The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection

1

The custom was to bring nothing but your body, no matter how weak or timid that body might be. Robotic help was forbidden, as were exoskeletons and other cybernetic aids. Every nexus had to be shut down; the universe and its distractions were too much of a burden to carry across the wilderness. Brutal work and miserable climates were guaranteed, and the financial costs were as crushing as any physical hardship. Food was purchased locally, every crumb wearing outrageous import fees, while simple tents and minimal bedding cost as much as luxury apartments. But most expensive were the indispensable porters: Every hiker had to hire one strong back from among a hodgepodge of superterran species, relying on that expert help to carry rations and essential equipment as well as the client’s fragile body when he proved too weary or too dead to walk any farther.

Porters were biological, woven from bone and muscle and extravagant colors of blood. Evolved for massive worlds, most of them thundered about on four and six and even eight stout legs. But there were a few bipeds in the ranks, and one of those was a spectacular humanoid who called herself Katabasis.

“Yet you seem small,” said the human male. “How can you charge what you charge, looking this way?”

Katabasis was three times his mass and much, much stronger. But the question was fair. With an expression that humans might mistake for a smile, she said, “The client pays the penalty for being brought out on his back. When you give up, we earn a powerful bonus.”

The human lifted a hand, two fingers tapping the top of his head. He had pale brown skin and thick hair the color of glacial ice, white infused with blue. The fingers tapped and the hand dropped and with genuine pride he said, “I studied the rules. I understand that rule.”

“Good,” she said.

“But these other creatures are giants,” he said. “That Wogfound would have no trouble carrying you. And the One-after-another looks easily stronger.”

“All true,” she agreed. “But by the same logic, they feel no special obligation to look after their clients. Extra money has its charms, and if you shatter, they win. But I am relatively weak—as you wisely noted, thank you—and that’s why I avoid carrying others, even for a few steps. Ask the other porters here; you will learn. Katabasis is notorious for keeping her clients healthy, which not only adds to the value of the trek, but it saves you the ignominy of being brought into City West as a cripple or a carcass.”

The modern brain was nearly impossible to kill, and no client had ever permanently died during these marches through jungle and desert. Yet immortality had its costs, including exceptional memories that played upon weaknesses like pride and dignity. Small humiliations were slow to heal. Giant failures could eat at the soul for thousands of years. Most humans would take her warning to heart. Yet this man was peculiarly different. Staring at the powerful, self-assured alien, he smiled for the first time. “Oh, no,” he said. “You cannot scare me.”

Katabasis had centuries of experience with the species and its countenances, but she had never observed anything so peculiar as that broad, blatant grin and that bald declaration. She watched the ugly tongue curling inside that joyful mouth. The human made no attempt to hide his feelings. He was staring, obviously intrigued by the porter: The shape of her tall triangular face and the muscled contours of the rugged, ageless body, and how the bright golden-brown plumage jutted out of her work clothes. An interspecies fantasy was playing inside his crazy head. This happened on rare occasions, but never on the first day. And never like this.

Without shame, the man adjusted his erection. “My name is Varid, and I want to hire you.”

“No.”

Varid didn’t seem to hear her. He continued to gaze at her with a simpleton’s lust. Then the face flattened, emptiness suddenly welling up in the eyes, and using a tone that was almost but not quite puzzled, he asked, “Why not?”

“You won’t endure the journey,” Katabasis said.

Varid tried to laugh but the sound came out broken, as if he was an alien attempting to make human sounds. Then the other arm lifted, bending to make a big bulge of muscle. “I’m exceptionally fit. I’ve trained for years, preparing for this day. Designer steroids and implanted genes, and I have special bacteria in my gut and my blood, doing nothing but keeping this body in perfect condition.”

“It isn’t the body that concerns me,” she said.

Varid shut his eyes and opened them again. “What are you saying?”

“Your mind is the problem.”

He responded with silence.

“I don’t know you,” Katabasis continued, “but my impression is that you have a fragile will and a foolish nature.”

The human face remained empty, unaffected.

“Hire the One-after-another,” she said, one broad hand picking him off the ground and then setting him aside. “She’s more patient than most porters, and she won’t speak too rudely about you once you give up.”

In the remote past, in some distant parcel of the newborn universe, someone harvested the core of a Jovian world. Godly hands filled the sphere with caverns and oceans, and then they swaddled their creation inside a hull of hyperfiber. Towering rockets rose thousands of kilometers above the stern, and the new starship was fueled and launched. Yet nobody ever came onboard. The machine’s purpose and ultimate destination were forgotten. Billions of years later, humans found the derelict wandering the cold outside the Milky Way, and after considering a thousand poetic names, that lucky species dubbed their prize “the Great Ship” and began a long voyage around the entire galaxy, offering passage to any species or individual that could afford the price of a ticket.

Early in the voyage, a high-gravity species sold asteroids and rare technologies to the humans and with their earnings bought passage for a distant solar system. Once onboard, they built a vast centripetal wheel. The wheel was deep inside the Ship, helping minimize the natural, distracting tug of real gravity. Forty kilometers wide and nearly five hundred kilometers in diameter, their home spun a circle every eight minutes, pressing them snugly against the wheel’s rim.

Eventually the aliens reached their destination, and they sold their home to a speculator with dreams but few resources.

That began a sequence of bankruptcies and auction sales. Each grand plan ended with fresh disappointment. Investors changed and new tenants worked the ground with false optimism, and then everything would fall apart again. In that piecemeal fashion, the habitat’s climate was modified and rectified in places while other regions were left to shatter, creating an ecological stew populated by survivors from a thousand massive worlds. Today the lone sea was shallow and hypersaline, bordered by City East and City West, while at the opposite end of the wheel stood a chain of mashed-down mountains. An artificial sun rode the hub, throwing a patchwork of colors and intensities of light into a maze of valleys, and after thousands of years, for no reason but luck, a splendidly fierce and decidedly unique biosphere had matured.

The current owners occupied City West, and so long as their investment produced capital and public curiosity, they were happy.

Every porter lived in City East. An abrasive, brawling community, it was as diverse as the countryside if not so beautiful. With powerful arms, Katabasis had hollowed out a boulder of quake-coral, making a cavity where she could sleep easily. She liked the City, and she loved to walk its shoreline every day, but she also had debts upon debts, which was why she worked constantly and why the wilderness was as much of a home as any place.

Prospective clients gathered every morning at the official trailheads. Among today’s crop were several species that she preferred to humans. But Varid wasn’t only peculiar, he proved especially stubborn. She tried to whisk him aside, but he insisted that she should be his porter, making noise about proving his worth and giving away wild bonuses for her trust.

At that point, she interrupted. “No, I won’t take you, no.” Her voice was sharp, and everything about the scene was in poor form. But at last the man seemed to understand. One last time, his face emptied. Varid finally walked away, slowly approaching the One-after-another. The small success lasted until two other humans approached—a mated couple, unexceptional to the eye—and Katabasis wondered why her day was cursed.

Then the male human did something rare. Not only had he read Katabasis’ public posting, he also had some understanding of her species. Raising one hand to make introductions, he looked skyward and called to her by name.

She lifted the backs of her hands, which was how one smiled politely to a stranger.

The human was named Perri. A handsome monkey, athletically built and younger in the face than fashionable, he raised his second hand and introduced his wife. Quee Lee took one step and another and then rested. She was a dark elegant creature built from curving tissues and pleasant odors. But there were telltale signs of intense training and medical trickery at work in the muscle beneath those curves, and the creature’s new strength was lashed to reinforced bones that could weather the relentless weight. Making humans ready for this gravity was as much art as engineering. Too much bulk, no matter how powerful, eventually dragged the body to its doom. In most circumstances it was smart to begin small and build the flesh where needed, on the trail and fed by the precious rations. That’s why it was a good sign, these humans being smaller than most, and perhaps they understood at least one vital lesson.

QueeLee raised her arm. “It is an honor to cross paths with you.”

“You have made this trek before,” Katabasis guessed.

“I managed the half-kilometer from the custom office, yes,” she said, her mouth filled with bright teeth.

“But I made the full circuit once,” Perri said. “Three hundred years ago, and my wife has been training since I returned home.”

“I’m trying to make my life exciting,” said Quee Lee.

“I am a boring husband,” he said.

The two laughed loudly, excluding the world with their pleasure.

Katabasis studied how they moved, how they stood, and with experience and unsentimental eyes, she sought the warning signs of failure.

“My husband wants to hire you,” Quee Lee said, “but I won’t survive the journey. My goal is to make the halfway point, into the mountains, and from there someone will have to carry me.”

“What about that Wogfound?” Perri asked. “She looks unbreakable.”

“Except she’ll mock you relentlessly,” Katabasis warned.

“I had one on my first trek,” Perri said. “Wogfounds are masters of insults and name-calling.”

“Well, if I’m riding, then I deserve her abuse,” Quee Lee said. “And if I’m dead for a spell, what could the noise matter?”

Three humans and several other alien hikers came to terms with their porters. Contracts were spun and sealed, monies were dropped into accounts of trust, and by then the day was half finished. The habitat’s original owners had come from a world with an eleven-hour day-night cycle, and the present owners maintained at least that tradition. Food and equipment still had to be collected, which was why the porters and their clients wouldn’t embark until the next dawn.

Perri asked to be responsible for his needs. Alone, Katabasis returned to that comfortable and familiar but ultimately alien home. A pot of boiled fish and twenty kilos of flame-blackened bread were the day’s meal, and then she chewed a stick flavored with mint and iron, walking the salty sand of her favorite beach. The night’s sleep lasted for most of three hours, which was typical, and then she woke when the dreams left her no choice, returning to the present and its stolid comforts full of hard work followed by more hard work, from this moment and until the time’s end.

2

The good porter knew what to leave behind. Extra clothes were burdens to drop in your tracks. Charms and religious symbols needed to be lighter than whispers, or they were unlucky evils. Even the richest flavors had to be carried in tiny doses, and only dead sticks could be collected along the way, soaked and chewed and then discarded with the body’s waste. Water in the wilderness was often tainted and sometimes putrid, if not outright laced with toxins. One rough filtering might leave a thousand awful tastes behind. But immortals lived inside tough, enduring bodies, and what was adventure without suffering? The one great law that couldn’t be cheated was that physical work required energy. Energy always meant food. But many of the habitat’s species were rare, and some had fallen extinct on their home world, which was why every visitor, local and tourist alike, was forbidden from hunting and grazing. That’s why every meal was carried and why each mouthful had to be jammed with nutrition. And the good porter fed herself before the client, because it was imperative that she be the strongest beast on the trail.

Katabasis never brought treats or wet meals. A client might pocket dried fruits or hide away some bloody bit of meat, but if she found these indulgences, she took them for herself. The preferred rations were dense desiccated nuggets. Flavors were coded to color and every tongue had favorites, but basically these were lumps of highly purified fat that would test even an immortal’s adaptable guts.

The trek’s first days always brought gas and embarrassing smells.

Katabasis expected jokes and had a few of her own at the ready, but Perri and his wife seemed untroubled by the rude noises.

The Wogfound was much less discreet. But the couple treated his jabs as just another series of farts, inevitable and natural, barely worth mentioning in a realm full of oddities.

The humans walked the jungle trail in slow, measured steps. Pseudo-gravity was difficult for its crushing pressure, but another complication was at work: The Great Ship had its own tug, and as the habitat’s rim spun upwards, everyone’s apparent weight increased. Then the wheel peaked and fell and down came both the body and weight. A one-gee swing rolled past every eight minutes. Clients had to contend with the shifting rules of walking and falling. Humans always fell, and they eventually broke. The other clients and their porters pushed ahead, but Katabasis’ little group conquered two kilometers on the first day and tried to hold that pace thereafter, passing through stands of pillar trees and a grove of golden willows growing around cores of carbon fiber, and then came another stretch of pillars that looked identical to the first but were born on an entirely different world. After ten days, the forest came to an abrupt end, replaced with a long valley filled with wooden reefs covered with bug-eating anemones and flower-mouths collected from scattered, left-behind worlds.

