Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

Vol. CXXXIII No. 6 Next Issue on Sale
June 2013 May 7, 2013
6 45
SERIAL
DARK SECRET, part III of IV, Edward M. Lerner __________________________ 67
NOVELETTES
A CUP OF DIRT, Mark Niemann-Ross ___________________________________ 6
SHORT STORIES
IN THE GREEN, K. S. Patterson_______________________________________ 26
WAVEFRONTS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY, David D. Levine ______________ 31
HYDROPONICS 101, Maggie Clark ____________________________________ 45
OUT IN THE DARK, Linda Nagata _____________________________________ 58
PROBABILITY ZERO
GLITCH, Jack McDevitt______________________________________________ 39
SCIENCE FACT
WAVES OF THE FUTURE: WHERE WILL THE NEXT
TSUNAMI STRIKE? Richard A. Lovett _______________________________ 18
SPECIAL FEATURE
WORKING ON THE SPACE SHUTTLE, Jeff Mitchell_______________________ 52
READER’S DEPARTMENTS
GUEST EDITORIAL: GEM HUNTING, Jamie Todd Rubin ____________________ 2
IN TIMES TO COME ________________________________________________41
THE ALTERNATE VIEW, Jeffery D. Kooistra _____________________________ 42
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Don Sakers______________________________ 100
BRASS TACKS ___________________________________________________ 104
UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis _________________________________106
Trevor Quachri Editor Emily Hockaday Editorial Assistant
Cover design by Victoria Green Cover Art by diversepixel/shutterstock
Indicia on Page 3

GUEST EDITORIAL Jamie Todd Rubin
GEM HUNTING
If you have ever read Jack McDevitt’s wonderful
Alex Benedict series, then you
know that Alex is a treasure-hunter. Along
with his companion, Chase Kolpath, he
seeks relics of the distant past (sometimes
thousands of years in the past) for his clients.
His clients pay for these relics, of course, but
I get the idea that Alex is not in it for the
money. He loves unraveling the mysteries
and holding these treasures in his hand, even
if only for a short time, admiring them for
what they represent.
While I am no Alex Benedict, I feel the
same way about science fiction stories that
Alex feels about the relics he seeks out. Each
time I begin reading a story I’ve never read
before, I get a little bit of a rush. It is similar
to the feeling I get just before the first pitch
of a baseball game, wondering whether or
not I will witness history: a perfect game,
perhaps, or maybe a no-hitter? I do believe
there are “perfect” stories, but unlike the
baseball game, “perfect” in this sense is relative
to the reader’s tastes. Ray Bradbury’s
“The Rocket Man” is one example. Harlan Ellison’s
“The Man Who Rowed Christopher
Columbus Ashore” is another. The newest
member of this short list is Ken Liu’s “The Paper
Menagerie.”
Perfect stories are extremely rare, whatever
your definition of perfection. I don’t expect
to find perfect stories, just like I don’t
expect to see a pitcher throw a perfect game.
Lately, I’ve been actively looking for what I
call “gems.” Gems are those great stories that
aren’t talked about much. If they are older
stories, perhaps they have been forgotten or
overlooked. For the last two years I have
been seeking gems in this magazine, albeit
seventy years in the past. Beginning with the
May 1939 issue of Astounding, I have been
2
reading every word of every issue, cover-tocover,
on a hunt for these lost stories. It takes
me about two weeks to get through an issue,
after which I write a blog post about it. I call
this my “Vacation in the Golden Age.” What
has been truly remarkable about this experience,
much to my surprise, is the number of
gems that I’ve uncovered in the first forty issues
alone.
Analog/Astounding (I’ll refer to the magazine
as ASF going forward) has, in its 82 year
history, published thousands of stories. The
magazine, under John W. Campbell, was utterly
dominant in the 1940s. Many of the stories
from that decade and since are now classics
in the genre, and it would undoubtedly
surprise younger fans to learn that these stories
were first published in ASF. For instance,
there have been two movies called The
Thing, both of which were based on the
1938 ASF story “Who Goes There?” by Don
A. Stuart. Stuart was a pseudonym for Campbell.
Dune was made into a movie and a
miniseries and was based upon Frank Herbert’s
novel, which was originally a series
that appeared in ASF in the 1960s. There are
many other examples of these ASF classics,
from Isaac Asimov’s Robot and Foundation
stories in the 1940s to Anne McCaffrey’s
Hugo Award-winning. “Weyr Search” in
1967.
The gems that I’ve been seeking don’t often
coincide with the classics we know today.
A Venn diagram would certainly show
some small overlap, but it is the gems that
don’t overlap with the classics that I find
most interesting. These stories, one and all,
have been remarkable not just because they
are outstanding stories, but because they are
seemingly forgotten. I hear almost no one
talking about them at conventions. I read lit-

tle about them in online discussions. It seems
to me the proper thing to do, therefore, is to
call your attention to a handful of these precious
stones, if for no other reason than to
ensure they are better remembered.
I uncovered the first of these stories in the
middle of the May 1939 ASF. The story, “The
Day Is Done” was written by Lester del Rey.
It caught my attention because I recalled
Isaac Asimov mentioning the story in his autobiography.
When I sat down to read the
story, I noticed something immediately different
about it from the other stories I’d been
reading in the early ASF: the story contains
no spaceships, no aliens, no time machines,
no scientists of any kind. Instead, we follow
the last days of Hwoogh, the last of the Neanderthals,
struggling to live in a world of
Homo sapiens amongst whom he simply
cannot compete.
In the Brass Tacks columns that followed
that issue, fans of the day complained that
the story wasn’t really science fiction. I disagree
with them. Del Rey does a masterful
job of putting us inside the head of a character
who is not on the “fittest” side of the “survival
of the fittest” equation. Hwoogh and all
of his kind have been outcompeted. Their
day is done. “The Day Is Done” is on my
short list of the best stories I’ve read. Fortunately,
this story is still available in the NESFA
Press collection Robots and Magic, edited by
Steven H Silver.
I discovered two more gems in 1939. The
first, “Greater Than Gods” by C. L. Moore,
appeared in the July 1939 ASF. That issue included
what would much later be considered
a star-studded lineup: Isaac Asimov’s first story
in ASF; A. E. van Vogt’s first story. Also stories
by Nat Schachner and Ross Rocklynne.
JUNE 2013
C. L. Moore wasn’t even the only woman in
that issue. There was a story by Amelia R.
Long. Moore’s “Greater Than Gods” was not
only the best story in the issue, it was the
best story ASF produced in the second half of
1939. The story was philosophical, pondering
the multiverse before the term even existed.
It explored the theme with characters
that seemed real, people with whom we
could empathize. The story was reprinted in
The Best of C.L.Moore as well as in Great Science
Fiction Stories of 1939, edited by Martin
H. Greenberg.
The second gem of 1939 was a robot story.
Robot stories are a staple of science fiction
made most famous, perhaps, by Isaac Asimov
who, with Campbell’s help, developed the
now-famous “Three Laws of Robotics.” There
were earlier robot stories, including Eando
Binder’s “I, Robot” and Lester del Rey’s “Helen
O’Loy.” In my opinion, none of these
reached the emotional level and compactness
of a little story called “Rust” (October
1939) by Joseph E. Kelleam. This is the tale
of the last three robots on earth, long after
humanity has vanished. The three robots can
repair one another, but one of them has begun
falling apart and can no longer repair his
counterparts. This leads them, each in turn,
to mechanical failure and demise, with the
last one witnessing the end of his kind with
the same quiet sadness experienced by del
Rey’s character, Hwoogh, in “The Day Is
Done.” After I read “Rust” I began to sing its
praises as perhaps the finest robot story I’ve
ever read. The story was reprinted several
times, most notably in The Great Science Fiction
Stories, Volume 1, 1939 edited by Isaac
Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.
In 1940, the Golden Age as we know it to-
Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXIII, No. 6, June 2013. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly
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GEM HUNTING
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3

