scouts to search for the daemon. They never found it. I think…I think daemons only appear to a certain kind of person. You have to be ready for them. You have to be open. You have to be goddamned alive.

So. I'm going out solo.

I want to know if I'm still the sort of person who's worthy of wonder.

Don't cry. If you don't want to run the company, let the board of directors do it. You'll still receive dividend payments and the company will stay healthy. My people know what they're doing. I just thought you might enjoy honest work.

If you prefer, you can sell your share in the company and use the money to pursue whatever dreams you want. Really. I wholeheartedly approve of people who pursue their dreams.

If you have any dreams.

Do you have any dreams, Maria?

VARIATION F: BOOJUM

(MENO MOSSO)

(SLOWER, LESS MOTION)

CONTACT: JULY 2070-APRIL 2071

So, Yorgi. You got caught.

You're an idiot, boy.

Your mother, she wants me to make a big fuss. She wants me to smack you around. I should spit in your face and say your ancestors will haunt you.

Maybe they will.

Me, if I get to heaven, and some great-great-grandchild of mine gets caught breaking into a store, I got better things to do than sneak up on the kid and go boo. I'll just say to myself, the boy's an idiot, and go back to the houris.

But your mother says, Emil, talk to the boy. Okay, Yorgi, I'm talking to you.

The priests, they'll threaten you with hell. They're good at it; it's their job. But you're like me—you can't listen to a sermon without falling asleep.

So no sermons. Here's all I'm going to say: there are lots of things you can do in your life, but they break into two classes. Some things make you smarter. Some things make you stupider. No other possibilities.

Stealing makes you stupider. Every time you steal, you get a little stupider. It doesn't matter if you get caught, and it doesn't matter what you steal.

I know.

A few years back—you aren't going to tell your mother this story—I was working for Petrozowski Energy. Cook on a freighter. But it wasn't really a freighter, it was a hunter. We'd load up with cargo and fuel as if we were making the Red Run, but then we'd prowl space, looking for a boojum Mr. Petrozowski saw once. Crazy, eh? And the craziest thing was, our third time out we found it.

Big thing. Huge. And black, with a kind of shimmer, like the northern lights. First time we saw it, we nearly pissed ourselves. Whole crew went up to the bridge, looked at the thing. None of us had a clue what it was. Didn't look dangerous. Just kind of spooky.

Instructions were to track it, plot its course. No radio reports…Mr. Petrozowski didn't want anyone finding out where we were or what we were doing. Once we got the thing charted, we were supposed to fire back full thrust and report in person.

Well. We all got to thinking. Petrozowski was paying big money for all this secrecy. Triple what we'd get on a normal run. And if we reported home right away, maybe we'd get a bonus if we were lucky, but then we'd go back to the usual grind. We thought, if we put off reporting it till the next run…well, Mr. Petrozowski would still find his boojum, we'd still get the bonus, and we'd get triple pay for an extra run.

So that's how we all started getting stupider. It was stealing, you see. Easy stealing. Didn't have to hit someone over the head, didn't have to get past an alarm. Just waited out our time and headed home empty-handed.

We waited out our time on the boojum. Didn't have anywhere else to go.

Went down, looked around. It was scaly. No mouth or any other opening. Something had dented its side a bit…a meteor, I guess. We tried to cut a hole in it with laser torches, but the light just got sucked up. We pried away scales, and underneath were more scales. We dug down a long way, but the scales went down farther. They grew back too, eventually. Took a few days. They sort of pushed up from below.

That first time, we amused ourselves watching the Boojum grow scales. Some of the technicians tried to figure out where its gravity came from, but they soon lost interest.

The second time, we found it again, no problem. Went straight to it. Then we had nothing to do but spend three months sitting around. As cook, I was the busiest hand on board.

To pass the time, the crew played with the Environment. Sure, Yorgi, our ship carried an Environment, like any other Mars freighter—Mr. Petrozowski didn't want to arouse suspicions when the ship was in port. The Environment held a little stone temple surrounded by a lot of nice green plants. Very pretty. Buddhist, maybe. Mr. Petrozowski didn't care about it; it'd been built by the previous owners. We could use it for anything we wanted.

We installed it on the boojum.

For some reason, we laughed and laughed at the idea. It seemed so funny. This boojum, this strange alien thing, this giant—we'd attach our Environment to it like a flea on the back of a dog, and we'd ride and grow fat. The ship would hover in space, but the crew would pass the time in the Environment pod on the boojum's back, sitting in easy chairs under a simulated sun, sipping lemonade and playing cards. Like we were all wealthy landlords who'd found some private jungle retreat away from the stupid peasants.

That time, we had to feed the Environment power from the ship's storage cells. And we had to reattach the Environment to our ship when we left for home.

The next time, we sold our extra fuel on the black market. We didn't need fuel to go out into space and sit around for three months. We used the money to buy good Petrozowski Whole Spectrum Collector Cells, which we installed on the hull of the Environment pod so it could gather its own energy from the sun. That way we didn't have to go back to the ship to recharge the life support systems; we could live in the Environment all the time. And we did. We lived what we thought were the lives of the rich.

They were stupid lives.

The time came to head for Earth. And we found the boojum had grown too fond of the Environment pod.

Somehow, the scales of the boojum had attached themselves to the collector cells we'd installed on the pod. The scales and cells had grown together into a single skin, like the edges of a wound healing shut. The Environment was bonded fast, held tight; we couldn't cut it free, couldn't pull it loose with the ship's engines. In the end, we had to go home without it.

Stupid, see? We thought we could do what we wanted. We thought were smarter than other people, and what did we get?

When we got back to Earth, we still thought we might get away with it. We tried to buy a new pod; we thought we could make do with a substitute, pick up better cutting tools and go back to slice the Environment free. No. Mr. Petrozowski heard we were missing a pod; he investigated and found we'd been selling our fuel; and he fired us. He thought we'd been cheating him all along. The only reason he didn't call the cops was he didn't want us telling anyone about the boojum hunt. We told him we'd found his boojum, but he laughed in our faces.

So. Your father is no saint. We both knew that, yes? But I've learned.

We were stupid. There were hundreds of ways we could have got caught. If one of Petrozowski's other hunters had found us on the boojum. If the police nabbed us selling fuel on the black market. If any member of the crew had loose lips. Hundreds of ways. But we ignored the risks. We thought we were being smart when we were being stupid.

I tell you, Yorgi, if you decided to be the best thief in the world, and learn, and work hard at it, maybe you could get smarter. Maybe that would be possible. But such thieves, I don't think they exist. When I was a thief, I was lazy. I sat on easy chairs and drank lemonade. I told myself Mr. Petrozowski was stupid, not me. I thought I was one of the smartest men in the world, and I laughed, laughed, laughed. But what was I? A flea riding the back of a dog. That's all.

Who thinks fleas are smart?

VARIATION G: TITAN

(DOLCE CON AMORE)

(SWEETLY, WITH LOVE)

CONTACT: MAY 2071

Teeth brushed? Faces washed? No one has to pee? Then we start.

How I met your father. A true story. With a moral.

No giggling. Once upon a time.

You know there are great rivalries between the Venus cloud mining orbitals. Great rivalries. Each orbital is owned by a different company, and the companies hate each other. They sabotage each other's wells, they interfere with each other's communications, and when miners meet each other in Venus-Wheel…well, there may be fights and duels and death.

My family lived on an orbital belonging to Clearwater Chemical, and our greatest rivals were those in New Frontier Mining and Manufacture.

No giggling! This is a true story. With a moral.

My mother was Clearwater's economic envoy to Venus-Wheel. By the time I was fourteen, I went with her on every trading mission. In those days, I was a very great beauty…

What are all these giggles I'm hearing?

I was a great girlish beauty then, and now I am a great womanly beauty, which is even better, though different. Do you want a story or not?

Then we go on. How I met your father. A true story. With a moral.

In those days, I was a great girlish beauty, and firm in the soft places. Which is almost as good as soft in the soft places, though different. Many boys wanted to make love to me, and many older men as well.

A great many older men.

You would not believe how many older men would rather have girlish beauty instead of womanly beauty. "Bah," they say, "who cares if the woman knows what to do? We know what to do, and that is the important thing."