Varid was somewhere ahead of them, walking with a Tristerman and the largest Yttytt that Katabasis had ever seen. Tracks and the wind claimed that he was matching paces with those stronger aliens. Perhaps the human felt that he had some point to prove. Maybe he was overextending himself, or maybe Katabasis had been wrong about his nature. The truth didn’t matter. She had a client and hers was quite cheerful about his pain, while his wife was proving resilient. Ten days was nothing in a very long journey, but they had a reasonable pace and ample rations, and their camp was pitched before darkness, time left to eat another dense, gut-knotting meal before managing a few hours of sleep and dreams.

The couple slipped into their little tent, and in the careful fashion of weaklings trapped in high gravity, they made love.

The porters listened to the sex, and because he couldn’t help himself, the Wogfound offered insults. “Before I carry that monkey,” he said, “I will wrap her inside her bedding. She is too ugly to touch in any way.”

“She is a beast,” Katabasis said agreeably. “But I don’t think you will ever carry her.”

The challenge was noted. “A wager then, your guess against mine.”

“No.”

“If you have seen the future,” said the Wogfound, “I will pay you what my bonus would have been.”

Again, she said, “No.”

Pulling his legs beneath his long body, the Wogfound prepared for sleep. “How many times have we walked together, Katabasis?”

“I cannot say.”

“Many times perhaps.”

“More than many,” she said.

“Yet I don’t know you at all,” he said.

Looking at the armored shell and the three jewel-like eyes, she said, “You are as stupid as you are ugly.”

The laughter was abrupt and thunderous. Every anemone yanked into its home, and save for the grunting of two monkeys hiding inside their tent, the reef fell silent. Then with a brazen joyful voice, the Wogfound said, “I know what I am. I am beautiful and brilliant.”

“A good thing to know,” Katabasis replied.

Shortly after that, the camp fell asleep.

They caught Varid on the seventeenth day, inside an arid valley blasted by the brilliant blue mirage of a sun. He had spent the night there, his tent and rations packed up but still lying on the hot rock. Varid was stretched out on a skeletal chair. He smiled when the others arrived. He aimed the smile at them and spoke a few quiet words, perhaps to his porter, and the One-after-another gave a deep snort. A furnace would be hotter, but not much. Varid was drenched with sweat, but to prove his strength he lifted one of those very powerful arms, wincing when he held the open hand high.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

Perri was leading. Seventeen days and the previous trek had taught him how to move against the relentless weight. Never lift the leg higher than necessary; keep the back straight and strong. Only motions essential to covering the next half-meter were allowed. He wore minimal clothes and light boots and a body that could live for another million years. But immortality didn’t make animals into machines. He was suffering as he shuffled forward, and his voice was slow when he said, “Thank you for waiting. You’re nothing but kind.”

Katabasis heard sarcasm and pain.

Varid appeared oblivious. Still smiling, he turned and said something else to his porter, and then he broke into an oversized laugh.

With her four back legs, the One-after-another stomped at the ground. They weren’t a verbal species, but those motions signaled frustration.

“I was traveling with several friends,” said Varid, “but I tripped and fell yesterday, rather hard, and the others continued without me.”

They had seen their chance to get free of you, thought Katabasis.

Perri stopped walking, breathing deeply. “A bad fall, was it?”

“Bones poking through skin and some torn tendons.”

Quee Lee caught up with her husband. “Are you having trouble healing?”

“I never have trouble healing.” Varid sat up, the veins in his forehead ready to burst. “No, I decided to let you catch me. I wanted someone to talk to.”

“I am dreary company,” said the One-after-another.

Varid stood carefully, and his chair collapsed into a fist-sized bundle.

Katabasis had served hundreds of humans, and none were like him. She wondered about the effects of drugs and other elixirs ingested for this journey. She wondered if one of the alien “friends” had tripped the man, perhaps intentionally—a common event out on the trails.

“May I walk with you?” Varid asked.

“Absolutely,” Quee Lee said, slowly passing her husband.

The One-after-another stowed the chair and balanced all of the gear on her broad back. Three humans and their porters continued up the desert valley. A long stone wall had been cut through the middle with explosives, and they slipped into the gap and entered the remains of someone’s attempted home—tunnels and oval rooms and bits of debris that might have been precious once or might have been trash. Katabasis never enjoyed walking this ground. Each time, without fail, she thought about lost homes and the ignorant strangers who would feel nothing when they passed through what others had once treasured.

Quee Lee was in the lead. Perceiving a challenge, Varid found his legs and got busy chasing her.

Every tradition told the porters to remain behind, watching the slow, painful, and ultimately useless race.

The parched trail eventually swung back toward the wheel’s center, and after a long climb over a diamondcrete ridge, they dropped into a fresh drainage and different climate. The sun was always directly overhead, but now it turned pale and small. The air filled with mist. The vegetation was several shades of black, every plant held up by multiple trunks, supporting hungry canopies and fluorescing wings wrapped around giant insect bodies.

“Beautiful,” said Quee Lee.

Glancing up, Perri stumbled, the bones in his left leg splintering from the unexpected impact, and he collapsed and hit the ground, shattering his cheek and eye socket against bare stone.

Quee Lee returned to him. There was no reason for worry, but she settled beside him anyway.

Varid was ahead of everyone, smiling at his fortune.

“I could make you feel better,” Quee Lee said.

“In no time,” her husband agreed.

“But others are lurking.”

The two of them laughed.

Then Quee Lee looked at the other human. “Have we met him? He seems just a little familiar.”

They didn’t have access to a nexus. Memory was what counted, and despite the blood plastered across his face and a crooked leg trying to straighten itself, Perri had enough focus to decide, “I don’t remember a man like him. And I think I would.”

“Maybe he isn’t the same person now,” said Quee Lee.

Perri wiped the gore from under his eye. “Maybe something happened to him.”

“Maybe I should ask him,” Quee Lee said.

Perri laughed softly.

“You’re right,” she said. “This is a long walk. There’ll be plenty of boring to fight off before the end.”

A central valley led toward the distant mountains, and the River East was slow leaden water down its middle. For three days the trail pushed close to the water, and just when the routine and climate became familiar, they crossed the river on a massive bridge of granite slabs and granite columns.

Another ridge demanded to be climbed.

Half a kilometer was one day’s work, and they weren’t yet to the top.

They camped again and ate shavings from their supplies, and nobody complained about the taste of the water. The spring at their feet was cool and clear, little crustaceans leaving feces that tasted like something called pepper. Beside them was a grove of tashaleen trees—massive trunks laced with glass, each supporting fat bladders filled with sulfuric acid. Tashaleens periodically flooded the landscape to maintain their monoculture, but none were ripe at present, and they had lovely red colors that pushed deep into the infrared.

Today Varid had broken the little bones inside one foot. They healed fast enough, but the foot needed hard rubbing.

The couple sat opposite him, leaning against one another.

Katabasis was sitting alone, chewing steadily on a dead black stick laced with bright flavors.

After a long silence, Varid cleared his throat. Smiling at his foot, he lifted his hand, and then he turned to smile at his fingers as he said, “Name anyone luckier than us.”

There was optimism in the voice.

And there wasn’t.

“Nobody is luckier,” Quee Lee said.

Perri watched the man. “What luck are you talking about?”

“Buying passage on the Great Ship,” said Varid. “That’s an honor beyond measure.”

How could anyone disagree?

“I feel blessed.”

“Where did you come from?” Perri asked.

“Mellis 4.”

“That’s a colony world,” Quee Lee said. “In the Outskirt District, isn’t it?”

Varid seemed to hear the question, and for a moment he looked ready to formulate an answer. But then his face emptied, and everybody sat waiting. Eventually he stared at Perri, and after another long pause asked, “What’s your background? From where did you come?”

“Nowhere. I was born on the Ship.”

“Are you some captain’s child, or something else?”

“Something else,” said Perri.

Varid nodded slowly, as if he was working through the myriad possibilities. But he didn’t ask for more information. He shifted his focus to Quee Lee, ready to ask the same question.

“I was born on the Earth,” she volunteered.

“I want to visit the Earth,” Varid said. “Once the voyage ends, I plan to walk all across its ancient ground.”

The Great Ship wouldn’t return home for another two hundred thousand years. And that was assuming nothing disastrous happened during the long, long journey.

The married humans glanced at each other.

Varid appeared excited, staring at the ground and the once-injured foot, smiling and breathing faster until he suddenly looked up, hunting for another worthwhile face.

“Katabasis,” he said.

His porter let her plumage flatten, showing disinterest.

“Your name,” he said. “There’s a human word that sounds like Katabasis.”

The others looked at her. Even the other porters were curious.

This had happened several times before, human clients recognizing the word. But to have this odd dim creature bring up the matter like this, without warning … well, it was astonishing. Katabasis held her breath, the hearts in her thighs pushing blood into her face, making it more purple than usual.

“What word is ‘Katabasis’?” asked Quee Lee.

“It is very old, and Greek,” Varid said. “I wish I could remember what it meant. Maybe I knew once, but then again…”

His voice faded, yet the face seemed more alive than usual, dark eyes sparkling and the mouth very small, very intense.

Perri looked at his porter. “Is that a coincidence?”

“No,” she admitted.

Quee Lee was interested enough to stand up and shuffle closer. “You took the name when you came here. Didn’t you?”

“It’s a tradition,” Katabasis explained. “Move to another realm, and you embrace some name from those in power.”

Varid’s face changed again, back to its flat, vague, and apparently empty ways. But he lifted the hand that had rubbed the foot that couldn’t be any healthier, and he asked the hand, “How did you find your way to the Great Ship?”

The other porters put their ears and eyes on her.

Then Katabasis surprised herself. With her voice cool and pleasant, she said, “I walked here. And I walked and walked and walked.”

3

She wasn’t Katabasis and wasn’t immortal, and she knew her tiny age and critical place, always going to sleep certain that a great family loved her. She lived inside the world’s stronghold. A wedge-hole decorated with painted pretties was where she slept, and the girl had a collection of flavored sticks to chew on, and every morning one of the household warriors would lick her bare toes, waking her with a hot rough tongue.

“The maiden is expected,” the warrior would say, or words to that effect. “The Five are waiting in the study with books and high expectations.”

The Five were a fierce and wealthy and much respected marriage. Royalty and elected leaders didn’t exist in the world and couldn’t be envisioned by the People. But three women and two husband/brothers sat astride generations of obligations and large favors. The girl wasn’t one of the Five’s children, not by blood or by adoption. But she was a Hopeful, which meant that she was endowed with some talent or compelling strength that had made her worth purchasing from forgotten parents.

“The Five are waiting,” was a ritual statement. Time was too precious to share with even the most promising half-grown citizen. But there were mornings when one of the Five, usually the younger brother/husband, would march past the two hundred Hopefuls, handing out assignments and lofty words about the future before chasing after even more pressing ceremonies.

The typical morning brought small groups divided by skills and led by teachers who loved the subject in hand. Sometimes Hopefuls were gathered in the arena where they played elaborate games full of lessons and fun that kept them busy until the day’s meal and the night’s sleep. Even better were days when a girl was told to read alone and contemplate every word. But reflective lessons brought warriors on the next morning—warriors delivering hard training because it was important to drive the laziness from these young, spoiled souls.

The girl’s gift was mathematics, and in particular, cumbersome formulas with their tangled alliances and deep abstractions. On the best days, a teacher and one warrior would pull aside the mathematicians—eleven Hopefuls, including her closest friends—and they would leave the stronghold, going out into the great, lovely, and nearly perfect world to test their knowledge against what was real.