ANALOG
day really began to take off. The year opened
with my favorite Robert Heinlein story, “Requiem.”
There was Nat Schachner’s “Cold”
(March 1940), Theodore Sturgeon’s “Butyl
and the Breather” (October 1940) and Willy
Ley’s “Fog” (December 1940, written under
the pseudonym Robert Willey). But the unexpected
gem that year was the L. Ron Hubbard
serial, “Final Blackout” (April, May, June
1940). “Final Blackout” follows a nameless
Lieutenant leading his band of men through a
war-devasted Europe. In many respects the
story was a contemporaneous alternate history.
Rather than follow the broad historical
strokes, Hubbard chose to focus on this
small, tight-knit group (as was the case in
Saving Private Ryan) in a technologically ruined
European landscape. It made for a powerful
story, in my opinion the finest thing
that Hubbard ever wrote. “Final Blackout”
was put out as a novel first in 1948 and more
recently in 1998.
In 1941, one of my favorite Heinlein novels
was serialized. “Methuselah’s Children” appeared
across the July, August and September
issues of ASF. Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”
appeared in the September 1941 issue and
Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God” appeared
in the April 1941 ASF. All of these stories
are fantastic, but the real gem that I
found buried in the yellowed pages of 1941
was the lead novelette for the February 1941
TREVOR QUACHRI ........................................Editor
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Subsidiary Rights and Marketing
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issue, “Magic City” by Nelson S. Bond. The
story, which I later learned was the second in
a loosely-connected series, was a kind of
post-apocalyptic travelogue of a band of men
and women making their way to a city once
known as New York. In some ways it foreshadowed
a new kind of story; the kind that
would lead to “A Canticle For Leibowitz” by
Walter M. Miller, Jr. and “They Don’t Make
Life Like They Used To” by Alfred Bester.
“Magic City” was reprinted in 2002 in the
collection The Far Side of Nowhere by
Arkham House.
As regular readers know, ASF publishes not
only stories but science articles as well. This
is true today and it was true seventy years
ago. When I began my search for these gems,
I had stories in mind. But I found myself impressed
with a number of the science articles
that appeared. One in particular has stood
out among all of the others that appeared in
the first 40 issues of my Vacation. “The Other
Side of Astronomy” (September 1939) by
R. S. Richardson was a remarkable article that
talked about the trials and tribulations of the
day in the life of an astronomer. Richardson’s
colloquial style, self-deprecation, and obvious
dedication to his career made this article
the finest that I’ve read in the early years of
ASF. Even so, Willy Ley has been close on his
heels once or twice.
Seeking out these gems—and for the
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Published since 1930
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January 1930 ©
4 JAMIE TODD RUBIN

ecord, I have yet to find one in 1942, despite
having read 11 of the 12 issues that
year—has given me a new appreciation for
slush piles. Writers often look upon the notion
of a slush pile with suspicion. “Why,”
they might think, “would an editor bother to
look at stories in the slush pile, when they
are certain to get a usable story from one of
their reliables?”
I am no editor, but I have to suspect part of
the answer lies in the gems. An editor takes
the same pleasure in seeking out gems in the
slush pile that I find digging them out of the
old pages of ASF. The experience has
changed the way I read science fiction magazines.
I used to read the stories by friends
first. Next, I’d tackle stories by writers I’ve always
admired. It used to be that if I didn’t
recognize someone’s name, I would skip the
story. Not anymore. The reason is because
you never know if that story with an unfamiliar
name is going to be the next gem. I imagine
the same is true of an editor and their
slush pile.
There is also a pleasure in time-traveling
into science fiction’s past. Each lunch hour, I
am transported back into the early 1940s.
GEM HUNTING
JUNE 2013
The world is at war and at times, things look
bleak. But there, within the pages of ASF,
bright people are imaging moon landings and
cities on Mars. They are exploring different
models of society. They envision robots and
automation and video phones and flying
cars. And, much like discussion boards on
the Internet today, they are duking it out in
the Brass Tacks column, holding the 1940s
equivalent of a modern-day flame war.
And occasionally, they produce a gem. ■
About the Author:
Jamie Todd Rubin is a science fiction writer
and blogger with stories appearing in Analog,
InterGalactic Medicine Show, Apex
Magazine, Daily Science Fiction and 40K
Books. He wrote the Wayward Time Traveler
column on science fiction for SF Signal,
and occasionally appears on the SF Signal
podcast. Jamie also writes book review and
interview columns for InterGalactic Medicine
Show.
Jamie lives in Falls Church, Virginia with
his wife and two children. He can be found
online at jamietoddrubin.com.
5

Enzo and Dmitry sat in the galley of the
space station unencumbered by EVA
suits, eating dinner and appreciating being
able to scratch their faces. Olya
Sidorova, the older, taller, and blonder of the
much-lusted-after Sidorova sisters tried to eat
6
Illustrated by Vincent DiFate
A Cup
of Dirt
Mark Niemann-Ross
Dirt is what you track into the space station.
Soil is what you grow things in.
between interruptions from the kitchen.
Three plates held construction-worker sized
quantities of spaghetti with tomatoes from
the hydroponic gardens.
The galley was small, so it was logical for
Olya to be sitting close to Dmitry. Close