A free lesson for you about men.

But I had not yet learned that lesson and I was drunk with the power of my very great firm beauty. I went to many dances on Venus-Wheel and danced with many men. It was a great whirling excitement for a girl my age. The men worshipped me and the boys adored me; it made me feel very strong.

Then one night I met a boy who made me feel weak. Oh, such weakness! If I looked in his direction, I blushed. If I didn't look in his direction, I watched in mirrors to see if he was eyeing me behind my back. When he talked to me, I wanted to run and hide; when I danced with him, I could feel every part of my body singing. And I could feel every part of his body too—maybe not singing, but at least standing up in the choir.

When I told him my name was Juliet, he bowed and said he would be my Romeo. So gallant! But too close to the truth. I found out after the dance his father was economic envoy for New Frontier. Disaster! I was forbidden to speak to the boy again.

I cannot be sure I loved my Romeo before I was forbidden to see him, but afterward, I loved him with a love as deep as starry space. He was the blazing sun, and I the dark Abyss that yawned to engulf him and be illuminated.

We talked like that back then. We were young.

The boy and I met all the time, of course. Many trysts. Many excellent trysts. I became a very great girlish beauty who purred to herself, and my mother became suspicious. She announced she was sending me home to Clearwater orbital, where the only boys were my brothers and cousins.

I did not go. Instead, I eloped. My Romeo and I stole a rich man's yacht, disabled the homing beacons, and fled into the night. Our goal was Mars, where we planned to scout the asteroid belt. Out in the belt, we would become the first humans to find alien artifacts; we would be rich and famous, and the entire solar system would envy us.

Two weeks later, our food ran out. A month and a half away from Earth, four months away from Mars.

My Romeo and I had our first fight.

"I thought you were going to pack the food."

"I didn't know we needed food. Ships are supposed to recycle everything."

"When you recycle everything, you don't recycle everything. You run out eventually. Don't you know Newton's laws?"

"I know Newton's laws, and they don't say anything about food!"

Remember, this is a true story.

We made up and made love, as always happens with first fights. Making love after a fight can be very bad or very good. It is awkward, but vigorous.

We were lucky and did not starve. God looked down, said "Tsk-tsk, such blockheads," and saved us.

We came upon a great creature in space. A giant; a friendly Titan, like Prometheus or Atlas.

Why do you immediately believe me when I say we found a Titan in space, but you giggle when I say I was a great girlish beauty? No, don't answer.

Like Atlas, the Titan carried a world on its back, and inside that world, we found a temple for worshipping the Titan. The temple area was bright and warm, filled with growing green plants. Many of the plants were edible; some were edible even after we had overcome the first pangs of our ravening hunger.

We stayed at the temple for two weeks. At dawn, we would wake naked in each other's arms and watch the sun rise; we would eat breakfast, then spend the morning gathering leaves. In the afternoon, we would go back to the yacht and take turns shoving leaves down the toilet, to replenish the bio-mass the ship needed to make food. In the evening, we would return to the temple, recite worshipful poems of our own devising, and sprawl ourselves reverently on the altar. We fell asleep only when we had wrung out our bodies in every way, and we dreamed of the new universes we would discover.

Here is what we really discovered.

I discovered my Romeo had never heard of Scarlatti, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Cage, or Laurier-Leyrac. He was not keen to learn.

I discovered he was an enthusiast for types of music called Synthereg and Mexihowl. Mexihowl required drumming on your thigh. Or someone else's thigh.

I discovered he thought my mother was a greedy bitch because of some deal where she'd outmaneuvered New Frontier.

I discovered he was unwilling to admit that many New Frontier trade practices were unethical, if not outright illegal.

I discovered whisker-burn.

He discovered menstruation.

We flew back to Venus-Wheel and were met with teary hugs. Afterwards, our parents got very very angry, but hugs first. That is the way good parents are.

My Romeo and I were sent to apologize to the man whose yacht we had stolen. The man was wealthy and good-natured. It amused him, the way things turned out. He laughed and laughed when I told him about stuffing the leaves into the toilet. I laughed with him. We had a very good laugh, and my Romeo joined in with us. Then he went away with his family, leaving me alone with the wealthy man.

So the true story is, I met your father by stealing his yacht to run away with someone else. And the moral is, making love is glorious, and someday you will do it and revel in it, as your father and I do it and revel in it. But when you pick someone to be with, think about everything except making love.

Any two people can make love if they want to.

VARIATION H: DRAGON

(SCHERZANDO MA CON FUOCO)

(PLAYFULLY, BUT WITH FIRE)

CONTACT: JULY 2076

Sacred Daughter of the Sun,

Forgive an old woman's presumption for writing to You, Honored Child, and forgive the many tricks I have used to smuggle this message past Your Regents. The Regents are all fine people, yes, but they are not the Empress. Some things are meant for Your August Ears alone.

I am Mariko Naruki, wife to Yushio Naruki, who is chief executive of Laughing Dragon Entertainment Industries Company Limited. He is a dear man because he is mostly a child. He has invented many games in his life, not to mention many fine rides in Laughing Dragon Entertainment Parks throughout the Inner Planets; but I have never trusted him with the grocery money. Never mind. A good man, and good at building fun and happiness. Not so good at building strong fiscal structures. So—and I pray it will be forgotten by the time You reach Your Majority and are given this letter—my dear Yushio led Laughing Dragon to the brink of ruin.

One day he phoned from work and asked me to make a large withdrawal from our savings account. Why? I asked. He needed the money to buy something. What did he want to buy? He wouldn't say. So I did what a good wife should: I gave him the money, then followed him when he left the office.

He bought a sword. A very fine sword of strong bright steel, with a hilt covered in real leather and a fine embroidered sheath. A good choice for a decoration hanging in the living room, but I knew he wanted it for a different reason. What a child he was! I confronted him there in the store, berated him about what he was up to, attracted a big crowd, never mind. In the end, I let him make a down payment on the sword—it really was excellent, and the price quite reasonable—but I made him leave it in the store on layaway.

Still, that was not the end of it. He could see disaster looming for the company and wanted to pay the honorable price of failure. Which meant he just wanted to run away. We women know many men are just little boys whose swagger has become convincing.

Finally I suggested flying into the sun. It was the kind of gesture that appealed to Yushio: a flamboyant idea, but austere in execution. It appealed to me too because the flight would give him time to reconsider his rash decision. I thought I could persuade him to start a new life instead of ending the old one: perhaps becoming a Flare-Fisher on Mercury, which would suit Yushio's sense of romance while paying very well.

We set off secretly in the executive yacht, well provisioned and weighted down with our life savings converted to platinum. (We had no children to whom we could leave an inheritance…my fallopian tubes had growths, I nearly died at fifteen, never mind.) Soon Yushio was treating our trip as an adventure. He had never been in space, though he had designed entertainments for all the colonies and for many spacefaring vessels. Long hours at a time, he forgot himself and scribbled designs on paper: new games, new rides, new adventure areas. But then suddenly he would remember the reason he was in space, the catastrophe facing his company, and he would sink into gloom.

Then the hand of the gods. Just outside the orbit of Venus, we encountered a dragon.

It didn't look like a dragon. More like a dragon's egg: black with shimmers, huge and beautiful. Silent and serene as space, but when you looked at it, you felt a million eyes looking back.

Almost everywhere, its hide was smooth as a girl's cheek; but in one spot, on its back, the skin rose in the shape of the sacred mountain (I do not lie) with a small hole at the top. Like the sacred mountain's cone.

Except that this opening was an airlock. Inside, there was fresh air, sunlight, gravity, and a reproduction of the Musubi Shrine to Amaterasu O-mikami, Your Own Celestial Ancestress.

I swear this is true.

"We have found Heaven," I said to Yushio.

"Nonsense," he answered. "We have found an Environment my company built for a Mars freighter. The Edo Maru. I wonder what it's doing here."

"The gods put it here."

He looked around. "The gods haven't been taking very good care of it, have they?"

It was true—the shrine was in a shambles. Vandals had hacked off much of the foliage. Inside the torii gate, where Your Majesty knows there should only be peace and serenity, there were instead a few broken lawn chairs and some playing cards bearing pictures of hairy people in rut. And the altar…I cannot describe the altar, but it needed a very good cleaning.