All that was worth knowing was built upon formulas.

The world was one day’s walk wide, on average, and fifteen days in length, shaped rather like a passion worm dying on hot rock. The world stood upon an old mountain range. Left in their natural state, those eroded peaks would catch only the rare rain, and perhaps a few rock-scions would grow in the valleys. But the People had built forests of broad towers standing above the tired, broken-down tectonics. Each life in the world had its job. Gardeners and their vines dangled out of the windows while J’jjs and clonetakes sang from cages, begging their keepers for feed. The buildings’ interiors were full of wedge-holes and broad hallways, and every floor had its stockers and teachers, weavers and gossips. Especially important were the miners who left every evening, descending to the hot plains to work with their electric machines. They cut fresh stone from the quarries and smelted metals from the best ores available. Other citizens tended the fans that stood high, dancing with the winds to supply power, and those who knew the dew-catchers watered the crops and every mouth. There was majesty and perfection in this labor. Every mouth attached to a working mind sang praises to the world’s rich life.

The towers demanded endless construction, and construction demanded endless calculation.

This girl, the happy young Hopeful, was being groomed to design new walls and reinforce old buttresses. If she couldn’t look forward to the day, at least she was resigned to her duty, and it was a good day whenever a teacher looked at her work, saying without too much difficulty that she was showing that most precious talent: “Promise.”

She never imagined that outside events could interrupt her future.

Who does at such an age?

The best mornings found the budding mathematicians riding in bubbles strung on electrified cables, climbing to the highest rooftops. Where the air was thin and chill was her favorite place. Deep pleasure could be found in those vistas. The girl always stole moments to look past the world. The surrounding plains were rough and ugly, but there was a horizon to seek, though it was often masked by dust and the occasional cloud. She carried a worn-out telescope rescued from the school’s garbage, and if she was very lucky and the lessons went into evening, she had stars to admire and neighboring worlds, and sometimes several moons graced the sky with their trusted round faces.

Each class was accompanied by at least one trained, well-armed warrior. The Hopefuls had real value and might tempt their enemies. Other worlds and other People lived beyond the horizon. Perhaps those same enemies would come here to steal away their talent: It had never happened and never would happen, but there was pleasure in the possibility. Who doesn’t wish to be valuable, to be special?

One day-journey reached into evening and then farther. The teacher had critical points to deliver about bracing towers and the telltale signs of strain on a windmill blade, and she steadfastly refused to leave this high place until every student absorbed her competence.

Thinking no one was watching, the girl drifted away.

But the warrior noticed and climbed after her, finding her chewing a fresh stick of dribbledoe while pushing the little telescope against her eye. The nearest moon was overhead—gray and airless, pocked with volcanoes that sometimes threw up columns of soot that left a soft ring in its orbit. She watched the moon’s limb and stared at patches of stars, and because this was one of those rare perches where every direction was visible, she turned in a slow circle, trying to absorb the precious vista.

The warrior was young and bold. He crept up on the girl, and wanting to startle her, tried to drop the cold gun barrel against her beautiful neck.

“Your feet are sloppy,” she warned, not looking at him. “I have listened to your approach since you left class.”

He paused, embarrassed and laughing.

She chewed and looked toward tomorrow’s dawn, where night was full and the land empty of any feature worthy of a name. “I wish I had a true telescope,” she said. “Like one of the giants perched on top of the stronghold.”

“They are impressive machines,” he agreed.

“Have you even seen them?” she asked doubtfully.

“I saw all of them during my training, of course. They are the ‘long eyes’ for the warrior guild.”

“But have you ever used one?”

He smiled and said, “Only the largest telescope. I looked through it once, just to see what could be seen.”

She smiled with her free hand. “What did you see?”

“The nearest worlds,” he said, pointing his weapon at the mountains riding the western horizon. “Skies were clear, clearer than tonight, and I saw amazing details.”

“I don’t care about those worlds,” she said. “Did you look at the sky?”

“No.”

She studied him.

“We don’t have enemies in the sky,” he said.

Every mountain range was a world standing alone, and the plains and scalding oceans between the ranges would kill any person who lingered too long.

The young warrior said nothing, wondering what to make of his complicated, shifting feelings for this child.

She turned to the redness where the sun had just vanished. “I’ve seen lights in that sky.”

“Flyers,” he said.

“I know what they are.”

“Then why didn’t you call them that?”

“I wish we had flyers,” she said.

“We could build them, if we needed them.”

“I suppose.”

“We are as smart as the other nations,” he said with authority.

The girl found a faint dark bulge where a young volcano pushed high into the wet heights of the sky.

“Our world is little,” she said.

“Our world is great,” he said.

“Nonetheless, we are small and poor. And the hills beneath us are nearly exhausted.”

The warrior pretended not to be bothered by this topic.

She lowered the telescope, reading his face and his feet. “You really don’t know very much, do you?”

“I know quite a lot.”

She said nothing.

“Our fans catch the winds,” he said. “And we have other machines that can snatch words out of the wind.”

“Those are radios. Yes, our teachers talk about them.”

He stood as tall as possible. “I’ve listened to the radios. Have you?”

“What did you hear?” she asked.

“Have you listened to them?”

“No.”

“I have heard voices,” he said.

“Did you understand the voices?”

“No.”

With a gesture, she proved that she wasn’t impressed.

“But I have a good friend,” he insisted. “My friend’s duty is to translate the other languages, making sense of our enemies’ words.”

“Are these words interesting?”

“Maybe.”

“What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

Suddenly the warrior wished the topic would vanish. But he was also young and willing to risk everything to impress this odd, odd girl. So against his best instincts, he said, “There is a secret. Only the Five and their children and a few chosen People are allowed to know this secret.”

“And you too,” she said.

He smiled.

She said, “Tell me.”

“Aliens,” he said, pointing at that last glimmer of ruddy light. “At this moment, aliens are walking on that world.”

Each world stood on its own mountains, and each was isolated by the dry wastelands. Every mature world had its own People. Ten thousand species of People were scattered across the face of Existence. Existence was the planet, and the planet had lived forever, and the word “alien” was normally used for the strangest, most remote species of People.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I am sorry,” he said. “‘Alien’ is a weak word for what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know a new word.” The warrior looked up at the churning moon and cold stars, and using a nervous, inexpert mouth, he tried to say the word.

“What is that?” she asked. “What does ‘human’ mean?”

4

Clients had to praise scenery. After spending and suffering too much, it was their duty to collapse on some little knoll, singing about the lovely colors and intoxicating odors and the magical properties of an ordinary breeze. Species and the lay of the land refused to stay the same. “Walking across twenty worlds wouldn’t be this interesting,” clients would sing. But how many of them had walked across even one world during their wealthy long lives? That was a good question never asked, certainly not by the stolid porters following behind, saying nothing while dreaming about grateful tips.

The rare client had careful eyes. Perri paid attention, but the skill was sharpest in the morning and faded with exhaustion. Quee Lee was less interested in scenery, but she was vigilant about her footing, measuring every step and each hesitation, ignoring the usual vistas until she was sure that she couldn’t fall. That made her the client who found animal tracks and odd rocks and bits of litter left by thousands of parties exactly like theirs, and unlike many, she asked big questions of the porters and then tried to paint the answers on the insides of her cavernous mind.

Varid existed at the other end of the spectrum: He was nearly blind. Wide scenes and telling details were ignored as he marched forward. What he did notice—what was bright and exceptionally real to the man—were the various ailments rolling inside him. Katabasis saw flashes of misery in the face. Sometimes a foot broke, or a rib; more often it was chronic fatigue. But even when he was rested and whole, his surroundings passed with little notice. The man filled that tiny chair in the morning, doing nothing and plainly thinking nothing, eyes open and pointing in some random direction, observing nothing as the rest of the camp made ready for the day’s next kilometer or two.

“He is the oddest monkey,” the Wogfound remarked. “Have you ever known a creature like him?”

“I never have, no,” Katabasis said with certainty.

“And do you know how he sleeps?”

Recalling Varid’s peculiar, unwelcome interest in her, she said, “I know nothing of the kind.”

“I know quite a lot,” said the Wogfound. “Look inside his shelter. During the night, early or late, the moment doesn’t matter. The creature lies on his back, holding a light before his face.”

“Which light?”

“His camp torch turned up high, or a blank reading net draped over his face, and I once saw him with a captured blazebee between his fingers.”

“Did you ask what he was doing?”

“I demanded to know. But he didn’t reply.”

“And did he wonder what you were doing, poking into his business?”

“From what I see, I doubt that creature is capable of wonder.”

Katabasis absorbed the words, unsure what to believe.

But the Wogfound had a ready explanation. “The body is human enough, but that mind is alien. Perhaps Sorry-gones have made a nest inside the head.”

“Not Sorry-gones, no,” she said. Varid was bizarre, but he was still human in her gaze. She wanted him to be human, maybe even needed that, but she didn’t want to dwell on reasons, much less the state of her mind.

“Watch him sleep,” her colleague advised.

“You may snoop for both us,” she said. “With my blessing.”

Days later, a torrential rain struck the valley where they were walking. Fat drops of water and ice battered exposed heads, and the ground that wasn’t flooded was left too slippery for any human foot.

Varid remained inside his tent for the rest of the day.

Just once, Katabasis looked in at him. The man had cut a small hole in the fabric and water fell through, hammering the blank gaze and the mouth that was moving as if talking, but not talking to her and maybe not to himself either. He made no noise. The lips were busy and then they stopped, and after a long moment Varid turned his head, not quite looking at her when he found the breath to say, “I like rain. I always have liked rain. I think.”

The storm passed in the night, replaced by cooler, drier air.

Perri took the lead in the morning and held it until he stumbled, shattering his knee and pelvis. Quee Lee passed him. “I’d stay and keep you company, darling. My darling. But I can smell the mountains now.”

“Push on,” he said amiably.

“I already have,” replied Quee Lee, her head down, focusing on the next meter of wicked pebbles and greasy soil.

Katabasis unfastened her tumpline and various straps, lowering her pack onto a boulder where it would wait without complaint. Settling beside the injured man, she said, “Let me carry you over the next rise.”

“And earn your bonus,” Perri said.

They laughed together.

Varid was approaching as the giant wheel spun upwards, making him heavier. Leaden feet needed to rest before taking any next step, and the man kept his head down, but more out of exhaustion than to pay strict attention. Meanwhile the ground kept trying to drop him. He wasn’t clumsy in any normal sense; when he slipped or staggered his feet often found the grace to save him. And then as he passed by, the wheel began to fall again, and inspired by that slight lessening of weight, Varid grew bold. Straightening his back, he managed longer strides, conquering the next low rise before his left leg leaped out in front of him, the monkey knee wrenched in a decidedly unnatural direction.

The moaning was urgent and familiar.

Katabasis and her client remained where they were. Eventually the moans softened, and turning to Katabasis, Perri said, “I finally remembered the story.”

“Which story?”

“Wait.”

The One-after-another was stomping past them with a furious air. Perri waited for her to leave, and then rubbing his healing leg, he said, “Our brains work so well. Living bioceramics woven around the original neural network, with horizon-sinks latching tight to every idea and event and whispered word. In theory, we shouldn’t forget anything for the next ten million years. Isn’t that what you hear when you get the upgrade?”

The human leg grew scorching hot as the healing quickened. There was beauty in the infrared glow. “Were you upgraded?” Katabasis asked.

“No, I was born exactly this way,” Perri admitted. “Humans usually are. But some little instinct tells me you were born elsewhere and maybe you heard the sales pitch one or two times.”

“We are talking about Varid,” she said.

“We were,” Perri agreed.

They sat for a moment, neither speaking.

“Varid,” said Perri. “I finally managed to remember the man. He didn’t have quite the same face and his hair was black then. I met him at a very splendid party. And I know what are you asking: ‘Why was this rough fellow at a splendid party?’ Because his wife moves in some very high orbits, and Varid used to belong to the highest reaches of the high. That’s why.”