enough that her blonde hair stuck to the static
electricity of his sweater.
“Izvinite,” Olya said. She reached across
Dmitry’s plate for a napkin.
She could have retrieved a napkin from the
dispenser behind her, but instead invaded his
personal space, flashing a smile. Olya’s smile
had caused several rocket scientists to lose
concentration. Dmitry blushed and focused
on his spaghetti.
“Olya, dinner is delizioso,” Enzo said. He
waved a chunk of tomato with his fork.
“These remind me of tomatoes from my
home.”
“Comrade Enzo, you never could grow
tomato like my Nana.” Dmitry swallowed,
then spun the fork to point at his fellow station
worker. “Hydroponic dermo tomato lack
soul of real tomato when plant seed in fertile
earth. This tomato—processed urine in red
skin—Bah.” Dmitry forked, shoveled, looked
up and chewed with Russian enthusiasm.
Enzo’s English vocabulary was ten times
that of Dmitry’s, but he had nothing to say. He
pictured his family’s fattoria in the Tuscan
Valley of Italy. There, gardens are a status symbol
and the absence of a flock of sheep is an
eyesore. Enzo remembered one uncle who
gained a black eye by carelessly disparaging a
neighbor’s produce. Dmitry’s complaints
about hydroponic tomatoes hadn’t been addressed
directly at him—Enzo wasn’t much of
a gardener—but his ancestral conditioning
viewed it as a challenge. Soil-grown tomatoes
on a space station. Irrational, impossible—exactly
the kind of problem Enzo couldn’t ignore.
Enzo twirled spaghetti and daydreamed
about the home he hadn’t seen for the better
part of a year. The installation of the Italian
science module proceeded along a predictable
and boring timeline. A good thing,
considering the alternative to boredom often
involved sudden and cold death. But Enzo
thrived on challenges, and anyone who knew
him, knew trouble could soon follow.
Enzo’s job as the module manager required
an engineer’s knowledge and a commander’s
self-confidence. Unfortunately, these rare
combinations of personalities were Il Demonio’s
playground. Enzo encouraged and enabled
his college engineering class to reassemble
a professor’s skimmer in the
A CUP OF DIRT
JUNE 2013
women’s locker room. And to launch laserguided
water balloons during freshman visitation.
Solving offbeat problems was Enzo’s
drug of choice.
A buzzer sounded in the kitchen, calling
Olya to action and bringing Enzo back to the
galley.
“Bus dishes!” she shouted as she left, swearing
in Russian when a second stove alarm
joined the chorus. Dmitry turned to appreciate
the backside of the departing cook, but
the entrance of Captain Theresa Jerwin broke
his moment of concentration. Sharing a room
with the Station Captain had a highly clarifying
effect. Some described it as terrifying.
“Gentlemen,” she said. Captain Jerwin gave
them a dismissive nod and strode to the coffee
machine.
She filled her sippy-cup and turned to regard
the engineers. One of the older members
of the station, her efforts to retain bone mass
had kept her looking like the sprinter she had
been at the University of Oregon. She excelled
in the nascent sport of orbital Judo and several
visiting athletes were surprised to find themselves
on the receiving end of her chokehold.
“How’s the food?” she asked.
“Good. Fine,” said Enzo.
“Tomatoes are dermo,” said Dmitry. “My
Nana grow better at home.”
“Perhaps we need to assign you to the hydroponics
bay,” Captain Jerwin pasted a terrifying
grin on her face. “I’m sure they would
appreciate the talents and opinions of someone
with discerning tastes such as yourself.”
Enzo wasn’t sure Dmitry could read the implied
threat and kicked him under the table.
Captain Jerwin was likable, but had a limited
sense of humor.
She had learned self-defense on Earth as a
Director at NASA, although her opponents
were bean counters and the contest had been
funding space exploration, not Judo. Captain
Jerwin’s passion had been sharpened by the
aftermath of an unexpected bolt failure on a
previous station, tragically resulting in the orbiting
object known as “CPTN_ABDUL_RAH-
MAN.” Her presentation at a Congressional
hearing showed the failure was a result of illadvised
budget cutbacks by a red-faced Representative.
She exhibited an “I would kill you if
I could reach you” stare which had been
recorded and reached most-popular status on
7

ANALOG
the Internet.
A death on this station wouldn’t improve
shareholder value and the Corporation gave
her god-like powers to prevent it. Captain Jerwin
kept the crew happy and safe. The crew
kept Captain Jerwin on a pedestal. Dmitry and
Enzo didn’t relax until she departed from the
galley.
Enzo thought about soil when he took a
bath. Water from his sponge disappeared
through vacuum ports, taking dirt with it.
Enzo thought about soil as he passed through
airlocks. A quick shake and a blast of air sent
dirt through the floor vents. Growing tomatoes
in soil would be hampered by the stationwide
absence of dirt. Dirt was nasty stuff with
no purpose; its presence led to component
failures. Soil had no ‘return on investment’
and the shuttle schedule wouldn’t prioritize a
bag of mulch over a piece of necessary lab
equipment.
Tomato seeds would be easy enough. His fidanzata,
Amata, would gladly send some in
the next personal package, included with
chocolate chip cookies deemed essential for
crew morale. Water wasn’t an endless resource,
but he would be able to satisfy a plant.
Abundant sunlight waited just outside the
hull.
But—soil. How do you make soil in a sterile
environment?
It was no problem on Earth. Take a shovel,
get as much as you want. If needed, amend it
with minerals, mulch, or worms and compost.
On Earth, soil inevitably happened.“Ashes
to ashes, dust to dust.” On a space station,
soil was an anomaly, a pest. Station procedure
manuals were clear; “All personnel will complete
pre-orbital sanitation procedures to
prevent contamination of the facility by foreign
bodies.”
Enzo researched the Internet. Googling
“make dirt” produced some unexpectedly
racy results. Googling “create dirt” produced
no useful results; Earth had no need to make
more. Googling “manufacturing soil” resulted
in pages of information on removing it from
clean environments such as manufacturing facilities
or space stations. Enzo chased the idea
until falling asleep; he dreamt of his beloved
Amata digging in the garden.
8
Eleven hours later, Dmitry and R-Eva (the
Robotic Extravehicular Automaton) floated
outside the station. The robot was remotely
operated, saving an operator from the ordeal
of suiting up. Above the waist R-Eva was humanoid,
complete with arms, hands, and a
protective helmet around stereo video cameras.
But instead of legs, R-Eva had a tail ending
in an EVA clamp.
R-Eva was controlled by Antoniy, a babyfaced
Ukrainian with a master’s in orbital engineering.
He was one of the few qualified
(and well-paid) R-Eva operators. Corporate
headhunters had tried to recruit him for other
projects, but he always turned down their offers.
Experience on the station put him closer
to the stars and—hopefully—a career among
them.
Antoniy wore VR glasses showing the view
from R-Eva’s perspective and gave the sensation
of being outside, wearing only a jumpsuit.
R-Eva mimicked everything Antoniy did,
so training had included learning not to
scratch one’s anatomical parts. Woe to the operator
who forgot and found video evidence
of their embarrassing moment broadcast to
the world.
R-Eva might be convenient, but trickier procedures
required a hands-on spacewalk. Dmitry
was fastening connectors on the outside of
the hull with Enzo providing guidance from
inside, standing next to Antoniy.
“I’ve been asked to confirm the arrangements
for air recirculation,” Enzo said to Antoniy.
“Will there be enough flow to make it
through both filtration and sterilization?”
“Da, plenty airflow,” Antoniy affirmed. He
looked down at a virtual bolt in his virtual
hand. “Sterilizer close to module joint. Air
come in, get cleaned, right back out.”
“But only if Antoniy install correctly,” Katya
Sidorova’s voice laughed over the intercom.
Katya was Olya’s younger sister and had red
hair, blue eyes, and a degree in electrical engineering.
The medical staff asserted they
could determine Katya’s location just by observing
heart rate telemetry of the station personnel.
Currently she was checking diagnostics
inside the Italian module. She had also
been checking out Antoniy, who was too shy
to respond, but this hadn’t stopped her from
being persistent. Katya may have been the
reason Antoniy turned down offers to move
MARK NIEMANN-ROSS