I insisted on resanctifying the shrine. Yushio argued it hadn't been a real shrine and he shouldn't delay his death-trip into the sun, but he knew he was on shaky theological ground. How could his death be true to the Way when he would not trouble himself to repair the desecration of such a holy place?

Yushio is a dear man, but whenever he argues with me he is always wrong.

So we cleaned the shrine and put it to rights. Yushio had packed some incense with the intention of burning it as we sailed into the sun; but I convinced him the gods would be happier if we used it at the shrine in a purification ceremony.

While we worked, we discussed what we thought this dragon really was. I knew in my heart it was a true dragon sent by the gods…but I pretended to agree with Yushio that most likely it was a secret super-project that had been abandoned for some reason. Maybe the builders had gone bankrupt and just left the thing here. (Going bankrupt was ever-present in Yushio's mind.)

Finally I said, "Why speculate? You know this Environment once belonged to the Edo Maru. Radio your company and get them to find out who owns the Environment now."

Yushio refused. He said his decision to die had cut all ties with the business world…but that just meant he was afraid to talk to people. Finally I made the call myself after he had fallen asleep on rice wine. Our closest branch office was on Venus-Wheel, only a few radio-seconds away. They were glad to know we were still alive, worried the creditors were growing more insistent every day. I cut short that line of conversation, saying "I want to know who owns a freighter called the Edo Maru."

After a few minutes, the answer came back: "Petrozowski Energy."

"Yushio wants you to buy it."

"Buy it? I don't think we can afford…"

"Get a loan."

"I don't think any bank would…"

"Tell the banks," I said, "Laughing Dragon is about to announce its largest Entertainment Park ever. Tell them we have kept it a great secret because it is a brand new idea. Tell them this park is where all the company's capital went, and it will repay everyone a millionfold. You hear?"

"Is this true?"

"Yes, it's all true. Very secret. Very big. In space."

"In space?"

"Yes, it's a whole new idea. You'll see. Get the board of directors. I'll turn on a tracking beacon so they can find us. They can come and see the marvel Yushio has built. But you must buy the Edo Maru."

"Perhaps it would be possible…"

"And the Edo Maru's Environment, and all attached chattels. That is most important. And it is most important Petrozowski Energy does not think this is anything special. You hear?"

"Yes." And it was done. We purchased the Edo Maru, its Environment, and all attached chattels. The dragon was attached and therefore ours…if humans can claim to own such a beast.

When Yushio awoke, I was looking over his plans for new games and rides. "It would be a shame if these were never built," I said. He agreed.

By the time the board of directors arrived, Yushio had mapped out two thirds of the Laughing Dragon of Heaven Entertainment World: the Christian Heaven, where adults and children would be given their own wings to play bumpem; Allah's Heaven with many nimble dancers; Valhalla, filled with much carousing and ax fights against hologram opponents; and many other fine heavens, including a reproduction of the real Heaven centered around the Musubi Shrine.

Now, as we begin construction on the park, the world believes this Dragon was built by our company. They see what they expect to see: the foundation for the greatest entertainment site in the universe.

Only you, Great Empress, will know the truth. It is a truth that should remain secret for a thousand years, for if anyone suspected Heaven's real nature…well, we know the West has a long tradition of killing dragons. But You—You are Child of the Sun and Sister to Dragons. May the truth do You honor.

VARIATION I: ROC

(NOBILMENTE CON FORZA)

(NOBLY, WITH FORCE)

CONTACT: SEPTEMBER 2078

If this had happened in my grandfather's time, throats would already be cut. I wouldn't be talking to a lawyer but to a mortician.

My grandfather was a prince who believed his title meant something. Perhaps it did in those days. Perhaps it still does. At the very least, being a prince means there's always some university that's willing to give you a scholarship. Trinity College, Oxford, for me. And you?

I don't believe I've heard of it. Good school, was it? Fine. I want to know we have a top man on this.

You're a little young to be a full partner, aren't you? Oh, no, I take that as a promising sign. Of course, you will be discussing the case with your firm's senior partners? Good. Good.

Now the long and the short of it is this: I want to sue Laughing Dragon's scaly tail off. Slap criminal negligence charges on anyone whose nose rises out of the foxhole. Permanently ruin a few careers, and if possible, give the whole Laughing Dragon of Heaven Entertainment Park such a reputation for gross mismanagement that no bourgeois little family would think of vacationing there. If we can drive a few of the bastards to commit seppuku, it will be icing on the cake.

Does that sound up your alley?

My dear man, let us understand each other. I am a prince in a line that stretches back more generations than anyone can count, and now, enemies have recklessly slain twenty-three people under my protection. If modern civilization prevents me from taking revenge with a knife, I will use whatever other weapon comes to hand. I have chosen my weapon to be the courts, and I will use that weapon to shed blood for blood, ruin for ruin, life for life. If you stand with me, good. If not…

You want to hear the circumstances first? I approve. Only a barbarian kills without knowing why.

As I've said, being a full-blooded prince means little today. I've had to work for a living. All in all, I think that's good for a man. I direct a modest construction company. Our primary business is building orbitals, but we're happy to put up anything that requires work in vacuum. My crews are drawn from all corners of the Earth, and one was even born on Mars…but you understand, whether or not they are of the blood or the faith, they are my people.

We had contracted with Laughing Dragon to build a part of the amusement park they call Heaven. (I know you'll want to examine the contract; I'll leave a copy with you.) Our assignment was a section on the side of the park that's always turned away from the sun. The section was named Afterlife After Dark…it's a name that would make a sensible man ill, but a company which refuses to work for fools soon finds itself out of business. And to be honest, my workers found building nightclubs and carousels and roller coasters was a pleasant change from all those oh-so-functional orbitals.

Not that it was easy work. Far from it. The entire surface of Heaven—they seem to want to keep this secret, so splash it around in every interview you give—the entire surface is covered with Petrozowski collector cells. Incredible. How long has Petrozowski been in business? Ten years? I wouldn't have thought the entire production of all his plants could have made so many cells. Hundreds of hectares in area! And many layers deep…a stupefying achievement. But impossible to dig into. We had to pour concrete foundations on top, covering over a fortune's worth of the cells…and you can't imagine the technical difficulties of putting up small environment domes, so you can pour concrete foundations, so you can put up big environment domes. But never mind that now.

Our construction site was on the dark side, but we lived in dormitory pods on the bright side of the terminator. We worked in shifts, of course. Which is why I'm alive when twenty-three of my people are not.

It was about an hour before shift change and I was in our cafeteria having breakfast with the crew that would be going out. I planned on going out with them. I often did. And I always did whatever tasks the shift supervisor assigned me, even if I am a prince. A prince must set an example, don't you think?

Suddenly, in the middle of the meal, we felt a great trembling in the floor beneath us. Water glasses rattled; salt shakers fell over. Without a second's thought, every man and woman there kicked back chairs and ran to the equipment chamber where Vac/suits were stored. We dove into the suits, grabbed extra oxygen tanks, jet packs, Mayday beacons, whatever we could fill our arms with; then we piled into the airlocks in a rush to get out in the open.

Outside, we were just one of many construction crews evacuating their dormitories, stumbling about in confusion, trying to keep our footing on the quaking surface. Every band on my helmet radio was clogged with cries of panic. I tried to shout against the noise, but couldn't make myself heard. In exasperation, I clicked it off and searched the sky, hoping to see one of the supply ships docked close enough that a jet pack could bridge the gap. But instead I saw the cause of the disturbance.

The entire dark side of Heaven had split in two, as if we stood on a giant bird, a roc, that was unfolding its wings. The wings rose up higher and higher over the horizon, strong and graceful, the ebony of night now glittering in the sunlight; but as the wings moved, their speed and strength tossed off my workers like seeds scattered across a field. The nightclubs, the carousels, the roller coasters…all wrenched apart as their foundations slid along with the motion of the wings. Gravity seemed to have gone wild out there: some buildings flew off into space with my people; others lodged themselves at the hinge point where the wings met the body.

Hundreds of people were thrown into the emptiness of the abyss. We formed rescue parties, retrieved those we could. Of my workers we found nineteen: seven alive, twelve dead in their suits. Another eleven have not yet been found. Teams still search—none of us believes the missing are alive, but it's horrible to think of a friend's body drifting forever in blackness.