“Varid was a captain?” Katabasis asked doubtfully.

“Oh, no. There are even loftier souls than those dreary uniforms.” Perri laughed. “I’m thinking about a civilian family—mother and father and several grown children accompanied by assorted mates and mistresses and thinking toys. One family, and they owned corporations and key patents and the entire Mellissolar system. They even had one of the fastest streakships in human hands. Varid happened to be one of those children, and his clan was among the Ship’s first paying passengers, human or otherwise. They purchased the largest quarters in the Ship’s most exclusive district, and seeing no reason to leave that paradise, they rarely took the trouble.”

Perri winced and smiled and looked at Katabasis. “Perhaps your people are never smug, self-involved, or dismissive. Since my only experience with your species is you, I can’t say. But that rich human family was all those things, and Varid—the original Varid—was pried from the same complacent mold. I keep massaging my head. There probably are other incidents. But I’ve remembered the one party and that single occasion when we crossed paths. We held drinks and faced each other and spoke at length about his grand wealth and the happiness that went with that wealth, and when I found my chance, I left. I didn’t see the man again until that day at the trailhead. Thousands of years had passed, and I never felt the urge to seek him out, and I’d wager anyone’s wealth that Varid didn’t hunger for my company. But of course that’s one of the sterling benefits of the Great Ship—you can avoid the souls you don’t like at all, unless it happens to be yours.”

From the hilltop, Varid groaned mightily.

“That is the man you met,” Katabasis said skeptically.

“No.” Perri showed his teeth. “Or yes.”

She waited.

“Seven hundred years ago, I found myself trapped inside another smug party. Some honorable charity was involved. Quee Lee promised her time and money, and certain lady friends insisted that she bring her wild wandering husband along. Rich ladies have always loved wild wandering husbands, just so long as we weren’t their problem. The party lasted ten days, which is about average, and there were ten thousand dull conversations to endure, and I drank more than was proper. But I told a few stories after my wanderings, and nobody seemed too offended. Which was when I discovered that I was, despite my own smugness, enjoying myself.

“On the tenth day, I happened across a group of strange faces. These people were too important to arrive until the end, and they clearly knew one another. The topic was homes and circumstances. It seemed that everybody had moved recently, judging by the sense of adventure when they described the giant apartments that they still had barely explored. And then according to some rule or tradition peculiar to them, they started to tell stories about the Fire.

“‘Which fire,’ I asked, meaning no harm.

“One lady turned to me and very calmly said, ‘The Whisper Fire,’ before turning back to her friends.”

He paused, watching Katabasis.

She said nothing.

“The Whisper Fire was eleven hundred years before that evening.” Perri studied his porter’s face while giving his knee a stern rubbing. “Eighteen hundred years ago, and maybe you don’t remember. Maybe you weren’t onboard yet. But the Fire was a fusion nightmare. It was very big, very dangerous. Of course our brains are tough, tough, tough. But nuclear temperatures eat away baryonic material. Even hyperfiber will eventually collapse back into plasma. The Fire was extinguished within the day, but mistakes and confusion led to many disasters, and some very important enclaves were obliterated before they could be evacuated.”

Katabasis nodded, saying nothing.

“Do you see my confusion? More than a millennium had passed, yet those jittery rich people were still dealing with the disaster. Which for some reason struck me as fun, and I remained at the edge of the group for a very long time, listening to old stories mixed with occasional bites of fresh news.”

He paused, and she said, “Varid.”

“They didn’t use his name. They used his family name, and just when I was beginning to feel a vague familiarity, someone mentioned that all of the family but one had perished: Parents and siblings, servants and spouses, plus the grandchildren born inside the Great Ship. All of them were inside their enclave. The enclave was consumed totally. There was only one survivor, except survival didn’t come in the usual sense of things.”

Katabasis didn’t want to hear anything more about Varid. Her pack was waiting to be carried, and she wondered if she would look cowardly or rude, sliding inside those heavy straps and walking over the hill.

She resisted the impulse.

Perri’s voice softened, saddened. “A team of salvage experts and ship engineers had finally cut into the deepest ruins. A thousand years had passed, and inside the amorphous glass and bottled poisons they found a piece of brain that hadn’t quite died. I was fascinated. How could you not help but be? I wanted to know how most of a mind can be vaporized but a sliver is spared. What odd chaos of fluid mechanics allows that kind of half-blessing? I asked questions. They ignored my questions. Finally the man’s name was mentioned, and the woman in the know spoke about a long convalescence that had only just begun and made no sense to any of them. ‘The boy was legally and literally dead,’ said this very pretty, very civilized lady. Discussing a many-thousand-year-old entity, she said, ‘What is left of the boy is residue, it is trash. Why build a body for the emptiness that remains?’”

On the hilltop, the One-after-another was stomping her encouragement to her miserable client.

“‘Besides,’ the lady said, ‘the boy’s portion of the estate was always tiny. He was the least-favorite child with the least-liked offspring. Any holdings back home have been inherited by cousins and odd twigs on the family spruce, and which leaves him close to destitute before he takes even one step from the hospital.’”

Katabasis looked up the trail.

Perri slowly rolled over and set both hands against the ground. Every limb pushed as he stood on his rebuilt leg, testing bone and the pain while that lovely heat faded.

“You’re certain that this is the same man,” Katabasis said.

“I’m certain of nothing. I don’t have a nexus and so how can I check?” He lifted the foot and dropped it, barely holding his balance. “Of course I’ve considered asking the source. My sense is that he would tell me, if he could. But even if every detail is wrong … even if this is a different, unrelated Varid … I think at its heart, our story remains true.

“Our friend is a shell.”

A series of owners had strived to make the mountains spectacular, each investing capital into endless sandwiches of cultured granite and diamondcrete and hyperfiber bracing and hyperfiber scrap, creating a range of increasingly treacherous hills that rose up to scenic summits and starved air.

Several hundred days of steady toil brought them to the foothills and the source of the River East. The party camped in a forest of happen-trees—vast gray plates tipped on end and halfway buried in the ruddy ground—and the humans rested, gathering energy for the push to the highest ridge. The next day was slow and taxing, but they conquered a hundred meters more than planned. Two travelers passed them in the end, both riding their porters. One was poet-bird, and with an important singsong voice he said, “Swallow your pride and ride, brothers and sister. Regret is sweeter pain than a hundred splintered bones.”

In their group, nobody rode. The day after was very slow and became slower when Quee Lee took a hard spill, shattering her face and her back. But she refused the Wogfound’s attempts to call her broken and carry her for the rest of the way, and when Perri offered his hand, she laughed and said, “You genuinely don’t know me, do you?”

The day after that proved steady and very productive. No one fell. Not even a small bone was shattered. One of Katabasis’ favorite campsites proved empty and as inviting as always—a glade of rainbow-colored foliage that never looked the same twice. She set down her pack and helped her client pitch his tent, and the Wogfound came over to complain about many matters, many failures, while waiting for the One-after-another to finish her duties.

Quee Lee lay in the open glade, on her back, legs flat. She was sobbing. She was laughing. Tears made the day-old face shine in sun that was as unnatural as it was brilliant—a fierce white glare that encompassed equal portions of the visible spectrum, feeding plants from at least a hundred worlds.

Finished with her chores, Katabasis rested where the ground was dampest, happily doing nothing while her trousers and plumage grew soggy.

Her colleagues marched past. “If we had made that wager,” said the One-after-another, “you would win tomorrow.”

“Or I would lose tomorrow,” said Katabasis.

Jeweled eyes studied the prostrate human. “As you say, she is a beast.”

“Am I the beast?” asked Quee Lee.

“You are,” Katabasis said. “You are going to climb these mountains.”

“I am a great beast, yes,” she said, smiling a little more.

Perri was beneath the little tent, preparing their aerogel bed.

Varid emerged from his shelter and on the third attempt managed to stand, walking slowly across the bright glade. Varid wanted to stare at Quee Lee. This was a recent habit, and no one acted offended or intrigued by the attention. But Katabasis was curious how this evening’s conversation would play out. She didn’t join her colleagues. Instead she studied the diminished human and the lovely beast who kept weeping from pleasure, and she was doing nothing else when a thick layer of scrap rock shifted on the slope behind her. An instant later several million tons of black granite swept across the glade, crushing and burying everything within ten steps of where Katabasis was sitting.

Two porters were gone.

Three survivors called for their companions, searching until well after dark, but nothing answered the pleas, and except for a few binnerlings dancing across the rubble, nothing moved.

Varid didn’t join the search. Walking to where Quee Lee had been, he laid down, filling the imprint of her body and shutting his eyes and opening them again, and out from the blackness he said a few true words.

“Somebody else will dig them up.”

Then, with a well-earned expertise, he added, “It’s amazing what you can survive, and with only a little luck.”

5

Her cadre of Hopefuls were about to graduate. Childhood was finished and her original wedge-chamber was too small for comfort. But the warrior always came past in the morning, licking toes and feet and the lower legs that stuck out into the hallway. It was the same warrior who several years ago told her about humans. The secret had seemed wondrous, overwhelming. Creatures from a distant sun had come to their planet, to Existence, and at least one of them was now walking the face of a neighboring world. But knowledge that grand couldn’t remain special for long. Teachers and every Hopeful and eventually even the old servants in the latrine began discussing the odd beasts that fell from the sky. Some claimed the Five were using radio winds to chat with the humans. These newcomers were few and wouldn’t stay long—gravity was crushing for their weak constitutions—but every story agreed on this: Creatures from nameless places were making pledges of peace and cultural trade as well as long speeches about their glorious, magical nature.

Soon the People inside the stronghold and throughout the world understood that great events were flowing.

And they understood nothing.

One morning the young woman was dreaming, and then she felt the touch and wetness of the tongue. But the warrior wasn’t licking between her toes. She was awake and in the next groggy moment felt the six fingers of a hand tugging at her leg while an excited, angry, and almost incomprehensible voice—her closest friend among the mathematicians—said something about hurrying to the arena. “Come now,” he said. “The Five are meeting with everybody, and everybody is late.”

The girl dressed as she walked. A big, naturally strong creature, she broke into a smooth foot-skimming run in the hallways, convinced that she was in trouble for being tardy but then discovering that no, she was among the first of the invited guests.

The Five appeared together only on ceremonial days. But this was a special occasion, and this was the new Five—the oldest wife had died recently, replaced by a smart young husband with a thousand valuable favors owed to him. The new husband sat as he should, off to the side, his mouth closed. Today’s oldest wife spoke for the group, and for a long while she said nothing except to urge the People to come forward and push close, and once there was no more space under the dome, she demanded that everyone remain silent and attentive.

Thousands of People breathed in sips, making no sound.

“There is a new word in our world,” said the wife. Then with an unnatural growl to the voice, she said, “Human.”

The excitement was felt, but no one spoke or moved.

“Humans are why we have called each other together,” the wife continued. “Star-creatures have crossed a tremendous desert to sit close to our realm. But they are not part of our world, and they have no plans to visit our world, and it is time to admit why: Because we are poor. They ignore the People because we have ordinary resources and unspectacular knowledge. And compared to those sitting on younger mountains, we are few. So they are not here and never will be here, and only the raving fool bolsters herself with bold, impossible talk.”

Honesty was rougher than any tongue. The full-grown Hopeful kept silent and tried to remain still, but she felt herself turning slowly, scanning the tight-packed faces until she found the gathered warriors.

They were made of stronger stone than her. Her warrior never let his gaze wander, and he didn’t flinch as the speech continued.