to other projects.
“If Antoniy distracted, air systems do not
work and moosor float free,” Katya continued,
slipping into Russian for “garbage.”
That’s the answer, realized Enzo.
The human body pollutes. It emits noxious
gasses. It sheds dead tissue. It excretes waste.
Large parts of the station were dedicated to
cleaning air and water after use by various organs.
Most interesting to Enzo, filtration systems
removed floating bits of filth.
“Is filtration located near the sterilizer?”
asked Enzo.
“Same thing,” said Antoniy. He handed a
virtual bolt to Dmitry. “Sterilize. Filter. One
unit. Cheaper to maintain. Air flow in, sterilize,
filter, air go back. New filter every
month.”
“What happens to the used filters?”
Antoniy paused for a minute. He gently
reached into the air, grasped a non-existent
connector, then replied. “Filters sampled and
sealed. Test moosor for pathogens, send to incinerator.”
Incineration meant a fiery re-entry
into atmosphere.
“How much filtrate do you test—and is it
returned to the rest of the collection bag?”
“One cc, eight filters. Keep samples for
month, then throw down with next bag.” Antoniy
absently responded while he handed another
bolt to Dmitry.
“I’d like to use some for testing. Instead of
throwing them away, could I have them?”
“If you want moosor, take. I show to you
where samples are stored. Take last day of
month or I throw out.” Antoniy picked up another
imaginary bolt and handed it to Dmitry,
leaving Enzo to contemplate his potential supply
of raw material.
* * *
With the station under construction, the
outer ring contained pressurized but unassigned
rooms. Later, these would become officer’s
quarters, labs and storage areas—but
for now, the crew occupied them and Enzo
enjoyed a bit of privacy. The door didn’t lock
but he had a hidden place to store his
moosor.
“Antoniy,” yelled Katya. She walked past
Enzo’s room, deep into male territory. “You
are wearing clothes?”
The station ring had been divided into
three areas: men, women, and couples. Visi-
A CUP OF DIRT
JUNE 2013
tors weren’t prohibited, but protocol suggested
an announcement when crossing boundaries—shower
stalls were a shared facility.
Katya had decided it was more convenient to
walk through the men’s area—and past Atnoniy’s
room—when she needed access to
the science labs.
“I don’t think Antoniy is here,” said Enzo.
He called through his door as he put on his
shoes. “I’m going to meet him at the maintenance
lab. Would you like to come along?”
“Da!” Katya enthusiastically responded.
Enzo walked out of his room and stopped.
Katya Sidorova wore makeup.
Makeup on a girl is pleasant. Makeup on a
girl on a space station is wildly extravagant. At
an orbiting cost of roughly one dollar per
gram, a small tube of eyeliner cost two dollars
to ship into space. Lipstick cost five dollars.
Shampoo cost $340. Katya had invested a
small, but significant, portion of her discretionary
payload into the pursuit of Antoniy.
Enzo tried not to stare.
Ten meters around the ring and a progressively
easier climb of fifty meters up a spoke;
they reached the nearly weightless maintenance
room. Just enough gravity to keep projects
in place, but not enough to prevent
climbing the walls. Antoniy stood in front of a
beheaded R-Eva, cleaning lenses and cameras.
Adrienne, an attractive French girl, sat at the
station next to him. She smiled at Antoniy, listening
to a story he was telling.
“Antoniy, I’m here to pick up some filtrate,”
said Enzo. Adrienne abruptly turned
back to her project area.
Katya entered the room behind Enzo. “And
I here to pick up Antoniy,” she said. Katya had
not missed Adrienne’s furtive move.
At Katya’s voice, Antoniy turned and
blushed.
“Da. Moosor there. Behind door.” Antoniy
spoke to Enzo, but stared at Katya. Enzo
moved across the room to inspect the filtrate,
opening a clear path for Katya to assess the situation.
“Antoniy, dorogoy,” Using the low gees to
exaggerate her swinging hips, Katya moved to
stand between Antoniy and Adrienne. The reduced
gravity allowed her to accidentally
bump up next to him, and with deliberation,
she flipped her long braid over her shoulder.
It floated into Adrienne’s project area, leaving
9

ANALOG
Adrienne to bat at the semi-floating intruder.
“Tell me what is this?” Katya asked. She
glanced at R-Eva’s head, then looked up to Antoniy.
Antoniy stammered and tried not to direct
his gaze where he most wanted to look.
Katya’s degree in electrical engineering had
not stunted her femininity, nor her ability to
monopolize the thoughts of a man. Enzo felt
bad for Adrienne’s discomfort and wondered
what might happen to a more serious competitor
for Antoniy’s attention. He took his filtrate
and left, wisely deciding there was no
further need of his presence.
Enzo looked at the eight CC of filtrate. Collecting
enough to plant a tomato would take
time, but as long as the crew continued to
shed their skin he’d eventually have a bowl of
nutritionally deficient organic dust.
Enzo knew the creation of soil would be
classified as an unsanctioned biological experiment.
Any number of PhDs would actively
object to the skunk-works project when
their research was being delayed. Station operations
didn’t care about PhD empire-building
concerns, but they sure as hell would
strongly discourage anything with a potential
to cause a clean-room failure. He thought it
best to keep things quiet.
But filtrate wasn’t fertile soil. As a boy, he
carried compost to all corners of the fattoria.
He blamed the unending job for his mental
block of agriculture and resulting civil engineering
degree, but fully understood the necessity.
Tomatoes would need minerals and
organics. He pondered stealing chemicals
from the hydroponics lab, but that would be
difficult and somewhat contrary to his self-imposed
rules of the game—an unfair shortcut.
He needed rotting vegetables.
“Olya, what do you do with the food wastes?
How do you break it down for the plants in hydroponics?”
Enzo queried the cook over dinner.
Dmitry quietly shoveled in his food.
Olya reached across Dmitry’s plate for the
saltshaker, shook it and wetted a finger to
pick up the small amount. Licking it from her
finger, she pointed her blue eyes at Enzo.
“Incinerator. Too much spices and meat.
Wrecks hydroponics then no dermo tomato
for Dmitry.”
She looked at Dmitry, who smiled at being
mentioned but continued to focus on his
plate of food.
Later, Enzo found an opportunity to wander
past the kitchen. “Chort voz’mi!” Olya’s voice
rose amidst a chorus of buzzers and the clatter
of a dropped bowl. She bent to scoop up
the spilled pan of re-hydrating textured vegetable
protein.
“Can I help?” Enzo asked.
Olya jumped and spun to face Enzo, suddenly
aware of his presence. “Nyet. This is
fine. You are back, would you like coffee?”
“Um . . . I hoped to find out more about
food wastes,” Enzo asked. “I’m doing some research
and hoped to get some samples.”
“Antoniy says you collect moosor,” Olya
leaned back on the counter, holding the pan
of scooped-up TVP. “You need more? You like
messy room, garbage lying around?”
“Uh, I’m . . . doing some research on . . .”
“You are not good liar, Enzo,” Olya put
down the pan and wiped her hands. “You
have dust, now you need old food. Tell me
what you research.”Olya flashed a smile, melting
Enzo’s self-reserve.
“Er. Okay . . . I’m going to grow tomatoes,”
admitted Enzo. “The dust and food waste are
for making soil. When I have enough, I’ll plant
seeds, and then surprise Dmitry with a real
soil-grown tomato.”
Enzo stopped, knowing the space station
owners wouldn’t want to hear about soil being
created on-board. Perpetrators would likely
be sent Earthside and Olya was now in the
uncomfortable position of either informant or
collaborator.
“Soil tomato for Dmitry?” Olya crossed her
arms and smirked at Enzo. Her lips worked
side to side, mirroring the thoughts behind
her eyes.
“I like,” Olya said. “I supply ground up vegetable
scrap, rescued from trash of sloppy
eaters. No meat. How much you need?”
Enzo needed far less than Olya supplied.
Perhaps Olya was interested in gaining Dmitry’s
attention. Like Antoniy, Dmitry was shy,
but the sisters appeared to like the hard-to-get
Russian boys.
“How is research?” Olya often whispered to
Enzo, but only when Dmitry was out of
earshot.
10 MARK NIEMANN-ROSS