And the explanation for this all? It took fifteen hours to get anything out of Laughing Dragon. Then the president's wife—his wife! the man couldn't face us himself—made a statement that the wings had been opened up to expose more collector cells to the sunlight. The management regretted this had happened without warning. Notices were supposed to have been sent around but were inadvertently misplaced.

All a lie. I've paid a few bribes, and no one, inside or outside Laughing Dragon, knew what was going to happen. Anyway, why would they open the wings when it would cause such damage to their own park? No, someone made a mistake, someone very high up or very well protected, and that person must be made to pay.

Reasonable damages for the next of kin? Do you think my people weren't insured? The next of kin will be paid handsomely, and if the insurance company wants to reclaim its money from Laughing Dragon, it can file its own suit. I want damage, man, not damages! Make them know they're dealing with something they can't control.

VARIATION J: LION

(LAMENTOSO MA DOLCISSIMO)

(SADLY, BUT VERY SWEETLY)

CONTACT: SEPTEMBER 2078

Oh, my darlings! I wish it could be said that your father died a man.

My grandfather once said to me, "Boy, a man is not a man until he walks with a lion."

And my grandmother said, "Oh, William, that was long ago."

"No," he answered. "Long ago, it was said a man had to kill a lion. But guns made killing easy. Too many lions died. Now, no more killing. Walk with the lion. See him. Learn what a man is not. Hear the voice of that which is stronger than you."

"What nonsense," my grandmother muttered. "If the boy ever does meet a lion, he'll find running is better than walking."

But my grandfather looked me in the eye, pointed a swollen-knuckled finger at my nose, and said softly, "A man is not a man until he walks with a lion. Maybe a leopard or a cheetah will do too. Or a male rhinoceros…but not a female! And elephants don't count either—they're strong, but now they're tame as dogs."

Thus, my grandfather. He died when I was still young…before I thought to ask if he had walked with a lion.

The only lions I have ever seen were mechanical. There's one back at the amusement park. On a merry-go-round. Ride a lion, ride a unicorn, ride a laughing dragon!

I bolted the lion in place myself. I pushed past the prince so I could do it with my own hands.

He probably thought I was trying to impress him with my enthusiasm. I think the truth was I was trying to impress the lion.

I'm getting cold. I wonder if I'll freeze before I suffocate or the other way around.

I could take off my helmet and finish it quickly. But there's always the chance if I hang on, someone will find me before I die.

Besides, most of these helmets are designed to lock in place when there's no air pressure outside.

Can you hear my thoughts, children? Noliwe? Jobe? Mamina?

The night my father died, I was asleep an ocean away…and I dreamed of a great plain dotted with every kind of tree in the world. The air was full of the smell of lilacs and the ground had a thick springy cover of pine needles and magnolia blossoms. If I reached up, I could pull down cherries or oranges, even calabashes—whatever fruit or nut I thought of, it was right there. Then my father was there too, and we walked together under the trees, saying nothing. I wanted to hold his hand the way I did when I was a boy, but I knew I couldn't.

"Son," he finally said to me, "they tell me I have to eat a leaf off every one of these trees. It's going to take a long while, and some of them are going to taste mighty bitter." He smiled. "Well, as penances go, I expected a lot worse. It's nice here, isn't it?"

"Did you ever walk with a lion?" I asked him.

He shook his head. "Lions are scarce these days," he said. "You never know, though." He looked around at the forest. "Lots of places here a lion could be hiding. I'll be checking them all out."

When I left him, he was still walking under the trees: walking slowly, enjoying himself. More relaxed in death than he'd ever been in life.

I believe I really was talking to him.

Can you hear me, children? I don't know what time it is where you are. I hope you're dreaming.

Lately, I've had a recurring dream of standing on the deck of a tall ship on a still night sea. There are many people with me. I feel as if we've been becalmed a long time; but as I watch, wind fills our sails, the mast groans and the canvas snaps taut, and everybody is clambering up to the rigging, laughing, letting out the sails, starting to sing a song of great rejoicing that we'll soon be speeding toward our destination again.

Children…are you dreaming?

It's as quiet as a forest here. Soft static on my helmet radio, that's all. For a while, I could hear everyone shouting at each other back on Heaven, but I'm out of range now.

From where I drift, Heaven is eclipsing the sun. Behind Heaven, the sun's corona is wild with prominences.

Heaven has a fiery mane.

Why can't I stop thinking about lions? I could just as easily say I'm walking with the constellation Leo. If I knew which one it was.

No, I'm walking with Heaven. And Heaven is just a carousel lion: something someone built.

But it's beautiful. And strong.

Something a man is not.

One could learn from it too.

I'm cold.

There's a song my grandfather taught me to sing:

The body perishes, the heart stays young.

The platter wears away with serving food.

No log retains its bark when old,

No lover peaceful while the rival weeps.

Oh, my children! I never taught you that song. It's a song for the old and the dying, and I thought I would sing it for you when I grew old.

But now I won't. You'll never learn it. And you won't know a man is not a man until he walks with a lion.

Soon everyone will forget that. And it's a thing someone should remember.

VARIATION K: JUGGERNAUT

(ANIMATO)

(ANIMATEDLY)

CONTACT: NOVEMBER 2078

Recorded video-burst transmission from Dr. Shanta Mukerjhee (Hydroponics Services, Heaven) to John Mukerjhee (San Francisco, CA):

They tell me you haven't checked to see if I'm alive.

We've been under strict orders up here for the last few days, not to call friends and relatives to say we're all right. For the first few hours after the construction workers were killed, all the radio bands were clogged with people trying to get messages back home, interfering with emergency communications; so Laughing Dragon clamped down and said no outgoing calls. Incoming calls were taken by the main communications center, and answered curtly: "Yes, she's alive and well." "No, we haven't located him yet."

You'd know this if you called. But you didn't. I suppose you were too busy getting injunctions against mining companies that want to despoil the pristine Martian landscape; your mother isn't environmentally relevant.

That's a cheap shot. I'm sorry.

Anyway, things are returning to normal. We're each being allowed one ten-minute transmission to anywhere in the solar system, all expenses paid by Laughing Dragon. And I wanted to tell you I'm safe; our hydroponics dome was nowhere near the accident, and I didn't lose so much as a bean plant.

There. Well. I guess I still have nine minutes of free air time.

This is hard for me.

Look, John, there's something I want to tell you. Show you. It's important.

I'll just get the camera turned…okay. You're looking at one of the hydroponics chambers up here. Leaf lettuce on the right, radishes on the left. Good growth, I'm sure you can see that. We've built quite a sophisticated system, very productive. I know you look down on me because I'm growing salad for rich tourists when I could be feeding the poor, but really—Laughing Dragon has given us a substantial research budget. Some of the designs we've developed could improve the yield of hydroponics systems everywhere, make more food for everyone….

I promised myself I wouldn't keep apologizing to you. I've done important work up here. I don't have to feel guilty I'm not fighting drought in Africa. We can't all live up to your standards, John.

The plants you're looking at are normal strains, designed for Earth-normal gravity. I suppose you've read that Heaven's gravity is almost exactly equal to Earth's: within a few thousandths of a percent of gravity at sea level on the equator. It's touted as the greatest engineering feat in the construction of Heaven: getting the right density and distribution of mass to mimic one Earth G, over almost the entire surface.

Well. You'll see.

Now I'm taking the camera into the next room. This is an experimental chamber—black-eyed peas biologically engineered for growth in the Luna colonies. Laughing Dragon lets each of us senior researchers conduct small personal experiments; we get publications out of it and Laughing Dragon basks in any resulting prestige. There's nothing wrong with that, it's no different from a university or a…

I'm apologizing again. Sorry.

All right, you can see the peas are growing well. Good greenery, excellent pod production. I never expected anything like this. After all, these are low gravity plants; I only set up this chamber because I wanted to experiment with the design of water delivery systems, and I never thought I'd get significant yields. You just shouldn't see this kind of growth under Earth-normal gravity.

Now, watch as I drop this pencil.

No, I didn't change the camera to slow motion. That's precisely the speed things fall in this chamber. I haven't done any elaborate tests, but I'm fairly certain we have lunar gravity in here.