“We are poor and few,” said the wife, “and even worse, our long prospects are miserable. Our old world is crumbling beneath us. A new world might suddenly burst out of the nearby plains, affording us fresh homes. But mountains are fickle gods, and this is why my family and all of the People have spent generations making ready for a longer exodus. Out on the horizon, perhaps somewhere past dawn, stands a row of young mountains too remote to be settled or too weak to resist our arrival. This has always been our destination, our salvation—a plan aimed at a heartbeat some thousand years in the future.

“But now we have a second destination: The humans. They are powerful beasts wielding tools that scare even our strongest neighbors. To move from star to star and manage that trick so easily—it astonishes our little minds. But humans are creatures of honor and heroism. Appreciating favors and good deeds, their main emissary has made an offer to all worlds and all species of People. Give the humans a worthy gift, and they will grant us passage to a starship. The starship is larger than our entire planet. Give them greater gifts, and they will grant the People infinite life. Then their Great Ship will carry us to some new planet where empty beautiful worlds stand above deserts that aren’t as ugly oras hot as ours.

“The Five have decided to embark on this bold migration. Today we are offering each of you the opportunity to walk with us across the emptiness. We will travel in the same ways our ancestors strode to these mountains when they were new—by wheel and by foot, one night at a time. And once we reach our benefactors, we shall give them a gift, a great gift—a wondrous, perfect gift worthy of passage on this giant vessel of theirs.”

The speaker paused. From the adjacent hallway came an electric wagon bearing a stout steel box, locked and secured with steel straps.

“An object waits inside,” explained the wife. “My ancestors dug this treasure out of the throat of the volcano that built the land beneath us, and it has belonged to my family since … our grandest, loveliest treasure, worth a million favors from creatures such as these human beasts.”

6

There was no reason for grief. The weight of twenty mountains meant nothing to the modern mind. Two porters were temporarily misplaced, bodiless but safe, bathed in partial comas that let them feel angry about their miserable luck and the loss of income but eternally confident that the landlords or colleagues would eventually come after them with a shovel.

The landslide was no grave, and besides, Katabasis’ colleagues were never true friends.

Why then was she sorrowful?

Humans thought of grief as being something that lived inside them, toxic and massive and often crippling. But Katabasis was not human. Sitting on the damp ground, a bright cloud hung about her face and shoulders. Her companions couldn’t see the sharp blue light pouring into her body and brain. They didn’t realize that anguish brought strength and absolute focus, which was the hallmark of her species: Horrible, withering losses could strike the species, yet the survivors’ instinctive response was to grow lighter and even braver, pushing toward some goal that had never seemed more precious.

“Maybe we should turn around and walk back to City East,” Quee Lee said.

“Back is nearly as far as forward,” said Perri.

“I won’t go back,” Varid said.

“Well, food won’t be a problem now,” Perri said. “We have supplies for six, including two giants.”

“And one good back to carry the wealth,” his wife said.

“I’m going on,” said Varid. He was holding a rigid golden leaf against the torchlight, watching it dry and then smolder and finally burn.

“We might hire new porters, if we push ahead,” Perri said.

“A strong porter carrying a dead client,” his wife agreed. “And we would pay bonuses for the extra work, of course.”

“One pissed-off Wogfound,” Perri said. “That’s all we need.”

The porter recognized the smartest strategy. But Katabasis was larger than her job, and she was older than her job, and she wanted to hold their present course, not involving anyone outside her family.

Whose family?

She caught herself, shaken by her thoughts.

Suddenly the reasons for grief stood in the open. She had a family once, a great embracing family, but they were lost on a distant trail. The porters trapped underground weren’t dead, but they served as triggers for these immortal aches, and these three fragile aliens—the unlikely lords of the galaxy—suddenly meant more to her than anyone else alive.

Katabasis made small sorrowful gestures, fighting to find her voice.

Varid dropped the burning leaf. With a big voice, he said, “Do what you wish, people. But I don’t need a porter.”

Quee Lee opened her mouth and closed it again, waiting.

“I’ll carry my own rations and sleep in the open and don’t worry about me.”

Perri touched his wife’s knee, and she met his stare. With nothing but faces, the ancient couple settled into prolonged conversation. Two rational minds were deciding how to argue with the damaged man. Watching their eyes and mouths, Katabasis remained silent, waiting for the reasonable tone and the most responsible plan. All at once Quee Lee brightened. She smiled and managed to laugh, slowly lifting herself to her knees and hands and then to her feet, shuffling over to Varid, her voice high and light when she said, “My porter is lost, and I don’t know where to turn.”

Varid looked up through the weak smoke.

Quee Lee dropped a hand on his shoulder. “What I want to do, if you’ll let me … I want to hire you as my new porter.”

All the days spent together, and Varid had never shown surprise. Until now he had been a flat, simple creature. But his eyes jumped open. He tried to breathe and failed, and then with a nervous tone asked, “Why me?”

“You’re the strongest back available,” she said simply.

Katabasis looked at Perri. Was this a genuine offer?

Perri replied with the appropriate hand gesture, slicing the air to say, “This is reasonable to me.”

“I don’t know,” said Varid.

Quee Lee said, “Please.”

Then the man smiled, and it wasn’t just a grin that had been practiced during rehabilitation. Varid smiled with his face and entire body, leaning into the hand’s touch, an effusive voice rolling across the glade and the avalanche, saying, “Of course I will. I will be your porter, yes.”

Two days after the disaster, they reached the first summit. Thousands of boots and bare feet had stood on the highest ground, killing all but the flattest and the toughest. Lichen from various worlds painted the stone, and a pair of ragdogs followed closely, ignoring Katabasis to beg for treats from the humans. The four walked slowly from view to view. On each peak, Perri and Quee Lee would discuss the scenery and animals and the rich smells on the breeze and how much farther they might cover before one of them broke another hip. Then some detail or single word would trigger memories in both of them, and suddenly they were talking about events and places buried deep in their shared past, and they laughed and often kissed, and Katabasis was weary of the game.

Varid paid no attention the show. He was playing the role of porter, and Quee Lee was nothing but his client. For two mornings he had made a show of loading and balancing his tiny pack before claiming that he was ready to carry more. A portion of his rations and a tiny piece of hers were inside the pack, plus his aerogel bed and a few other lightweight essentials. There was extra room, but Katabasis always had the ready excuse not to add grams to a body that would break several times on the best days. She had to be cautious. In the history of this world, there had never been a slower, more fragile porter. Nor could Katabasis remember any colleague who took his work half as seriously.

Tents were a brutal kilogram best left in one of the official trash heaps. Bodies and beds spent the night on the final summit, and when snow fell they gathered inside the same rocky bowl, waking early beneath half a meter of dry fluff. Several valleys radiated down from the final summit. Katabasis selected the most forgiving slope, but that didn’t stop accidents and breaks and extra food ingested to make up for lost heat and chronic repairs. Then the sun changed, growing dim and tiny, and they entered a forest of velvety foliage, the scarce light concentrated by banks of living mirrors.

Three careful days were usually required to cross this region.

Katabasis estimated that five days would be necessary, but the sixth arrived with another two days standing in their way. She hated marching in the dark and never mentioned her feelings. They walked through the gloom, and sometimes one of the humans stumbled, and it was Varid as much as it was the other two. But on the sixth day, while crossing a thin, cold slice of snowmelt, Katabasis allowed her pack to shift out of position, and for the first time in twenty treks, she fell hard enough to shatter a leg.

Quee Lee and Perri returned with regrets and polite offers of help.

“Walk on,” was Katabasis’ advice. “I’ll heal in one moment and catch up in two.”

But the other porter refused to leave. With grave eyes and a taunting grin, Varid sat on a flat stone, obviously enjoying the circumstances.

“Don’t smile,” she warned.

He heard the words or her sharp tone, and the smile abandoned the face, leaving him as empty as always.

Such a puzzle, the creature was. Wanting any noise for distraction, she said, “Katabasis.” Then she asked, “How did you recognize my name?”

Varid did not react.

“Do you remember your lecture about Greeks?” she asked.

He stared at her hot leg and then at his own hands, nodding slightly. With a quiet voice, he admitted, “I wasn’t sure where the word came from. I used to study history, and languages fascinated me, and I must have learned it there.”

She watched her leg’s fire, saying nothing.

“I have had some recent difficulties,” Varid admitted. “My health, my situation, has not been good. My mind is far from what it used to be.”

“I know this.”

He smiled again, this time with a shy human embarrassment.

Katabasis liked that smile best.

“I do remember the word,” he said. “But there isn’t any simple meaning to ‘Katabasis,’ is there?”

“There isn’t,” she agreed.

“But you chose the name for a reason.”

“No one leaves names to chance.”

“It must have suited you,” he said.

She nodded, ready to explain.

But Varid lifted an arm first. “Give me one chance to guess.”

“Try,” she said.

And he closed his eyes, quietly saying, “Katabasis is the journey from a high place, down and down into the bowels of Hell.”

She stared at him.

Then Varid opened his eyes and looked at her, his broken laugh ringing in the dark air. “Two rarities in the same day,” he said. “You fall down, and I impress you.

“What could be more miraculous?”

7

The girl always woke early, long before the sun set. Bad dreams woke her, and good ones too. The heat woke her. Breathing the thick, toxic, and very dusty air hurt her lungs, and she would roll to her side and cough hard and ache all the worse, unable to fall back to sleep. Sometimes her lover woke her with his coughing and his dreams, and then they would lie in the hot shadow beneath the mirrored tent, talking about critical matters—water rations and food stocks and the distance to be covered tonight and the little hints of terrain visible in the fiery glare of the plains. It was important to plan your night’s walk and then grab an early start. The People were moving in a wide line, shoulder to shoulder as they pushed across the wilderness, and it was best to get ahead of the dust kicked up by all of those feet and wheels. And if there was time after their planning, or if one of them was especially sad, the other would mention the humans and their Great Ship. These were the goals, and everyone needed goals. Not like they needed water, no, but the Great Ship was everything that water and food couldn’t supply. It didn’t represent hope; it was the only hope. Its hallways and giant wedge-rooms offered rest to the weary, and the body and mind would be rejuvenated and then enlarged—relentless long life and profound brains ready to be filled with experience and joy that would endure for thousands and millions of years.

The warrior was smitten with the idea of instant healing. Eleven days after abandoning the world, he brushed against a barkershang, driving three poisoned needles into his thigh. The wounds had been cleaned and cleaned, and he was good about changing his dressings, but even though the doctors claimed that he was improving, the holes were no smaller and the swollen flesh was a bright sick green.

From the moment she woke until they fell asleep with their legs wrapped together, the girl would remind herself that her lover was strong enough even without the help of aliens. He might limp on occasion, and maybe he suffered little fevers, but there were sicker citizens and a few dead. Besides, they were marching toward another world and different people, and warriors were at a premium. The Five had ample stocks of better drugs, and when the time came—should it come—they would release the antibiotics and the charms held back for emergencies.

The warrior wished for the immortal body, but the girl wanted the gifts of the mind. Perfect, boundless memory struck her as a blessing—provided that she could control the onslaught from the past. But why build such a brain and not give yourself the power to close off certain days and the very bad years? She imagined that she had a choice, and that was mostly true. But only while she was awake. A thousand years later, she would dream it all over again, and it wouldn’t be just the worst night, but every hot sorry march through the darkness and every sleepless oven-racked day.

The worst night began with the sun still up. She woke and the warrior slept, and she worked like a demon not to cough. But the coughing was always worse when she finally succumbed—a roaring hack blowing out the dust and thick air. The warrior was jarred awake. She apologized, but he said that he was rested. She asked about his leg, and he lifted the leg and rubbed it before announcing that the swelling and pain were both in the ground under them.

They talked about water and food.

With quiet, conspiratorial voices, they described the wedge-room they would share on the Great Ship and what kinds of aliens they might meet on their way to the toilet.