Unfortunately, “research” was not going
well. Enzo mixed the compost puree with filtrate
but only created a dry salsa. The combination
quickly went rancid, growing mold. He
needed a processing facility to convert the
powdered human cast-offs into component
minerals and organics. It was so easy to compost
on Earth with its teeming mass of bugs
and critters—but impossible here. Absently,
he poked the moldy salsa, wiped off his finger,
slung back into his hammock and dialed
up his fidanzata.
“Enzo, amore mio! How are you?” Amata
appeared on the screen, Tuscan fields in the
background. “I wondered when you were going
to call.”
Amata had studied biochemical engineering
at the same university as Enzo, with a minor
in botany. Engineering was her career; plants
were her passion. Enzo admired the landscape
with a new appreciation for all the free
soil lying around.
“Things are good, Amata. Working on a few
minor problems, but the module install is going
perfettamente.”
“So you will be coming home early?” Amata
laughed. She placed the phone on a shelf, giving
Enzo a view of her in the garden shed. She
was always willing to talk but her hands were
constantly in motion. She scooped the contents
of the kitchen compost bucket into a
bin.
“Sorry, no changes to the schedule.” Enzo
watched Amata work, watched her dark hair.
Enzo refocused and recited the station gossip,
but his attention drifted to the background—
the potting soil, the green plants, the fertilizer.
“What are you doing?” Enzo asked.
“Just feeding the worms.”
With a flock of chickens arguing off-camera,
she described the healthy state of the
worm farm, the egg bundles she had recently
found, and the amount of castings.
Enzo slapped his head. “Amata, would you
send me a care package? I have a special request.
. . .”
He explained his needs and Amata shook
her head, placing her hand on her hip. “I can
do this. But if you get into trouble, make sure
they return you directly to me for disciplining.”
“Cargo container ATE 23.55 successfully
A CUP OF DIRT
JUNE 2013
docked. Shuttle Tiberius clear. Enjoy the
toys.” The departing shuttle extinguished its
floodlights and drifted to the next docking
station.
Inside the station, Dmitry equalized pressure
with the cargo container, opened the airlock
and floated through. Enzo could hear
him unsnapping clamps; he quickly reappeared,
pushing the perishables container.
Too many flash-frozen bottles of good Russian
vodka had resulted in grumblings from the
crew, so the captain arranged a compromise.
Each cargo container included a limited volume
of warm, pressurized storage. In exchange,
construction would get back on
schedule.
Captain Jerwin knew to play the politics
and insisted on personally distributing the
contents. She refused to wear the Station’s
Santa Claus suit while she performed this task,
but the event was clearly festive.
“Enzo, you have a package from Amata,”
Captain Jerwin announced. “Is this from your
farm?”
“Sì,” Enzo said. “Something special from my
fidanzata.”
“I’m not going to have to confiscate this,
am I?” asked the Captain. “We can’t be introducing
contaminates....”
Enzo froze. Had the Captain somehow
learned the contents of the package? He
quickly examined the seal—still intact. He
started to formulate a response.
“. . . After all, chocolate-chip cookies are a
special kind of contraband,” continued Captain
Jerwin. “I’d hate to have to eat them all
myself in the name of station cleanliness.”
Captain Jerwin was smiling. Enzo realized
she was joking. He resumed breathing.
“Amata sends you cookies?” Dmitry whispered.
“Drinking vodka later, you bring!”
“Gotta go, Dmitry,” mumbled Enzo as he
hand-climbed out of the zero-gee dock in the
hub of the station. “I’ll stop by this evening.”
Enzo rushed to his room and snapped the
seal on the package. Inside were cookies—
but more importantly, a bag containing tiny
yellow pouches, each smaller than a grain of
rice. He carefully opened the bag and mixed
the contents with a fresh sample of filtrate
and a bit of water.
Every preschool student plants a seed in a
cup of soil, unleashing an ancient force of bio-
11

ANALOG
chemical mysticism. They watch in awe as the
emerging life waves a green banner of hope
and fulfillment. Enzo was no less hopeful as
he planted the packets of worm eggs in skin
flakes. A batch of mature worms from Amata
would have been easier, but rail-gun acceleration
turned complex organisms into mush.
Eggs were much more robust and if they
weren’t frozen, would make orbit in fine
shape.
Enzo watched the mix for weeks, but nothing
moved. No worms, no soil, just powdered
dead skin. Olya frequently stopped by to
check up on the research—which accidentally
led to the next conspirator in the tomato
drama.
Enzo had borrowed a magnifying glass to
inspect for weld undercuts and had “forgotten”
to return it. Olya sat at the desk and held
it above the dormant worm farm, searching
for life.
“Is this worm egg?” she asked. Enzo stood
and took the magnifier, looking over her
shoulder at the contents of the desk. The aerial
view of Sidorova cleavage caught his attention,
if only for the slightest of moments.
“You don’t need magnifier to see that,” Antoniy
laughed. His unexpected appearance in
the small room startled and embarrassed
Enzo. He straightened quickly and his collar
zipper snagged several blonde hairs from
Olya’s head, yanking her back and exposing
the worm farm to Antoniy’s full view.
“Moosor?” Antoniy immediately recognized
the powder. “You are hoarding moosor? This
is strange.”
Enzo and Olya babbled with competing explanations,
protesting entirely too much to assert
any innocence. He watched them quietly,
then walked to the desk, fingered the small
pile and turned to regard his shipmates with a
puzzled expression.
“Tomatoes!” Enzo exclaimed. “Soil grown
tomatoes for Dmitry.” He came clean about
the entire plan. Olya held her breath.
Antoniy, revealing a hidden sense of humor,
thought the idea of presenting Dmitry with a
tomato taste-test was “Vot eto da!” Enzo’s private
quarters become a clubhouse for the
three while they fretted over the dormant
worm farm.
Olya and Antoniy sat at the desk, using the
magnifier to examine the bowl of filtrate for
signs of activity. As had been true for the previous
week, nothing could be seen.
“I’m worried about this,” said Enzo. “This
station is too small to keep secrets. What happens
when people find out?”
“Nobody to find out from me,” Olya said. “I
want surprise for Dmitry.”
“Chyort voz’mi!” exclaimed Antoniy, looking
at the clock and bolting out the door.
“Late for shift!”
Which resulted in the opening scene of a
major station-side love scandal, complete with
associated gossip.
In the hallway, Antoniy received a refresher
course on the effects of rapid acceleration,
precession and movement against direction of
spin in the tight confines of a space station.
These forces normally resulted in a collision—
in this case with Katya Sidorova.
Russian cursing and apologies echoed back
into the room as Katya and Antoniy tried to regain
their proper orientation. Olya mistakenly
peeked out the door. Katya looked up from
her position on the floor.
Speakers of any language could understand
the ensuing Russian invectives between the
sisters. Katya had not expected to meet Antoniy
in such a forceful way and was especially
not pleased to find Olya peeking out of the
door he had just exited. Thinking with her red
hair, Katya jumped to the worst of conclusions
and berated her sister for romancing Antoniy.
The volume quickly rose to uncomfortable
levels and echoed through the station,
with Antoniy unhappily stuck in the middle.
“Blyad!” screamed Olya as she jetted off toward
the kitchen.
“Blyadishcha!” answered Katya, running in
the opposite direction.
Silence from the hall leaked into Enzo’s
quarters. Antoniy had slipped back into the
room in an attempt to hide from the sisters.
The explosive situation in the hallway had dissipated
before Antoniy turned to Enzo. “I go
to work now. Perhaps EVA might be safer.” He
slunk out the door.
Enzo’s clubhouse became a therapy room.
Olya frequently replayed the event and shared
stories of Katya’s irrational behavior. Antoniy
focused on the worm farm. Enzo was an engineer,
not a therapist, so he wisely spent much
of the time nodding his head in vague agree-
12 MARK NIEMANN-ROSS