Needless to say, this is none of my doing. A month ago, I would have said it was impossible to have gravity like Earth in one room and like Luna right next door. But now let me go into the next chamber. I'll just…you can probably see the camera bouncing, because I'm bouncing as I walk. Have you ever been to the moon colonies, John? Walking in here is exactly like walking down the streets of Tycho. I suppose it would be fun, if it weren't so bewildering. And scary.

All right, through the hatch to the next room and…yes, I'm floating toward the ceiling. Weightless. I've got zero-G soybeans growing in this chamber—you know, engineered for nonspinning orbitals. Zero-G plants, zero-G chamber.

Believe me, the gravity here was Earth-normal two months ago. Back then, these beans could scarcely germinate. But over the course of a few days, the gravity dropped to nothing. Just dropped of its own accord. To precisely the level the plants found ideal.

It gives me the creeps, John. It did the first time I noticed, and it still does now. I haven't told anyone about this because it's too spooky to talk about.

Do you know what I think is happening? It's a feedback loop between these plants and Heaven. Heaven is artificially controlling the gravity on every square millimeter of its surface, in accordance with the preferences of those affected. In here, the soybeans want it weightless. Out on the rest of the surface…well, I don't think it's an accident the gravity is exactly what humans like it to be.

Laughing Dragon didn't engineer the gravity here; Heaven is doing this itself.

I get cold chills just thinking about it, John. Heaven can't be human-made. Humans don't know how to play games with gravity. Humans don't know how to establish this kind of feedback communication with plants.

And I haven't told you yet about the dreams. More and more people up here are having vivid dreams…and coherent ones, not the usual sort of vague, disjointed images. The dreams leave a lingering feeling of…I guess the word is spirituality. "Like touching the mind of God," one of the other researchers said this morning…which I'm sure you'll dismiss as maudlin sentimentality, but if you ever had one of these dreams yourself…a sort of quiet wonder…

No, I'm not going to tell you what I've dreamt about. I'm tired of you sneering at me.

But the point is, I don't think these dreams are just coincidence. This thing we're on, what Laughing Dragon calls Heaven—I don't know whether it's touching our minds or we're touching it, but if there's such a thing as telepathy with soybeans, why not with humans?

I don't sound much like a professional scientist, do I? No detachment. I can't feel detached when I'm constantly swinging between extremes of fear and awe. Because even if this creature sends inspiring dreams and nurtures our gardens, it killed dozens of people when it casually opened its wings.

It's like…do you know what the juggernaut is? I never tried to teach you the old ways, but maybe your grandmother told you. The juggernaut is a wagon used to carry a huge statue of Krishna Jagannatha through the city of Puri during the Rathayatra festival. The wagon is gigantic—it takes several hundred people to drag it along. On one hand, the juggernaut is beautiful and serene: it's decorated with flowers and surrounded by pilgrims singing hymns, not to mention that it carries the statue of the compassionate Lord Krishna; but on the other hand, a huge crowd mills uncontrollably around the wagon, and all too often, someone falls under the wheels. People even throw themselves under. The juggernaut doesn't stop; it represents benevolence and goodwill, but it can leave crushed bodies in its wake.

Do you understand, John? Yes, I imagine you do. You're a juggernaut yourself, on occasion.

I've been trying to build up my courage to tell someone what I've found out. I'm sure you'd do it without a moment's hesitation: summon the media, make a statement, proclaim your moral outrage at what's going on. Deceit. Criminal negligence. Cover-up.

But I'm no crusader. I'm just a woman who knows a secret.

And now you do too.

Help me, John. Call that prince, the one who's suing Laughing Dragon over the death of his workers. Say I'll testify. But keep my name secret, just for the time being. I still have a job up here with Laughing Dragon. I still have a reputation as a scientist, and if I start talking about artificial gravity, telepathy…I promise I'll take the witness stand when the time comes, but I don't want to declare war on Heaven just yet.

I want to stay here a little while longer. Even if it sometimes terrifies me.

I want to hold on to my dreams.

VARIATION L: WHITE ELEPHANT

(ALLEGRO POMPOSO)

(AT GOOD SPEED, POMPOUSLY)

CONTACT: DECEMBER 2078

Excuse me, Miss, uhh, Ms., uhh, Verhooven. Is your father in?

This, uhh, it's a business matter at the presidential level. Oh, no. No, it's not…of course, you're every bit the banker your father is, but I think—

Yes, ma'am.

Yes, ma'am.

No, ma'am.

Well, it's related to Laughing Dragon Entertainment Industries. As you know, their company has loans with this bank well in excess of…uhh, I have it written down…yes, ma'am, that's the figure I have here. Very good. You have an excellent memory, miss, uhh, ma'am.

At any rate, when our bank has that much invested in a firm, you may or may not know it's standard policy for us to, uhh, approach someone on their staff and make arrangements to be informed if and when something of interest…we prefer not to use the term "spy," ma'am. That term hasn't gained acceptance in traditional banking circles.

Certainly, I'll get to the point. Our, uhh, contact has informed us Mr. and Mrs. Naruki are considered missing. Ma'am.

Three days.

Our contact thinks the Narukis may have decided to, uhh, fly into the sun.

Well, it isn't entirely unfounded, ma'am. On one previous occasion when Laughing Dragon's business was running into setbacks, it's believed the Narukis set off sunward and—

Running into setbacks, ma'am. It isn't public knowledge, but the prince, you know, Prince, uhh, who's suing Laughing Dragon over the construction deaths—he seems to have come into some information. We aren't exactly sure what he knows, but the word is it's extremely powerful leverage that should…yes, we can try to find out. I'll write that down, shall I? Action Item One: find out what the prince knows.

Other setbacks, yes, ma'am, I'm getting to them. Uhh, it seems the, uhh, construction teams have all evacuated.

Gone home, ma'am. All of them.

Our guess is the prince told them something. Although maybe they just left on their own because of all the accidents. The accidents. Four since the original one that killed the prince's workers. Apparently there have been quakes on Heaven's surface which ruptured a number of domes…oh no, there's no suggestion of sabotage. It says here Laughing Dragon security personnel investigated each incident with all the…of course, there was insurance. We insist on insurance. We're a bank.

Our own investigators, ma'am? Well, perhaps you don't, uhh, understand the level of security Mrs., uhh, Mr. Naruki has imposed on Heaven. No photographs, no close approach from space, no unauthorized visits from…good Lord, no, she wasn't trying to hide anything from us. How could she hide something from us? We audit her books every six months.

The security was because Mrs. Naruki was worried about terrorists. Terrorists, ma'am. Well, no, an amusement park one hundred and six million kilometers from Earth is not an obvious political target, but caution is always—

Oh, now, Miss Verhooven, uhh, Ms…. we've made a substantial number of investigations, yes, a substantial number, let me…oh…no…this is the, uhh…we call it the, uhh, nut file. From earlier inquiries. You recall Laughing Dragon categorically refused to discuss how the body of Heaven was constructed? Well, we did some digging to find out…asked around on all the planets, did anyone see something huge and strange in space…well, we got some wild stories, ma'am, you'd be amused. No, there's nothing of interest here, I personally checked each and every…yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. I'll leave the file with you.

About the Narukis, ma'am…if they're, uhh, gone, there could be serious…well, I was talking to Legal, and they say if Laughing Dragon were to default on the loan, Heaven would, uhh…become ours.

The bank's.

Presumably we'd sell it to someone, ma'am.

There must be…uhh…I mean, it's a nice big, uhh…I should think there'd be a buyer somewhere, ma'am. All those energy cells, the scrap value alone…no, I don't think we've calculated the cost of reclamation. No, ma'am, I wouldn't be qualified to venture an opinion in that area. Not at present. I'll make that another Action Item, shall I?

Maybe we'll just work up a full report on this, yes? I mean, Heaven's a great big…it's very big. There's always someone who'll buy something that's big. In my experience. Any time the bank has repossessed something before, we've never had any trouble selling it off…not when it was something, uhh, big.

No, ma'am. We didn't think ahead. We're sorry.

VARIATION M: TOTEM

(TRANQUILLO CON SPIRITO)

(SERENELY, WITH SPIRIT)

CONTACT: JANUARY 2079

The smoke rises to heaven.