It was still day, but the sun was dropping. The earliest shadows were talking to one another, claiming that first willingness to merge and matter. The People were moving under their bright tents. The girl drank what was allowed and the warrior took his share, and with the sun fading into the red dust, they climbed into the greater heat, packing and loading the two-wheeled cart that she would pull and push through the night. That was her duty. His duty involved marching ahead, scouting for enemies and the best routes, although there were good reasons to come back and give help, and maybe she would need help in the night’s heart.

The sun vanished against the low shape of the distant world, leaving nothing behind but its heat and a furnace wind.

He and she embraced and again embraced, and like every other dusk, she wondered if they would never touch again. These were not omens. Tiny mistakes and large lapses in judgment could kill, and even the smartest, most careful soul was never safe.

The old world stood behind them, mostly abandoned. Only the sick and infirm, the elderly and cowardly had remained inside the empty buildings. The Five were leading the rest across the wasteland, and true to their nature, they were models of sacrifice and generosity. Electrified vehicles were charged by daylight, and the Five had ownership over many or most of the machines, but they rarely rode. Walking among the common citizens was their duty, and maybe the old wife was carried now and again, but who could blame her? Her guards and her children were well within their rights to catch her as she stumbled, and if a chair and poles were assembled on the spot, why not? She was the leader among the Five. She was owed enormous favors and deserved this small consideration, just as any other person was entitled to help and care when they weakened and dropped—provided that they had built up the favors to deserve the honor.

That night—the worst night ever—saw the girl pushing her cart up a long slope of pale, star-washed rock. Knots of angry weed threatened—weeds as alien as anything found on remote planets. Dust was everywhere. So many feet pounding the same ground made for clouds of smothering grime, and not even three cloths across the mouth would keep out the urge to choke.

Climbing uphill, she suddenly found herself walking beside the Five’s new husband. He was pushing nothing, but she managed to drift ahead. Their eyes met for a moment. He offered an amused gesture. Then he lost his footing on a weed and fell hard, causing the girl to stop her cart and offer the free hand.

He said, “You are a strong woman, and thank you.”

She was strong, and now she felt important too. A favor had been given to one of the Five. It was a smallish favor, and maybe it would be forgotten before it could be redeemed. But perfect memories were coming, and ten thousand years from tonight, this ageless man would recall the instant and her strength, and he would pay back the debt. It was a thought worth savoring. This was a moment to share inside the tent, the sun rising again and the food for the day going inside them. The warrior would laugh, feeling proud of his big strong lover, and then they would plunge into sleep, a few more steps achieved on the endless trek.

Happiness proved brief. Reaching the hill’s crest, she found a dozen People sitting on the dry hot ground, breathing painfully or not breathing at all. One and then two more reached for her, and someone called a name. But it wasn’t her name. They were guessing, hoping for lucky coincidences. She didn’t know any of the faces or hands. It was normal for citizens to collapse after the hard climb, but what alarmed her was their youth and the fit bodies with the plumage still vigorous. Obviously they had worked too hard, too fast. That was the impression that helped her walk past, and that was the smug attitude that made her push harder through the night.

Twice again, long slopes needed to be climbed.

Centuries later, she would dream about the dying people on top and on the way up to the top, and because it was a dream and a lie, their voices would call to her. This time everybody knew her name, and she owed each of them multiple favors, yet she shoved the cart past them and couldn’t even do them the simple courtesy of averting her eyes. In her dreams she stared at their suffering and hopelessness, and sometimes she even boasted about her invincible luck.

This long trek had started well enough, but that’s how a trap works. If bad weather or unusual heat had struck the People, most would have turned around immediately, leaving the Five and their precious gift to march into oblivion. But the weather and a thousand other factors had remained relatively kind. Until that night, it was possible to believe that most of the People would survive. It was possible to walk through the heat and bad air, letting the anguish strengthen every stride. But hundreds of People were collapsing now, sometimes on the easiest ground, and the girl remembered that after the next line of little hills came a long basin covered with salt and metallic dusts and temperatures strong enough to cook meat and a girl’s will.

She pushed her cart into a boulder-littered valley where water hadn’t traveled in ages. Even the machines were dying now. The electric cart with the precious steel box was broken, and the oldest of the Five was sitting in a chair supplied by one well-wisher, sucking on what looked like a ball of ice supplied by another. Mechanics were listing the reasons why the vehicle would never roll again. The old woman said she didn’t care about the machine. What mattered was its cargo, and nobody should forget that. And with her authority in hand, children and associates hurried off to find new transport, including the son who stopped a big bus crossing the dead stream.

The bus was opened and emptied. Mechanics began cutting out the seats and removing the roof, making room for the treasure. The passengers had lost this night’s promised break. A slender little mathematician didn’t seem too displeased, helping with the work when he saw the big girl pushing the cart past. He called the proper name. He didn’t ask for help. He probably only wanted a gesture of friendship, a sharing of confidence. But the girl decided not to risk the possibility. There was plenty of ground between them. It was easy not to hear her friend in the rattle of machinery, and it was even easier to sprint ahead without quite fleeing, out of the valley and across the last high ground before the salt and real misery began.

This was an awful night, and it still wasn’t finished. That girl, the future Katabasis, began to see warriors marching back toward the rest of the People. She saw her lover in one body after another. There he was, no there, and there too. The search was frustrating, and then it was terrifying, and somewhere in the midst of her desperate hunt she realized that he was dead and lost forever.

But the man wasn’t dead. In fact, he wasn’t any weaker or sicker than he was at dusk. Out from the swirling dust he emerged, and they made camp and finally ate their daily allotment, and then as the sun broke over the bright tent, they tried to settle.

The habit was for the warrior to engulf her legs with his legs.

But that dawn was different. He did nothing, and she complained about his distance.

So he tried twice and then twice again, but he was uncomfortable. Finally pulling away, he coughed weakly before admitting that the soreness was worse, maybe more than a little worse, and he was sorry but tomorrow he would feel better and everything would be right again.

She reached behind, touching the injured leg.

The swollen flesh was hiding inside the trousers, obvious and alarming if not yet lethal. Suddenly the future was clear. The warrior was too strong to die quickly. He would serve his duty tomorrow night and for several nights, and then his duty and the uniform would be stripped from him as he failed. Like the girl, he would be allowed to carry what he could and help push the cart, and one of the cart’s wheels would eventually shatter and they would have to leave it behind. Each night’s misery would be stoically endured; there was no doubting his capacity to suffer. But a final moment was approaching. The warrior would stumble one last time. Some People managed to be kind in the end, dying quietly, without complaints. He was the sort of man to make that kind of honorable promise. But as the girl lay beside him in their bed—as the sun rose and he growled fitfully in his sleep—she arrived at the awful knowledge that the love of her life would break every promise in the end. He would use her name and invoke every favor, and she would walk past him and then pause, returning in order to reach past his desperate hands, stripping away the last of his rations and two tastes of salty, hot, precious water.

8

The humans fell and broke and healed again and got up again. Two of them stopped pretending to be cheerful about these circumstances, aiming instead for weary politeness. The third human rolled in agony and wept with a child’s self-absorption, and in the end his results were no worse, no better. Every injury could be healed, but there were costs. Heat and the rapid weaving of tissue and bone required high levels of fuel, and they were already limited in the food they carried. If the humans avoided stumbling, they would eventually reach the final kilometer with a last meal in their guts. But the descending trails were never easy, and the food shares had to be cut again. Missing calories forced injured bodies to cheat with the healing. Mass was lost, fat burned, and organs minimized before precious muscle was stolen. The humans shrank. Proportions changed, saving what was necessary to walk while stripping away what didn’t matter today. But even the most careful manipulations caused strength to fade and bones weaken, and the shriveled, half-starved bodies defended themselves with extreme caution, measuring each step twice before making the attempt.

And still they fell. The two-kilometer hikes from the early days were impossible. Half a kilometer was an exceptional accomplishment. But that meant that each mouthful was buying even less distance than before, and their shares had to be sliced down again, and City West might well be standing at the end of the universe for all the chance they had of reaching its broad, clean streets.

“Care for yourself,” Katabasis told the other porter, pressing an extra brick of food into a grimy cold hand. “You’re the woman’s best chance, but not if you turn into a stick lost beside the trail.”

Varid looked at the gift. The brick was shiny gray, flavored like dribbledoe and laced with chemical bonds waiting for any excuse to explode. Then he looked at her, setting the brick on one of his bare knees. “You’re losing weight too.”

“Not like the rest of you,” she said.

He nodded.

“Eat,” she insisted.

Saliva came out with the words. “I am a porter.”

“You are.”

“A porter,” he repeated. Then he brightened and picked up the feast with both hands, asking, “How did I get so lucky?”

Without question, the habitat’s second half was lovelier than the first. Forests were older, more complex. Landlords hadn’t reworked the ground as often or as ineptly. And the weather was a little less awful than before. But even the strongest clients were usually worn down by now: They couldn’t appreciate the artful winding of streams. Rare blossoms and brilliant worms could barely rouse them out of the tedium. Typically Katabasis looked forward to a glade of unique trees—each one lovely, each representing one species that couldn’t be found anywhere else inside a thousand-light-year radius—and she usually made a point of camping inside the glade, lingering for two nights and a full day. But they entered in mid-morning, the weather kind but cloudy, and fearing rain and more delays, she marched her humans through the gorgeous woods, barely looking to her side as she held the slow, withering pace.

Other clients and other porters began to catch them. They could hear them closing, often for a full day, and then some happy voice would beg for a wider trail, please. Those first clients were always riding strong porters. Nobody recognized Varid, and the anonymity suited him. But a few rich travelers, human and otherwise, knew the married couple, and they would shout out greetings and teasings before offering some obligatory words about admiring their courage.

But starvation kept eating at the faces and the bodies, and eventually the best friends stopped recognizing them.

Perri was a frail body shrunk down to a child’s proportions while his face remained pretty in a rail-slender fashion. Except on the hottest days, he was cold, and the hair had dropped off his scalp and face, but the eyes seemed only to have grown larger from the experience, gazing at nothing but the ground that looked flat and looked level but might at any moment tip him over, breaking him in the same dreary, frustrating ways.

Quee Lee was even less recognizable. She was hairless, genderless. Breasts and hips had vanished, the black hair was scattered all the way back to the mountains, and with a tired, dry, amazed voice she would admit that she hadn’t even attempted relations with her husband in fifty or sixty or a hundred nights. She counted those nights. She laughed weakly and dabbed at the crumbs of her day’s rations, and then she would collapse into Perri’s little arms, whispering a few words when she found the energy.

“Thank you so much for inviting me along,” she told her husband.

With a slight laugh, he said, “You’re welcome,” and then dabbed up a few more crumbs. The source of these little feasts was uncertain, but he always attempted to put his finger into Quee Lee’s mouth, and she would suck hard and cry and then pull the finger out again, urging his closer ear to her mouth, ready to whisper whatever was next.

Walking clients began to catch them. Even weak and inept hikers passed by, as if the humans were trees standing in a glade. Various eyes stared at the couple, probably assuming they were alien, not human. And then they noticed the human porter with his little pack that hadn’t carried anything in a very long while. What was that man’s story? Sometimes they struck up a conversation, with the strangers or with each other, and it became the day’s high point to watch their emotions when a woman’s voice emerged from the tiniest, weakest of the apparitions.

Quee Lee had digested most of her face. Her mouth was a sliver without more than a few tired teeth, and the cheekbones had collapsed into a skull that was perforated like an aerogel sponge. But her voice remained, and a shred of humor, and the first time that she begged for food was meant as a joke.

One brick of high-density fat helped save the trek.

She promised that she was joking. She and Perri were sharing the unexpected feast at camp, and she was honestly remorseful for pleading as she had. What kind of person had she become? The next three groups didn’t hear begging, and they didn’t leave gifts. But the hunger returned, and Quee Lee used her voice and bizarre appearance to find sympathy with everybody who passed them by. Most strangers didn’t want to part with their wealth, but a few were more amenable. Ten days of humiliation and charm produced enough nourishment to put them twenty or thirty days farther down the endless trail, giving them enough leeway to consider their situation very carefully.