ment.
Station retellings of the Shakespearean drama
were proliferate and inaccurate. Dmitry reacted
with Slavic silence, which annoyed Olya
who found reasons to blame Katya. Dmitry
seemed unsure of the relationship between
Antoniy and Olya—they had been spending a
lot of time together. Time spent farming
worms, but he was unaware of this detail. Perhaps
Dmitry was just frightened of Olya, either
her explosive temper or possibly her
smoldering good looks.
Katya aggressively didn’t speak to Antoniy,
but found opportunities to make him feel
sheepish. As they were still working on the
Italian installation, those moments were frequent.
Enzo replayed one awkward session on
video for Amata.
On the recording, Dmitry floated on EVA,
accompanied by R-Eva, operated by Antoniy.
Enzo could be seen consulting blueprints next
to Antoniy. Katya appeared in an inset window
of the monitor, confirming connections
at the module joint.
“Dmitry, connection not functional,” Katya
said. “Please tell R-Eva move it to socket B13.”
Dmitry shifted his position to look up at Antoniy/R-Eva,
and then looked back at the panel
he held. Normally, Katya would have made
an impish remark directly to Antoniy. Now
she directed her conversation to Dmitry, who
had to relay it to R-Eva and finally to Antoniy.
Antoniy could hear everything, but anger or
shyness prevented his direct reply.
The video lasted for one minute, thirty-two
seconds, but recorded an eternity. On an orbiting
station, awkward moments have a lot of
space to fill.
* * *
“. . . she always took last of ice cream and
Mama let her,” Olya said. She had been venting
to Enzo and Antoniy about her younger
sister for the last hour.
Enzo tried to read in his hammock. Antoniy
avoided eye contact.
“I need return to kitchen. Dinner waits.”
Olya stood and departed from Enzo’s Therapy
Room and Dormant Worm Farm. The cabin
was blissfully quiet for forty-two minutes before
the excitement started.
“Gospodi!” Antoniy quietly whispered from
the desk. Enzo didn’t look up from his reader—Antoniy
had been calling false alarms for
A CUP OF DIRT
JUNE 2013
the last week. “Little worms!”
Enzo shifted his gaze to the desk. Antoniy
turned the bowl of filtrate with one hand, the
other holding the magnifier to his eye. Turn
the bowl, stop, turn back, fiddle with the focus
dial, turn the bowl.
“Gospodi!” Antoniy again exclaimed.
Antoniy’s false alarms were usually momentary,
followed by “Nyet” and a sniff. This time,
Antoniy did see something. Enzo rolled off the
hammock and stood, looking through the
magnifier.
“Oh my God!” agreed Enzo.
The white filtrate contrasted with the small
red lines crawling across the surface. No mistake—worms.
Worms, searching for food.
Enzo hadn’t kept any kitchen scraps around
for weeks, but now he suddenly needed nutrients.
He turned for the door.
“Stay here!” shouted Enzo. “Don’t let them
get away!”
Workers from the third shift filled the galley,
but seeing Enzo breathlessly appear in the
kitchen doorway gave Olya every reason to ignore
the crowd.
“Research!” whispered Enzo.
Dumping the contents of the mixer, Olya
grabbed a handful of mixed food trimmings
and minced them to soup. Like a bartender in
a high-class restaurant, she deftly tossed the
puree into a clean glass and handed it to
Enzo.
“Research!” agreed Olya. “Go!”
Enzo proceeded down the corridor at a
faster pace than advised in the station manuals,
bouncing off walls when his enthusiasm
exceeded available gees. He directed his attention
entirely at the small glass of vegetable
puree, resulting in his vector abruptly intersecting
with the Captain’s. He tumbled, but
managed to keep the contents of the glass
contained. Containing the angry Captain
proved to be more difficult.
“Where’s the fire, Enzo?” queried the Captain.
Her eyebrows furrowed in annoyance.
“Do we need to post speed limits?”
Enzo used his finger to wipe up the small
bits of vegetable from the floor, walls, and her
uniform. “Sorry,” he said, hoping to truncate
the conversation and return to his starving
worm farm.
“What’s in the glass?” she enquired. “Does
Olya have a new milkshake flavor?”
13

ANALOG
Enzo realized he should panic. Transporting
unlicensed vegetable puree wasn’t prohibited—but
could lead to questions he didn’t
want to answer.
“Um . . . it’s something she’s trying out. A
bit bland, but lots of vitamins.” He desperately
spun the story, focusing his adrenaline with
hopes of preserving his career and the secrecy
of the impending soil. Captain Jerwin regarded
him with a questioning look.
Enzo hesitated, raised the glass of puree to
his lips, took a tentative sip and swirled the
woody pulp. The overwhelming taste of garlic
and strawberry surprised him, but he
smacked his lips in theatrical approval, held
up the glass and nodded.
“Delicious!” he lied. “Gotta go.”
Enzo resumed his dash down the hallway
before the Captain could respond. Cornering
into his cabin, he handed the puree to Antoniy,
who carefully placed small amounts
near the infant worms. Antoniy and Enzo almost
cheered out loud when their babies
found the vegetable mix.
The worms thrived on Olya’s compost
puree and the filtrate slowly turned from salsa
to soil. A diet of straight vegetable sauce
failed—the worms needed the filtrate for rest
and breeding. Antoniy decided the station air
filters needed more frequent cleaning and
now supplied twenty or thirty CCs of moosor
per month.
Distressingly, an increasing number of station
personnel were becoming aware of the
project and becoming willing co-conspirators.
“Enzo, please meet friend of mine,” Antoniy
introduced a newcomer to Enzo’s research
room and private quarters. “He comes
from Penza, much farming. He misses smell of
soil. I tell him I know of something he will
like, he bring vodka from Penza. Top quality.
We drink!”
Enzo had learned to appreciate fine vodka,
but this was some of the best he had appreciated.
Likewise, Antoniy’s friend agreed the
soil was the best he had smelled in months.
“Too bad about plants,” the Penzan farmer
said. “Space seeds are genetically modified for
hydroponics—lots of fruit, not much root. In
dirt, they sprout then die. Not enough nutrients.
Normal seeds also fail. Light is all
wrong.”
Enzo had had assumed the failure to sprout
was due to his lack of gardening skills. After
the conversation with the Penzan, he realized
the need for more agricultural know-how.
With hopes of gaining further insights, Enzo
supplied the staggering Russian with a starter
kit of filtrate, worms and puree.
Olya now included “Research” in her daily
food preparation schedule and “For Research”
became a regular, although clandestine, request
at the galley.
The success of soil creation offset the corresponding
social failures of Katya, Antoniy
and Olya. With hopes of patching up friendships,
Enzo carefully hid any evidence of
worms and threw a small party in his quarters.
“Antoniy tells me this vodka is from Penza,”
Enzo chattered to Dmitry, pouring him an
oversized glass. He poured an equal amount
for Antoniy, hoping the myth of Russians
holding their booze was inaccurate. For himself
he poured only a little, trying to maintain
his wits should things go out of control.
“Penza near my home town,” Dmitry cheerfully
agreed. “Make good vodka. Za druzhbu
myezhdu narodami!” Dmitry and Antoniy
emptied their glasses in a toss, and then
looked expectantly at Enzo. Enzo, being a
good host, followed their example.
Two more shots and the singing started.
Loud Russian vocalizations did not need the
intercom to echo through the station. The out
of control portion of the party began with
Katya entering the room.
Dmitry noticed Katya first. Antoniy faced
away from the door, teaching Enzo the correct
pronunciation of a Russian folksong.
Dmitry removed the foolish grin from his face,
replacing it with a sober frown.
“Enzo, you not say Antoniy here!” Katya
said, expecting a pleasant evening with Dmitry
and Enzo, rather than a weak attempt at reunions.
Antoniy stopped and turned. Not prepared
for an encounter with a redheaded Russian
she-badger, he tossed back the rest of his glass
and exited the room, managing to avoid any
contact with Katya through a door not designed
for two occupants.
“Antoniy is Yeban’ko maloletnee,”
screamed Katya. “I make clear I don’t want
see him again!”
14 MARK NIEMANN-ROSS