The sound of the rattle rises to heaven.

Let my song rise to heaven,

For I have dreamed a true dream.

Come here, Celeste.

You're wondering what your animal will be, right?

When I was a boy your age, I wanted the shaman to tell me I'd been chosen by the eagles. I dreamt of flying with them…or a bear, that seemed like a good animal too. I'd seen a bear once in a zoo—it seemed wise and kindly. Now that I know more about bears, I realize I overlooked important aspects of the bear personality. Its claws, for example.

But no, your animal will not be the bear. Or the eagle. Or the wolf or the whale or any of those totems young people usually hope for.

I know. You're disappointed. I was disappointed when the shaman told me my bed would lie in the rabbit lodge. I wanted to be…oh, something more heroic. I thought rabbits were timid and foolish. But really, when a rabbit runs from a fox, it isn't being foolish, is it? It's just being sensible. And a rabbit has the heart of a wolverine at times—when being brave is the least foolish alternative. A rabbit is always watching, always listening, always sniffing the air. That's a good way for a shaman to live.

But no, you won't be a rabbit either.

The spirits have built a new lodge. They've sensed a new creature. Not human, not an animal they've known in the past. It comes from far away. This animal is your totem.

I don't know its name. You're the first of its clan. It has no name in any human tongue. You can ask for its secret name when you meet it.

To meet it, you'll have to journey off-planet. At present, the creature is several million kilometers inside the orbit of Mercury, and—

No, I'm not crazy. Or lying. The animals spoke. I dreamed a true dream.

Are you saying the truth is only true when you can understand it?

You're wrong.

When I went to university many decades ago, I enrolled in mathematics because I wanted to tell truth from falsehood. I believed mathematics was the one pure source of truth because it was the only discipline entirely divorced from subjectivity. But that was before I began studying. At school, I learned all mathematics starts with "Let's pretend this is true and see where it leads." That is mathematics' great joy and strength: it dares to stand on nothingness. It dares to see it's standing on nothingness, yet it's still brave. Can you tell me its magic isn't strong?

You want to argue with me, I see that. Don't you want to be a shaman, Celeste? Don't you want to have magic in your heart? Well, I'll tell you a secret about magic: it refuses to be what you want it to be. Demand something of magic and it will choose to be something else.

One quiet wintry Sunday while I was at the university, I woke at dawn and went for a walk. I suppose you'd like me to give some mystic explanation for walking at that hour, but the truth is, my roommate was snoring so loudly I couldn't sleep, so I got angry and left. I walked nowhere in particular, and because I was angry, I paid little attention to the world around me: the cardinals whistling in the trees, the squirrels running across the snow. I was in no magical mood, I assure you.

But. As I passed one of the university parking lots, I saw a spirit.

It was the Thunderbird, I think: a man's body with the head of a bird of prey. It was at the far end of the lot, walking away from me toward the science complex; I could only see its back, a long distance off.

I stood frozen for two full minutes until the spirit disappeared behind the Chemistry building.

Now, girl, was that magic?

The spirit was a long way off and in the shadow of some buildings. It could have been nothing more than someone wearing an odd hat. I tried to convince myself I was imagining things, because the incident didn't fit with how I thought the world should work. Why would a great spirit be walking across a parking lot? A parking lot! Not a field, not a forest, a parking lot. And if a spirit chose to show itself to me, why didn't it talk or do something miraculous? Why would it just walk away and disappear?

Was that magic? Or was it only my imagination?

Since then I've met the Thunderbird several times in my dreams of the Other World, but it's always refused to say whether it really showed itself to me that day.

That's the way of true magic, Celeste. It's slippery. It's always open to question. My dreams of the Other World, well, maybe they're just dreams, right? There's always a logical explanation somewhere if you want it.

And there's always magic if you want it. Everywhere. In the forest, in the city, in a lodge, in a factory.

In space, several million kilometers inside the orbit of Mercury.

That's the magic you've been offered, Celeste. You don't get a choice what your magic will be; your choice is whether you will let it be magic.

Will you?

Yes, we can get you there. A woman named Verhooven is bringing people to see the new creature. She's become curious about it; she's gathering those with knowledge of its travels. It won't be hard for you to join this group. You belong to the creature's clan—you have to speak for it. The spirits will make sure you get where you belong.

Are you willing to accept this magic, young shaman? Are you willing to say, "Let's pretend this is true and see where it leads"?

Then let the drums sound.

The music of the drums rises to Heaven.

FUGUE: ORGANISM

(ALLEGRO CON TUTTI)

(AT GOOD SPEED, WITH THE ENTIRE ORCHESTRA)

CONTACT: MARCH

According to the laws of the League of Peoples, the boundary of a single-sun solar system is that set of points where the gravitational attraction of the primary exactly equals the gravitational attraction of the rest of the universe. Humans might claim determining this line is impossible, maybe even in violation of quantum physics; but the laws of the League have taken precedence over the laws of physics so long, physics no longer contests the issue.

A few meters outside the boundary of Sol's system, the Outpost prepared for action. Sensors had recorded a steady increase in the Organism's mass over the past months as it drank in Sol's energy; within minutes, the Organism would have enough energy to open a wormhole out of the system. Wormholes were a haphazard way to travel—the hole's outlet might open as much as a light-year off target—but species without true FTL flight found wormholes a convenient shortcut whenever they wanted to leapfrog a parsec or two.

Of course, wormholes had an unfortunate tendency to suck in every particle of matter for kilometers around….

The Outpost of the League of Peoples watched and waited. The odds were good that humans would become an interstellar race much sooner than they expected.

[Leviathan] On Heaven, the environment domes and dormitory pods were slowly being shaken apart by twitches in the Organism's skin; but a new dormitory had been built in space, floating some five kilometers above the surface. In this dormitory's cafeteria, Colleen O'Neil stood before a giant viewscreen, watching a crack grow across the surface of one of Heaven's domes as the creature shrugged. Colleen had no idea which heavenly environment was dying…Valhalla perhaps, crumbling into Götterdämmerung. Good riddance.

She hated the sight of her grandfather's magnificent Leviathan reduced to this decrepit clown. But at the farthest ranges of vision, she could see the creature's wings spread wide to the sun: a clear, clean black, darker than the night sky behind them. Valhalla and Nirvana and the Sunboat Fun ride were just barnacles on Leviathan's hide; they'd be scraped off soon enough.

[Nessie] Stitch Ashworth entered the cafeteria and nearly left again immediately. The only other person he saw there was a fellow Martian, but dressed in laborer's khaki, her red hair braided with the gritty twine that miners called sand-string. Stitch's family were Olympians, residents of the heights of Olympus Mons, where the corporate executives lived. As a boy he'd been beaten up by miners' children whenever he ventured out of the Olympian safe areas; he'd become a pilot to get away from the mines, the miners, and everyone associated with the desolation of Mars.

The woman must have heard him come in, for she turned and nodded without smiling. "Hello."

"H'lo," he answered carefully. "Anything doing out?"

"Heaven is warring with itself," she said. "The idols are crashing down."

"Oh." He looked at the wreckage shuddering across the surface. A concrete tower toppled soundlessly across a cluster of roller-coaster tracks. The windows in the distant tower's observation deck shattered; the air inside burst outward, its humidity turning to a spray of white. Stitch couldn't remember if the white was steam because of the low pressure or frost because of the cold. "Wild, isn't it?" he said.

"Yes," said the woman, sounding very satisfied.

"I was thinking of driving down," Stitch said suddenly, surprising himself he'd revealed this to a stranger. "I'm licensed for minishuttles, and there are dozens in the docking bay. I'd like to see…" But there was something too intense in the woman's expression to let him tell the truth: that he was hoping to find some huge chalk letters his grandfather had scribbled decades earlier. "I'd like to see it close up," he said.

The woman looked down at the surface again. She seemed to be smiling at the continuing destruction. "I'd like to see it close up too."

[Angel] Dr. Simon Esteban met two of his fellow passengers in the corridor: Martians, both of them, a laborer built like a she-bear and a shy dandy dressed like he was heading for Club Olympia. No, Esteban corrected himself, it was wrong to pigeonhole people so quickly. As soon as a psychiatrist labeled a patient, he started treating the label instead of the person.