In the night, inside a warm bramble-filled valley, Quee Lee and Perri lay together beneath the aerogel bedding. Katabasis could hear pieces of their conversation. Certain words and the long silences pointed at a grim topic, and the porter listened and ached and in the next moment corrected herself. Nobody was doomed. No souls were bound for the Final World where all the species of People shared the breath of life. These two creatures were simply discussing matters of time and energy and the pragmatic limits of desire, and after a while they fell into sleep, and preparing her own bed, Katabasis felt peculiarly honored for being allowed this chance to study their lives.

One blue light shone in the darkness.

A little stiffly, the porter rose again, walking to the man lying in his bed. Varid was holding the torch to his eyes. What once was deeply peculiar had become ordinary. The man couldn’t sleep in the usual sense. Holding brightness against his eyes seemed to relax him or busy him or do something else worthwhile. Katabasis had never asked why he did this. She didn’t intend to ask now. But looking down at Varid, she enjoyed the same epiphanies that had struck her again and again over these last days:

This was not a human being.

And whatever Varid was, he was unique—a species with a population of precisely one.

She knelt beside him, watching the light and the open eyes.

After a long while, he noticed. Taking a long breath, he set the torch aside, and when he felt ready he said, “It helps me remember, the light does.”

“Remember what?”

He was too tired to sit up. The first attempt proved it, but he tried again, glad for her help when it came, and then he regretted the choice and slowly fell back into the aerogel. After more breathing, he said, “I suffered this medical situation. I was caught inside a very large fire.”

“The Whisper Fire,” she said.

“Have I told you this before?”

“No.”

A slow nod. “I don’t remember very much. Not the day or being scared, or anything like that. But I do remember the last thing that I saw: This impossibly bright light. They say … the doctors explained this to me … they claimed that I took shelter inside a hyperfiber blister, and the inferno ate through the walls, and as soon as the last layer was pierced, this thread of plasmas found me. But my eyes didn’t die immediately, and my brain survived afterwards. Something about the shape of that little space not only saved my mind, but it allowed my eyes to watch this most amazing light.”

She said nothing.

“Then I was dead and blind,” he said. “I was lost and mostly unconscious. But if you’re buried for a thousand years, thoughts happen. You remember what you can, but I couldn’t remember much. So much had been turned to fire.” He paused, smiling weakly. “But you probably realized that on our first day together, didn’t you?”

“The light,” she said.

“It helps my head work better. Brilliance somehow makes it easier for me to practice what I learned today and fifty thousand years ago.”

She said, “Good then.”

“This is crazy, yes. But when I was dead, the fire that killed me … nearly killed me, and murdered my family … that fire was my largest best memory. It seemed so lovely and wonderful. I don’t think I could have remained sane for even a hundred years, if it wasn’t for me thinking about that searing magical light.”

Watching him, Katabasis weighed questions.

Varid answered an unasked question. “I don’t need sleep anymore. It’s a consequence of my injuries, and it’s because this is how far I was fixed before the fixing stopped.”

“Why did the fixing stop?” she asked.

Varid picked up the torch again, holding it against his right eye. He didn’t act interested in the question, and maybe he didn’t notice it. Katabasis still didn’t know what the man could learn or how well ideas would play inside his head. But he wasn’t the insane idiot that she had imagined. He was a mystery, relentlessly frustrating but compelling, and instead of working to avoid this creature, she wanted to share the solitude forced on both of them by bad and wonderful forces.

“Could I become a porter?” he asked abruptly.

“What?”

The torch and hand pulled away from his face. The dark center of the eye was a pinprick point. He wasn’t as starved as the others, his bluish-white hair still alive, though thin and not growing any longer, and his face was very much like the face that she first met. She had passed her colleague enough rations to keep up his strength, and she had quit bristling whenever she thought of Varid that way: Her colleague.

“I don’t know if you could be a porter,” she said.

He remained silent.

“You’re tiny and you’re weak,” she said.

“Like you,” he said. “But you manage to make your living.”

She laughed with her hands, her face. She laughed as close to the human sound of laughter as she could manage.

“I stopped the fixing where it is,” Varid said.

“Did you?”

He nodded.

“Was it a question of money?” she asked.

“No, I have money. A sliver from the original estate, they tell me. But it’s still more than most passengers enjoy.”

She watched his face.

“No, the doctors let me choose,” he said. “They gave me permission to decide how much new bioceramic I wanted grown, and how giant my mind would be. They thought they were going to get rich doing the work. But I surprised them. I told them thank you, but no, and to leave me alone.”

She watched his empty hand, fingers spread out on his hungry belly.

“A thousand years spent underground, and almost everything from before was gone,” he said. “I didn’t think about my dead family, and I didn’t forget and think about them being alive either. I had memories of the past and disjointed facts learned, but there wasn’t one story pulling the mess together. I was dead. My mind was gone, only pieces left, and those pieces slowly assembled themselves into something that was familiar to me … that became me … and I don’t know how to explain this.”

“Don’t,” she advised.

But Varid showed a stubborn face. “I don’t have much humor left. But maybe I didn’t have any to begin with. I don’t feel much empathy for others, and I know I forget most of what I learn. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop learning or making myself better or doing whatever good thing it is that I’m supposed to do. And I do like to attempt whatever is difficult. Which isn’t the way I used to be, they tell me. Certain strangers who knew me before. They don’t like me, they like to say, but I don’t see how they liked the man who died. I’ve studied him. For years and years after getting out into the world again … I know I’m rambling, I do this if I’m not careful … but I do appreciate, very much, getting lost in passions that he couldn’t even imagine. Like this adventure. He would never, ever have envisioned walking through wilderness accompanied by a beautiful alien creature.”

Katabasis sat motionless, watching all of the man.

“You can sleep,” Varid said. “Sleep now, and it will help you tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” she said.

She stood and said, “I will.”

Three days later, Perri found the right place and proper circumstances. He called Quee Lee to his side and they spoke to each other with just those big eyes. Standing beneath a ripe tashaleen tree, they looked vulnerable and worried. But when Varid walked into the tree’s shadow, they calmly warned him to back away.

Little seams were opening in the swollen bladder. The stink of sulfuric acid began to pervade the calm forest air, but it might take another day or two for the flesh to burst wide, scouring the nearby ground.

Varid slowly backed away, studying the scene. Comprehension took longer for him, but he accepted the obvious quickly, and approaching Katabasis, he said, “We have all of the rations.”

She was carrying every bit of food, including the treats given out of pity.

Quee Lee called to Varid, saying, “You’ll have to carry me from here on. So of course you’ll earn your bonus.”

Perri slowly bent over, grabbing a small rock.

Katabasis was thinking about acid and its effects on flesh and how the flow would roll when the bladder burst.

Perri tried to throw the pebble at the bladder, but it weighed tons and tons.

“I won’t break the tree for you,” Katabasis warned.

“I have a suggestion,” Varid said. Then to the couple waiting in that dark, fume-laced shade, he said, “Lie down inside your bed.”

With a reasonable, perfectly calm voice, he said, “The aerogel won’t dissolve, but it will let the acid seep through. Your brains will stay where they are, which is good. We won’t have to chase either of you downstream.”

9

At dawn, eighty-nine People crawled beneath the tattered shelters. There were no rations to eat, nothing to drink. They lay quietly, in pain, listening to the world bake and blister, and sometimes they slept but mostly they watched their own vague thoughts form and shift before being lost. When the sun finally dropped behind the new world, eighty-three People found enough reason to stand again, stowing the shelters in the final three carts and grabbing hold of the wagon that carried the rusted steel box, slowly pushing away from the dead.

The new world began with towering black cliffs. Through telescopes, rivers could be seen plunging over the side of the volcano, wasted water turning to mists and serpentine clouds that were consumed before drifting halfway to the desert. Those cliffs were the goal, the dream, but the walk would take another four or five or perhaps six nights, and worse, there was no obvious path leading up the imposing and very smooth face of rock.

The Five had become the Three. The ice-sucking woman refused to die, along with her two youngest husbands. The woman always rode on the back end of the wagon. Every night she made optimistic noises about imminent rescue and the abiding decency of the human animal. She insisted that she knew the animal well. She and the god-like emissary had spoken many times by radio. They were allies, collaborators, sometimes friends. But the final radio died out on the salt, and she didn’t have her friend to speak to anymore. She was making noise, half-mad and often feverish, and her noise had an erosive effect on the last shreds of hope.

Her husbands didn’t bother lying. Working beside the strongest bodies, they pushed wheels up long slopes and used their scant weight to keep the wagon and their wife from rolling wild downhill. Sometimes one or the other would climb ahead, scouting the ground for the least-awful route. Just short of the night’s center, the older man went up to the ridge crest and then came back again. He was running. He fell suddenly. He got up and fell and got up laughing with his arms, and with more disbelief than joy, he announced, “We reached the world early. Over this hill is a mine.”

The next long reach of desert had been stripped away. Deep gouges were cut into the pale rock, roads and paths leading down to giant electric machines working in the depths of the deepest hole. The machines took no interest in them. Any miners were equally oblivious. Eighty-two People looked down on the mayhem, and one of them sat for a moment and died and the others backed away from the mine’s edge, aiming for the nearest road.

The first miner had a strange oval face and a fancy mask over his mouth and eyes. He stared at the filthy parade of bodies, and with a string of peculiar words, he spoke into a tiny radio, presumably asking a question or soliciting advice.

Peculiar words came out of the radio, and he responded by clambering into a burly electric cart and riding away.

After that, they didn’t see one miner.

But someone had left rations and fresh water stacked together in some form of way station. The People fell on what they assumed were gifts, drinking enough and eating more than enough, and another one of their ranks died from the indulgence.

The station had a roof full of tubes that leaked cold air, and several sets of rails ended here but led off toward the world. The rails stood empty until a heavy railcar arrived and parked. The husbands conferred and then gave orders. The car was long enough for all of the People to ride in comfort, with room remaining for a battered wagon and its precious cargo. Once loaded, the railcar began rolling back from where it had come, bearing the People across the last bits of wasteland, diving into a long tunnel as the sun burst into view. And even at that moment, the girl sitting on the aluminum floor of the car was unable to believe that she would survive one day longer.

Their old world was nearly nothing. It had been a low ridge, dry and thinly populated, while this world was a hundred times larger, tall enough for permanent ice and wet everywhere, its belly full of hot rock and deep springs powering geothermal plants which made the entire realm hum with electrical activity. Perhaps a million generations separated the People from these citizens. They looked that different, that alien. Every face was grossly round, and the plumage wasn’t just wrong in its color but longer and gaudily colored, and these new People smelled different and sounded odd, talking about the railcar that was sliding past their homes and businesses. Their day had just begun. The old People, their lost cousins, deserved notice and some idle chatter. The girl stared at the bright buildings passing by and the endless metal and how every window was filled with light, the faces behind glass staring at her for a moment or two, curious but not curious, ready for any excuse to pull back to their own busy lives.

If the girl and her People had arrived here in full force, they would have meant nothing. They were too scarce, too primitive, and much too stupid to generate anything more than polite disinterest.

That was the morning’s first awful lesson.

The long railcar was driven by a machine’s mind, turns taken and turns avoided until they arrived at a fresh volcanic crater, barren land encircling a turquoise lake. On the black rock stood a different kind of building, round like a half-ball and woven from slick gray material that didn’t look like any steel.

“This is the emissary’s quarters,” the old woman announced happily. “It is also a spaceship, fueled and ready to carry us to the Great Ship.”

At dusk, the girl didn’t believe anything the old woman claimed. But suddenly she was an expert again, and every statement only enhanced her boundless value.