And on cue, Olya entered the room at high
velocity. She had been just down the hallway
when she saw Antoniy exit and heard her sister
swearing at Enzo.
“Enzo, you are glupetz, why is she here?”
Olya blasted him before she even passed the
doorway. She didn’t expect Katya would be
blocking the door and unexpectedly bounced
off her—directly into Dmitry’s half-finished
glass of vodka, spilling the drink into his lap
and landing there herself.
The silence was as brief as the explosion of
cursing and accusations was loud. Katya
swearing at Enzo. Olya swearing at Katya and
Enzo. Dmitry trying to move between the
atoms of the wall behind him and away from
the struggling blonde in his lap. Enzo trying to
explain. Katya and Olya challenging each other’s
parenthood and virtue. Abruptly, the sisters
exited into the hallway, departing in
equal but opposite directions. Dmitry listened
to the firestorm recede, glanced at Enzo and
quietly left him alone.
Two days later, Enzo and Dmitry climbed to
EVA prep for the next scheduled install.
“Antoniy and Katya? Same room, same
time?” queried Dmitry of Enzo. “Did Katya
and Antoniy know same room, same time?”
Enzo admitted he had been a neglectful
host.
“Why not sponsor Judo match instead?”
snarked Dmitry.
Sobs greeted them as they entered the
wing. “That Yeban’ko maloletnee LEFT!”
Katya choked. “Antoniy transferred to other
station yesterday. Did not say goodbye, just
gone with glupetz robot.” Another sobbing
cry filled the station. Katya was a hysterical
wreck.
Enzo paged Olya to collect her sister. Without
a qualified tech helping them inside the
station, they were done for the day. It would
be best if they were gone when Olya arrived,
so they went to find other projects.
Enzo later found Olya and Katya in the galley
with strong black tea and tissues. The magnetic
force of boyfriends had repelled, and
then attracted the sisters. While Katya
sobbed, Olya explained to Enzo how Antoniy
had transferred to the sister space station, also
under construction. The other station had a
greater need for R-Eva operators, so his re-
A CUP OF DIRT
JUNE 2013
quest had been quickly granted. Antoniy had
left without telling Katya, leaving her to find
out from the station project manager. For a
woman who had been inflicting Russian silent
torture on Antoniy for several weeks, Katya
now reacted as if Antoniy was the only boy in
space.
“I angry, but not want him to leave,” sniffed
Katya. “Just want him to be strong, notice
me.” Another sob and a drink of tea.
“Stupid men,” agreed Olya.
Katya wasn’t the only one missing Antoniy.
The engineer newly tasked with cleaning filtration
wanted nothing to do with saving filtrate
for worms and soil. Filters were cleaned,
moosor incinerated and the monthly eight
CCs of archived filtrate sent Earthward. Enzo
couldn’t blame him for sticking to documented
procedures, but it created a barrier to
building enough soil for serious agriculture.
Or even one good tomato.
Further and unfortunately, the module installation
continued to proceed on schedule.
With only a few short weeks before the last
connectors were placed, Enzo realized he
would be sent back to Amata before the tomatoes
were sprouting.
“Ciao amore mio!” Enzo said to the video
link image of Amata, who smiled back at him.
“Three weeks and I will be home. Is the house
still standing?”
“There have been no fires to speak of,” Amata
laughed. “The chickens are happy and the
garden is ripe. Fresh marinara for you when
you return.” Amata held up a Roma tomato,
ripe and out of reach. Her botany degree had
served her well.
“Amata, you cannot imagine how much I
wish to be holding that tomato.”
“Tell me more when you come home,” Amata
breathed. “I miss you.”
Three days later, the final scene of the station
celebrity scandal took place. It began as
Enzo, Dmitry and Katya reported to EVA prep
for external inspection spacewalks.
“Don’t bother suiting up,” said Roger, the
EVA tech. “Captain just left. She said to tell
you two things. First—you’re late. Second—
you’re to report to her conference room. And
I’m pretty sure she meant immediately.”
The three moved down the station corridors
feeling the dark, gravitational pull of the
15

ANALOG
Captain’s summons. They passed the galley
when Olya emerged with a glass of what appeared
to be vegetable puree.
“Move,” Olya shouted. “Captain want
pureed vegetables in conference room.”
Enzo imagined bad things coming his way.
They entered the room to find Antoniy’s
image displayed on a teleconference link, the
Captain looking out of the view port and a
bowl of soil and worms at the head of the
table. Enzo smelled impending doom.
“Sit,” stated Captain Jerwin.
They sat.
“The five of you are an unbelievable pain in
the ass.” The Captain turned, staring at each
of them, finishing with a glare at the worms.
“I assume you have forgotten the commercial
nature of this station. I assume you have
forgotten the importance of maintaining a
clean-room environment. I assume you have
forgotten the consequences, both to your
safety and careers, of willfully creating quantities
of contaminant.”
“I can explain—” Enzo attempted to do the
noble thing and own up.
“I’m talking. You’re listening.” The Captain
glared at him in a fashion reminiscent of her
famous video. “When I’m ready to hear from
you, I will have told you what you are going to
say. Until then, nothing. Understood?”
Enzo gulped and nodded. He hoped he’d be
sent home in the pressurized transport, rather
than the incinerator run.
“Last night, I had a Captain’s dinner at our
sister space station. A wonderful meal, until
we discussed shipboard morale. At this point,
my peer challenged me with a wager. He believes
his station will produce soil-grown
tomatoes faster and of better quality than
ours.”
Enzo shot a quick glance at a puzzled Dmitry.
The Captain continued, “‘What are soilgrown
tomatoes?’ I thought to myself. But I
don’t like to appear ignorant of activities
around my station. So I, of course, accepted
his wager. And by the way, it is a substantial
wager.”
Enzo mentally inventoried his possessions
on the station and decided to whom they’d be
given.
“Antoniy.” The Captain faced the monitor.
“Thank you for indulging me in our conversa-
tion last night. For those of you in the room,
Antoniy explained where these worms and
soil have come from and how they traveled to
our sister station amongst his personal belongings.”
The Captain picked up the bowl and examined
it closely. “News travels quickly in the vacuum
of space. This morning, I had the unexpected
pleasure of conversing with an
extremely enthusiastic representative of the
Corporation that owns this station. He told me
they were thrilled we had instituted a program
to improve station morale by reproducing a little
piece of Earth. He was briefly curious about
how we contained this—dirt—so as to not
contaminate the station, but didn’t pause long
enough for me to dream up a lie. He rushed on
to tell me Earthside engineers were highly supportive
about the improvements in quality of
life on our station. He wanted to know when
we’d be prepared for a press conference to
show off these tomatoes.”
Turning back to the monitor, the Captain
continued. “Antoniy. I managed to rescind
your transfer, much to the dismay of my competitor
in this wager. You are returning to this
station on the next transport. I believe it will
be departing your current location in approximately
fifty minutes. When you set foot on
this station, you will report to engineering
headquarters. You will accept your previous
assignment. They are expecting you to complete
cleaning the filtration systems before
dinner. You will continue to use your modified
disposal routine for the filtrate. Dismissed.”
The connection ended and a dropjawed
Antoniy disappeared from the monitor.
“Katya,” The Captain turned from the blank
monitor and stared down the Russian girl.
“You are remaining as Support Engineer on
the same team. This time you will not turn my
station into a soap opera. I will not hear reports
of missed assignments. You and Antoniy
will attend an upcoming series of Effective
Communication classes. I expect to hear
glowing reports from the instructor regarding
your respective performances. This is not a
speculative statement. Is this clear?”
Katya’s face was as red as her hair. She understood.
The Captain turned to Olya.
“This vegetable puree seems to be exceedingly
popular and until last night, it didn’t occur
to me it was anything other than a health
16 MARK NIEMANN-ROSS