Esteban had repeated that axiom to himself so often it was like a mantra. Jogging around the track at the gym, he sometimes caught himself muttering, "Treat the person, not the label," over and over and over and over.

"We're going for a closer look at the surface," the she-bear said. "Interested?"

"Certainly," Esteban said, smiling his professional smile. In fact, he'd heard that vicious quakes rocked the surface from time to time, scattering rubble into the air. Getting too close was dangerous…but his first patient Rachel had hesitated to approach her angel, and for that cowardice, she'd gone mad.

No, he corrected himself, she'd succumbed to delusional paranoia brought about by unresolved guilt.

No, he corrected himself again. She'd gone mad.

[Bogey] In the docking bay, Jenny Harrington slid into the shadows of an inactive minishuttle storage tube when she heard approaching footsteps. Not that Jenny was afraid to be caught here—Ms. Verhooven said guests could go where they liked. But Jenny didn't want to talk to anyone now, didn't want the pointless rituals of making conversation with strangers. In her hand was a bouquet of daisies, hard-grown in Mars's sterile soil…well, to be honest, grown in spite of Mars's soil, because it had been necessary to add so much: fertilizer, water, several strains of bacteria.

Jenny didn't want any of Verhooven's other guests to see the flowers in her hand. They'd all heard her story. They'd think she was going to drop the flowers on the spot where her father had died because she loved him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her father had been a militaristic blockhead who died trying to kill some harmless hulk…and it was all pointless, wasn't it, because the hulk was still here and all that was left of her father was a dent in the hulk's side. Love was for people who deserved it, and her father had never ever deserved it.

The flowers were an exorcism, nothing more. A way to close off the past, once and for all.

Three people passed her hiding place and entered another minishuttle tube. Soon the blast door shut and the mini blasted off.

Jenny clutched her flowers fiercely and headed for the next active shuttle.

[Daemon] Gregor Petrozowski did nothing as the first shuttle emerged from the dormitory. His yacht hovered above the dormitory, several kilometers sunward; he could see everything, with little chance of being detected himself, just a fleck in the fireball's face. When the second shuttle took off, the old man gave his computer a single soft command. "Down."

The sound of the sun was loud static over his radio speakers. In his years of isolation, he'd developed a distaste for both music and the human voice. Staying in contact with humanity had been impure, in a way he couldn't explain. If he was to become worthy to rediscover his daemon, he had to cut himself off from the mundane world. Now the only voice he could stand was the sun's.

Obviously, other people had discovered the daemon while he was searching alone in space. They'd tried to build something on it—temples, maybe; he couldn't tell now that everything was in ruins. If he'd been listening to human broadcasts, he would have come here much earlier.

But he was here now. He had found the daemon, unaided, in the vast depths of space. And he could feel in his bones that he'd arrived just in time.

"Down," he whispered. "Down."

[Boojum] "That's Petrozowski's yacht," Emil Mayous told his son Yorgi. "Petrozowski himself."

The boy hauled himself off his acceleration couch with a great ripping of Velcro and floated over to the viewscreen. "Yacht looks like shit," he said after a moment's inspection.

The boy Yorgi thought he was an expert on yachts now that he owned one himself. Emil didn't want to know where the boy got enough money to buy the ship. Emil hadn't wanted to come to Heaven either, but Yorgi thought the Verhooven woman might pay big money to hear about his father's boojum hunt.

"Petrozowski's probably been in space ever since he abandoned the company," Yorgi said. "I bet he hasn't—Jesus Christ!"

A jet-black wing swept past the viewscreen like a flapping chunk of night. Proximity alarms blared throughout the ship.

"You stupid flea!" Emil shouted at his son, for no reason except his fear.

[Titan] The last maxishuttle to Heaven was en route to the main dormitory when the Organism lifted its wings to full height. Suddenly, the shuttle found itself in a trough six kilometers deep, the walls and floor so black they were nearly invisible. Overhead, the wide face of the sun burned down into the chasm; but it was far, far away, like a glimpse of sky to a child trapped in a well.

"Ooooo," said Beatrice Mallio, age four.

"Wow," said Benedict Mallio, age five.

"Something nice on the viewscreen?" their mother asked. Like the other adults on board, Juliet Mallio was tired of looking outside after days of travel; but she dutifully prepared herself to admire whatever piece of space debris her children were watching now.

Her eyes widened as she saw the deep black of the Organism's skin towering over both sides of the ship, the wings forming massive walls of starless night. At first she thought the shuttle had entered some sort of landing bay; but as she watched, dim flecks of blue-tinged light flickered into life against the blackness.

"Pretty!" said Beatrice.

"Like electric spiders!" said Benedict.

And they did look like spiders, skittering out of their nests and racing across the surface of both wings. The spiders danced madly, colliding with each other, coalescing…and suddenly one leapt across the gap between the wings, trailing a pale thread of lightning directly in front of the shuttle. Without thinking, Juliet stamped down with her foot, as if she had a brake pedal that could stop the ship from flying through the lightning. The shuttle's pilot must have had reflexes equally quick, for the ship suddenly dipped, just managing to slip under the glowing thread.

All over the cabin, people cried out at the ship's sudden maneuver; but Juliet remained tensely silent, her eyes on the screen, her arms reaching out to wrap around her children's shoulders.

More and more of the lightning-threads sparked from one wing to another, weaving a net, a web across the trough. There was no way the pilot could avoid them all. One thread whipped against the shuttle's hull, and for a moment the viewscreen image twisted into jagged distortion; but a moment later, the picture snapped back into focus with an audible crackle. Another lightning strike, another crackle, a third, a fourth; then a fountain of light gushed crimson and the viewscreen went dead.

"Children," said Juliet Mallio, "are your safety belts very snug? Yes, make sure, let me check. Good. Good. A kiss for each of you. That's nice, very nice. Now it's too bad the pretty show has gone off the screen, but maybe you'd like a story instead. Yes? Maybe a story about a Titan." The shuttle veered sharply upward. "A Titan named Prometheus. A sad story, but a brave one."

The shuttle rocked like a cradle under an impatient hand.

"Ready? Once upon a time…"

[Dragon] Sunward, the Narukis looked back for a final time on their dragon. The wings were now pulled so far forward it seemed as if the Laughing Dragon of Heaven had reshaped itself into a cavernous mouth and its breath was a rainbow of fire.

"A true dragon," said Yushio, awestruck.

"It always has been," his wife answered.

"Change course, change course!" Yushio shouted to their yacht's navigation computer. "Into the dragon's mouth!"

For a moment, Mrs. Naruki considered countermanding the order. But when she saw the exhilaration on her husband's face, the joy of jumping into something new and exciting, she held her silence. The sun, the dragon, never mind.

She took Yushio's hand and squeezed fondly.

[Roc] Two seats behind the Mallio family inside the maxishuttle, the prince unbuckled his safety belt, then staggered up the aisle and dragged open the hatch separating the cockpit from the passenger cabin. The female pilot shouted at him to get back and sit down, but the prince ignored the woman; he refused to die meekly, blind to what was happening and strapped into a comfortable chair.

Through the tinted cockpit port, the prince saw the pilot had angled the shuttle upward, trying to climb out of the trough made by the Organism's wings; but the web of energy woven across the chasm was acting like a physical obstruction, tangling around the ship's nose, dragging it down. Red lights flashed on the control panel; new ones lit every second.

There were no sounds but the cursing of the pilot and a frightened babbling back in the cabin. But beneath his feet, the prince could feel the floor beginning to vibrate.

Trying to balance against the rocking of the ship, he knelt beside the pilot and said in a low voice, "I'm a trained engineer. Tell me what I can do to help."

"Can you cross your fingers and pray?" she asked.

"The first thing an engineer learns," he told her.

[Lion] In the passenger cabin of the shuttle, Elizabeth Obasa hugged her children and whispered to them not to cry. "Listen," she said, "I had a dream. When I was sleeping a little while ago. About your father.

"He was walking across a dark grassland at night, and wherever I looked there was an animal there, watching him: a bull, a bear, a swan, all kinds of animals.

"As I watched, he walked up to a goat and said, 'I'm looking for a lion.'