The car stopped before a walkway made from gemstone bricks.

Out from the building—from the spaceship—came a creature with six jointed legs. Except it wasn’t a creature, it was a machine, and the human rode on a high chair inside the machine’s body. His face was grim, stern. But the girl didn’t know it then. He was as angry as a diplomat trained in the art of agreements and sweet words could ever be. But she only saw the narrow black face and the frail body shorn of its plumage and the odd little hands that didn’t like rising off the rests in his chair. He was undoubtedly alien. The new People would look ordinary next to him, if only they were standing here. But it was the human alone, and the last of the girl’s People, and he introduced himself with his name and his title and once again, his name.

A box inside the walking machine made the best translations possible.

The diplomat was named Rococo, which was nothing but odd noise in her ears and she forgot it immediately.

“You have arrived,” the emissary said wearily.

Everyone looked at the old woman, but suddenly and for no apparent reason she forgot how to speak.

The youngest husband broke the silence. “We have a gift for you. For your species. We brought it from our home, at great cost.”

“I don’t want it,” Rococo said.

The old woman roused herself. With a quiet, tense voice, she said, “Take the box to him now. Take it.”

“It is alien,” said the older husband. “We found this artifact in the throat of a dead volcano.”

“Very valuable,” the other husband shouted.

Rococo stared at the gray box. “Leave it there,” he ordered.

But the People were not listening or refused to understand. Terrific costs had been paid so that they could drag the box off the wagon and over the railcar’s railing, metal screeching against metal as the alien wonder was dropped on the gemstones beside the mechanical feet.

Staring at the old woman, the emissary said, “I told you. What did I tell you? I was exceptionally clear about what I could and couldn’t do for you.”

From a special pouch came the key. But the woman was too nervous, and she didn’t care who opened the treasure.

The girl found the key in her hand.

“We can’t take just anybody onboard the Ship,” the human insisted. Then with a thought, he caused a mechanical arm to unfold and reach down, grabbing the girl by her wrist.

She dropped the key.

“I have made agreements,” said the human. “Following galactic law, we have binding arrangements with the most advanced species on this world. My species has purchased the right to begin terraforming your nearest moon, and in thanks for this blessing, we will give carry a small, small, small population of local People to a world that they will be able to colonize.

“This is binding and legal and I told you all of that before,” he said. “I was honest. When did I mislead you? I told you not to bother with this pathetic migration, and you came anyway. I talked to you a hundred times in the night, warning you to turn around and head home again before it was too late. If I wasn’t stationed here alone, I would have sent subordinates to the basin just to explain things to your flock. Which I should have done myself, and I see that now. I regret it all, yes.”

The youngest husband grabbed the key, and with a blur of motion unfastened the lock and threw the lid over the side.

“Look,” he shouted. “Look.”

Rococo released the girl and grudgingly peered inside.

The girl fell to her knees, rubbing at the aching wrist. She wanted to look inside and didn’t. Then the human beast told everyone, “This is a piece of hyperfiber, a shard of someone’s hull. Hyperfiber is the most durable, persistent, and unremarkable kind of trash in this portion of the galaxy, which means that it is worth nothing.”

The girl shook from nerves, exhaustion, and anguish.

Then the old woman stepped between the mechanical legs and under the arm, and with a passionate, practiced voice she said, “Of course it isn’t enough. You told me, and I believed you, yes. But I have learned about your species, your nature. You know sympathy and empathy, and just like us, you understand how great deeds demand to be recognized. We are the last of our species. We have spent everything and sacrificed almost everything to place a few of us on your ground.”

Rococo took a deep breath, and then gasped.

She moved her hands as a beggar would. “Take a few of us with you, please. We can select, or you can choose. I am prepared for either eventuality. But here we stand, surrounded by People who care nothing for us, and we have pushed ourselves to the brink of extinction, and if you don’t give us this one little charity, our kind will vanish from the universe forever.”

Rococo lifted one of his hands, and he lowered it again.

He did not know what to say next.

The old woman turned and said, “Marvel at what we have accomplished, my People. We must celebrate this wonderful fine day.”

Katabasis stood. What happened next wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t an accident either. She intended to throw her fist but she wanted only to make the old woman stop talking, and the woman should have been bruised and startled. But she stumbled oddly and fell sideways into the box, and the rusted red corner of steel struck at the worst point on her head, and she died.

The two husbands and then the others attacked the girl.

With every mechanical arm and half of the legs, the emissary dragged the murderer away from the People. Then he threw curses and threats of much worse, hauling his prisoner back inside the ship where he intended to wait for some inspiration that would give him a route out of this miserable trap.

10

Clients walked past them and rode past them, some for the second and third time. It seemed that the story of the landslide and long subsequent march had gained a brief measure of fame. Everyone who met them on the trail, including their porters, asked when they would arrive at City West. Would it be today or tomorrow or maybe the day after? Katabasis promised they would finish tomorrow, probably late in the day, and then the other porter, the human, would name the clearing where they planned to camp tonight, begging the others to please leave it empty because they needed quiet even more than they needed food.

Save for two acid-polished jackets of bioceramic matter, their packs were nearly empty. They had one torch but no food and no bedding, and they drank their water straight from the river, and even the excess grams of fabric had been cut away from the packs and clothes, left behind in the jungle along with at least half of their body mass. They were battered gaunt skeletons taking tiny strides. They were crazy souls and heroes, and strangers were so impressed by what they knew of the story that they would turn short of the trail’s end and come back around again, just to see them once more with their own mesmerized eyes.

Several clients mentioned that groups were gathering. Well-wishers would be waiting tomorrow at the edge of City West, and there might even be a small ceremony complete with treats suitable for brave, tenacious creatures like them.

By day’s end, they were close enough to the City to hear individual voices mixed in with the normal urban sounds. Varid smelled food on the wind, his belly aching even worse. But as promised, they made their night’s camp. Several tents had been left behind, each wearing notes and good wishes, and the two porters selected the largest tent and set the torch inside, turned up to full brightness, and when night arrived and the City changed its pitch, moving into nocturnal affairs, they climbed into the open and shouldered the cut-apart packs, carrying their clients down the dark, well-walked trail.

Neither porter fell in that last stretch.

The next six hundred meters took half of the night, but suddenly the jungle ended and the sky opened up, revealing a welcoming banner written in the human language. Apparently no one was certain about Katabasis’ native language. But someone had managed to spell her name in the original Greek, which made her feel just a little sorry for slipping past this way. Then they slowly, slowly crept their way to the first street, and she waved for a cap-car, telling it that they were carrying two people needing to be given some rather extensive medical help.

Three kilometers were covered in two minutes. Autodocs were waiting at the entranceway, along with one of the habitat’s landlords whose duty was to make certain that no paying customers had died.

“I left two porters under the mountain,” Katabasis said.

“We know everything,” he said testily. “As soon as arrangements can be made, we will start to dig.”

Varid stared at the man and then turned to his colleague.

She put a finger in his mouth, which she had learned was a very good way to keep the man from talking.

The landlord belonged to that second species of People. He was a young man when the human emissary arrived, walking in the bug-carriage down the avenues of his home world. Now he was grown but would never grow old—a giant well-fed beast sporting purple and blue plumage. He and his kind had purchased the habitat for almost nothing. They had excellent minds for business and a natural flair for selling their wares, and the strange slow-motion nightmare that had just been lived by these two pathetic creatures was very good for business. The habitat was an investment to help pay for extras needed when they finally reached the colony world. That was the only reason why he didn’t shout his disapproval. It was enough to offer a few gestures that were very similar to those used by Katabasis’ species, leaving no doubt about his state of mind and how small his regard was for this hero and her monkey friend.

Perri and Quee Lee were left in the care of autodocs.

Katabasis removed her finger from the little wet mouth. Back inside the cap-car, she asked for the nearest dock, and they rode in silence. Then they slowly climbed out, and using a calm, reasoned tone, Varid mentioned that he would like something enormous to eat.

The salty little sea was home to one odd fish, tough as could be and worth any price. Katabasis suggested that for a dinner, and her companion bought ten kilos, both smoked and raw, and then they boarded the first ferry they could find, starting across the flat dark water.

They ate, and after a time Varid turned to her. “He looked like you.”

“But we aren’t the same,” she said.

He nodded, and waited.

“We’re like two species of monkeys,” she said.

He stopped nodding. His face went blank in that way that she envied, as if he had the power to wash away his past and any urgent thoughts of the moment, existing in a quiet realm that she could only wish to know.

Then with no warning, Varid asked, “How did you come here?”

She considered. She leaned a long ways forward, and after one deep breath told the ferry to stop in the middle, please, and drift with the current and wait.

She killed the old woman once again, except not in her dreams but with words and a small sorry thrust of the fist.

Varid chewed at the raw fish, saying nothing.

“The human carried me inside his ship,” she said, “and for two days he fed me and fed the People outside, and he spoke to them and to me and finally decided on a course of action and inaction. What I had endured was beyond any human experience, and he could not believe what we had accomplished. The local species—those standing thick on this world and the nearby volcanoes—were durable, yes, but not nearly as resilient as us. Against every instinct, he decided that we had proved our worth, and with that in mind, he would personally return the People to their former home. The buildings were still standing. With repairs, enough fans and dew-catchers could feed a small rebirth. And later, when human terraformers arrived in force, the People would supply most of the labor and all of the tenacity to making the inhospitable moon into a wondrous garden.”

Varid swallowed and looked across the water. “I have an idea.”

“I’m not finished,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But don’t let me forget to tell you my idea, please.”

“I will remind you.”

She ate and he ate, and then he said, “You are here.”

“If Rococo had left me with my People, I would have been killed. But my crime occurred on the diplomat’s ground, which was nearly the same as being on the Earth or inside the Great Ship. His laws ruled. He had the only authority. And according his laws, I needed to be tried in a fair court, which could only be found once he returned here.”

“He saved you,” Varid said.

“In a fashion, yes,” she said. “I was frozen inside the shuttle’s hold and defrosted on arrival and tried three years later and convicted of some lesser brutality. My sentence was short. Someone, probably Rococo himself, paid to have my body and mind rebuilt. But nobody has told me who holds this favor, which is the largest favor of all. Then as I was released from prison, the captains presented me with a bill for passage onboard the Great Ship—which will take fifty thousand years to make good, working as a porter, and that really is another gift, when you consider that you have forever to march across.”

Her companion said nothing. He had stopped eating, and the face had shifted into another lost expression.

“You had an idea,” she said.

“I did,” he agreed.

They waited.

Just when she thought that he had forgotten the subject, Varid pushed his face close and said, “There are little passengers onboard the Ship. They are machines and intelligent parasites and such. And I have empty space inside my head. Has there ever been a porter willing to be filled with other souls, carrying his clients from the first step?”

“No,” she said. “There never has been, no.”

The sun was slowly coming to life overhead. She told the ferry to continue and turned back to Varid. “This is a worthy idea,” she told him. “This is definitely a notion to twist in the light, to see how it plays.”

Once again, at last, Katabasis walked her beach.

She couldn’t sleep. Her body felt too tired to ever rest again. She moved weakly and breathed too much, and the familiar faces of her neighbors weren’t quite certain who she was. Yet she felt stronger in every way but strength, strolling past her usual turning point and then coming back even slower. Her little house of quake-coral looked like a wonder from a distance. Two legs were sticking out of the door, and smiling with her hands and arms, she came up quietly and knelt down and looked inside.

Varid was on his back, his eyes closed.

She sat back and waited. Was he truly that exhausted? Was this his first real sleep in centuries? Then she leaned forward and looked again, watching the eyes bouncing under the barely closed lids.

Once more, she sat back.

But she couldn’t resist. There finally came the moment when she put her shrunken weight on her arms and dipped her head, brushing his salty ankles with the full rough surface of her tongue.