"The goat said, 'I'm a lion.' So they walked a little distance and they talked about how beautiful their children looked when they were asleep.

"Then he walked up to a fine winged horse and said, 'I'm looking for a lion.'

"The horse said, 'I'm a lion.' So they walked a little distance and they talked about how beautiful their children sounded when they laughed.

"Then he walked up to me and said, 'I'm looking for a lion.'

"I said, 'I'm a lion.' So we walked a short distance to a little grove where you children were climbing trees. And your father said, 'So many lions!' "

A burst of blinding blue roared out from the door to the cockpit and the cabin lights blinked out.

[Juggernaut] The cabin lay silent and dark, lit only by a faint glow coming from the cockpit. Slowly, Shanta Mukerjhee eased her grip on the arms of her seat; she'd been clinging so tightly her knuckles cracked softly as they relaxed. She desperately wanted all the trouble to go away, for this to be yet another dream sent by the Juggernaut. But she knew this was real. And the blast of light from the cockpit suggested a fire, an explosion, something like that.

Her son John would never forgive her for cowering in her seat when the pilot might be endangered.

Hesitantly, she lifted open the release on her safety belt. Her first motion sent her drifting toward the cabin roof, bumping off and heading floorward again. It was almost funny—at one time she would have been completely disoriented by being weightless, but thanks to some soybeans, she was quite accustomed to it by now.

She could easily pull herself forward by grabbing at the edge of the overhead luggage compartments. A few of her fellow travelers were beginning to make panicked noises in the darkness. "It's all right," she said loudly, "it's just that the engines have shut off, so we're all weightless. Stay where you are and I'll check with the pilot."

She hoped she sounded cool and confident. John would despise her forever if she couldn't keep people calm in a crisis.

The light in the cockpit area was starshine coming through the front port: the hard sharp starshine of vacuum. The sun was not in sight, and overhead, the body of the Juggernaut was a vast blackness against the Milky Way. Its wings had once again tucked back against its body; its fireworks were over.

By the starlight, Shanta could see the pilot still belted into her chair, her face and hands black with burns. Shanta put her hand to the pilot's neck; no pulse. Electrocution from the control panel? Shanta couldn't imagine the size of a power surge that would kill a human being faster than fuses could blow.

But still. The pilot was dead.

On the opposite side of the cockpit, the prince's body was drifting, nudging against the side viewing port. He too had been caught in the power surge, but his burns were less severe. Shanta could feel no pulse in his throat either, but she couldn't just hover there staring at two dead bodies without doing something.

Shanta pushed the prince's body down to the floor and tried to give CPR. Weightlessness made it almost impossible: when she pressed on his chest, she drifted toward the roof. She managed to prop her shoulder under the pilot's chair to get some leverage, then began again. Patiently. Unstoppably.

[White Elephant] Margaret Verhooven floated to the door of the maxishuttle cockpit. She could see the dead pilot, and Shanta Mukerjhee trying to revive the prince. She could also see other ships outside: two minishuttles and three yachts. The shuttles were stenciled with the name of her bank, but the yachts were unfamiliar.

Verhooven scanned the sky for some indication of where she was. Against the swath of untwinkling stars, one star stood out from the rest, brighter than any planet seen from Earth. The star was yellow. It was either the sun much too far away, or another star much too close up.

The Outpost of the League of Peoples suddenly appeared below the shuttle, seeming to materialize from nowhere: a huge habitat bigger than any orbital or space-wheel, its brilliantly white skin surrounded by a milky envelope of particles agitated by its arrival. Teleportation? Verhooven asked herself silently. Or just moving so fast I didn't see it come? And what the hell is it?

The Outpost began to ascend slowly. Looking at the stark white Outpost below and the jet-black Organism above, Verhooven had the image of being crushed between giant salt and pepper shakers. She stifled a laugh before it threatened to become hysterical.

When the Outpost nudged up against the shuttle, Verhooven heard only a soft bump. She floated downward as the Outpost continued to ascend, pushing the shuttle with it. With one hand, she grabbed the edge of the cabin door and pulled herself back up to keep a clear view out the cockpit port.

One by one, the other ships made contact with the ascending Outpost and were caught in its upward push. They were not far apart to begin with, all sucked through the same small wormhole and spat out at the same point; now gentle nudges from the Outpost clumped them closer together, until they were bumping each other lightly like rowboats tied to the same ring on a dock. (Verhooven thought about the time her father had taken her fishing. The only time. She was eight years old, and for some reason he thought she hadn't enjoyed herself. Whenever she asked if she could go with him on another trip, he thought she was being polite. Or sarcastic. Throughout her whole life, no one had ever been able to tell when she was sincere.)

She told herself the white giant beneath them would really crush the ships against Heaven above; but when the gap was almost closed, the Outpost stopped pushing and let the ships drift the rest of the way to Heaven's surface. For a moment nothing happened but a gentle bump. Then, without hurry, gravity imposed itself: gravity from the Organism overhead, making the shuttle's roof into a floor.

Verhooven had ample time to reorient herself. Across the cabin, she saw Shanta Mukerjhee cradling the prince's body as the world reversed. The prince was breathing weakly.

Behind Verhooven's back, the hatch to the outside world slid open. Adrenaline shot into her blood and she dragged in a huge breath, expecting the ship's atmosphere to gust out into vacuum; but there was no wind, nor the sudden cold of space. A warm breeze blew in through the hatch, smelling as pleasant as a sunny hillside. She remembered the smell from the two weeks she and her father had spent at a mountain resort in the Rockies. They'd never done that again either.

Verhooven found she had tears in her eyes.

[Totem] Celeste Dumont was the first person to leave the shuttle. She walked slowly down the gangway, trying to memorize every sensation as she set foot on her totem's skin. The eyes of its scales tracked her as she moved. She knelt and held her hand out close to the surface, the same way she would let a dog smell her when she met it for the first time. The eyes focused on her, drank in her body heat.

Behind her, other passengers came slowly out of the shuttle, and farther off, people emerged from the other ships that lay on the surface. Some talked excitedly; others seemed struck dumb. Celeste remained silent and tried to hear a deeper voice.

When the babble of humans became too distracting, she moved away from them, coming at last to a hatchway in the side of a large black bulge in the Organism's skin. The hatch slid open at her touch, revealing an airlock. She went inside, closed the outer door, opened the inner.

Celeste found herself in a place of quiet greenery. A well-tended Japanese temple stood before her, and somewhere inside a flute was playing. As she followed the sound of the music, a wild joy filled her heart, tightening her chest, burning through her whole body: the taste of magic, the sensation of truly not knowing what might be abroad in the world, yet racing eagerly to meet it.

[Organism] The Envoy of the League of Peoples sat in a bamboo chair beside the temple's altar, his heart filled with the same fierce excitement. He'd lost track of how many human lifetimes he'd waited for this moment…although he was human himself, very human. Could a being live centuries and still be truly human? Yes. Yes.

If he couldn't calm himself by playing the flute, he felt as if his heart would batter its way out of his chest.

A woman entered the sanctuary, nearly running, her face shining. He lowered his flute and smiled self-consciously. He was sure she'd be disappointed to see a very ordinary man here; but there was no disappointment on her face.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," she answered, a bit out of breath. "Do you know anything about this…creature we're standing on?"

"I've been watching it a long time. From the Outpost. The Outpost is the big white thing." He laughed. "I've been watching everything a long time. Hello."

"Yes. Hello."

"The League of Peoples wrote me a speech to welcome humanity as new citizens of the universe," he said, "but it's very pompous. At the moment, I'd be embarrassed to deliver it. If you people invite me back to Earth, I'm sure I'll have plenty of public speaking engagements. I can be pompous then. So…just hello."

She smiled brilliantly, and his heart beat even harder. He'd never met another human. He couldn't believe how magnificent humans could be. He wanted to see them all, touch them, embrace them, this woman, the others outside, a solar system full of them.

O wonder, he thought, how many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in't.

An allusion to a human celebration text. His mentor would be proud.

"This creature…" the woman said to him, pointing downward. "Do you know its name?"

"I just call it the Organism."

She nodded as if she found the name perfect. "It's my totem," she said. "I've finally found my totem."

He smiled. "So have I."