drink. Apparently it’s a health drink, but not
for my human crew. In support of the tomato
project, you are now going to produce
enough of your health mix to keep our worm
population happy and producing soil.”
“And you,” The Captain turned her gaze on
a suddenly fidgeting Dmitry. “It’s unclear
how, but you are somehow the cause of this
situation. You are now accepting the job of
Soil Production Manager. I expect you will
work closely with Olya and Antoniy to monitor,
contain, and maximize system throughput.
Emphasis on contain. Please do not consider
this a promotion; it is simply a new part
of your job. Understood?”
Dmitry replied with a vigorous affirmation.
“Da, Captain!”
“The three of you are dismissed,” The Captain
said in an efficient tone. “Enzo, you stay.”
Olya, Dmitry, and Katya cleared the room
as if in an explosive decompression. In spite
of the air-conditioning, Enzo began to sweat.
“Enzo, you and I have a problem,” started
the Captain. “First, an affirmation. You’re a
good engineer. Your module install will finish
on time. Good work.”
Enzo swallowed. Nodded. Stared.
“If you were a screw-up, I could just wait
for your contract to end and you’d be off my
station. However, you are clever and you
know the routines. And there’s this wager and
press conference. All of this soil. But no tomatoes.”
The Captain held up the bowl. “Is that
correct? There are no tomatoes?”
Enzo admitted that yes, there were no
tomatoes.
“I’ve put in a recommendation you remain
on the ship for further work on the Italian
module. I have expressed concerns about its
operation, concerns that will require a qualified
engineer to address. In addition to your
duties with the module, you are also going to
produce tomatoes.”
Enzo felt his heart drop to Earth, to his Amata.
A CUP OF DIRT
JUNE 2013
“Captain.” Enzo stopped to clear his throat
and started again. “Captain, I’m not sure it can
be done. I’m not good with plants. I’m sure
Dmitry and Olya can handle it.”
“They will be busy enough. This is for you
to do.” The Captain voiced the statement
slowly, enunciating every syllable. “Your
tomatoes are now tied to shareholder value.
You will grow them successfully, if you have
to spend evenings taking a community college
class in botany. I don’t care what it takes. It
apparently doesn’t matter to the corporation
how much it costs. But I’d better see them on
my desk and soon.”
Enzo thought for a long moment. “Captain,
I think I know how to do this.”
“Fine. Good. Do as you need. Red, round
vegetables on my desk. Dismissed.”
Two weeks later, R-Eva worked near the
docking port. Antoniy, wearing VR glasses
and controlling R-Eva, stood inside next to
Katya.
“Can you see them?” Katya scanned the
videos, showing the view from outside via R-
Eva’s cameras. Katya put her arm around Antoniy.
R-Eva reached down to pat a phantom
Katya’s butt—an oversight by Antoniy, with
video evidence shared widely among station
crew.
“There is shuttle,” said Antoniy. “Coming
from behind spoke three.”
R-Eva’s head swiveled to follow the Italian
personnel shuttle. Inside the station, Antoniy
took off the VR glasses and joined Katya in
watching the video of the dock interior. They
could see Enzo, Dmitry, and Olya waiting by
the entry port for final pressurization. Lights
flashed, the seal opened, and several new station
personnel emerged. Among them was a
dark-haired woman with a botany major and a
sack of seeds, who launched herself into
Enzo’s arms. ■
17

A
few years ago, I joined some friends
for an event called the Hood to Coast
Relay—which, as the name implies, is
a relay race running all the way from
Oregon’s Mount Hood to the sea (about two
hundred miles). That year I didn’t run, but instead
served as a volunteer, directing traffic
somewhere in the recesses of the Oregon
Coast Ranges. Afterward, I joined my friends
at the beach for sunset, celebration, and a
weekend on the coast.
Since I’d not run the race, I went for a jog.
About two miles into it, I got to thinking
about tsunamis.
That might sound strange, but those
18
Science Fact
Waves of the
Future: Where
Will the Next
Tsunami Strike?
Richard A. Lovett
who’ve read my prior articles know I’ve often
written about seismology, earthquakes, and
tectonics. 1 Not far offshore from the Oregon
Coast is one of the world’s largest subduction
zones—a place where tectonic plates crush
together, with one diving beneath another,
sometimes in giant lurches. These can produce
earthquakes of magnitude 9.0 or greater
. . . and undersea earthquakes of that size
mean tsunamis.
What, I wondered, would I do, if the
ground heaved?
I knew a tsunami wouldn’t strike until
twenty or thirty minutes after a quake ended.
That was enough time for me to run three or
1 In fact, my guest Alternate View column in November 2012, “Traditional Mousetraps” was about
a different aspect of the global tsunami problem.

four miles . . . assuming bridges were intact
and I didn’t have to swim sloughs. Assuming
there weren’t power lines down all over the
place. Assuming the hill I ran for didn’t turn
out to be an impenetrable blackberry thicket.
The beach I was running along was three
miles long, which meant the middle of it was
a mile and a half from high ground. Suddenly,
I felt dangerously exposed.
The last decade has done much to bring the
threat of tsunamis to worldwide attention.
The best-known disasters were the ones in
Sumatra (230,000 dead on December 26,
2004) and Japan (20,000 dead on March 11,
2011). But those aren’t the only killer waves.
The 2010 Chilean earthquake generated eightfoot
waves that killed two hundred people. 2
And an earthquake near Samoa on September
29, 2009 washed the islands with 15-foot
waves, killing at least 129. 3 Even the Haiti
earthquake of 2010 generated a small but
deadly tsunami. 4 All of which leads to a simple
question: where will the next deadly wave hit?
The short answer is that until earthquake
prediction becomes a true science, nobody
knows. But some regions are at greater risk
(and more poorly prepared) than others.
The Oregon Coast where I was jogging is
one of these. The fault that threatens it is the
Cascadia Subduction Zone, which stretches
offshore from Northern California to Canada.
JUNE 2013
Every few hundred years, geologists believe,
this fault unleashes a mega-quake comparable
to the one that devastated Japan. The most recent
was in 1700 (dated by tree-ring studies of
trees it killed). 5 Nobody knows whether that
means the fault is about ready to slip again, or
if it will be quiescent for several more centuries.
Unfortunately, if it happens now, American
coastal residents won’t react as well as the
Japanese. “The Japanese are culturally attuned
to be aware of earthquakes and tsunamis,”
says Patrick Corcoran, a disaster specialist at
Oregon State University. “We are not.”
How many people are in the danger zone is
difficult to estimate. Corcoran puts the figure
at roughly a hundred thousand, but some of
the coastal towns, he notes, can see their populations
swell by a factor of ten during peak
tourist weekends. “It’s musical chairs,” he
said. “When the earthquake happens, whoever
is going to be there is going to be there.”
In Japan, 90% of the people in the areas hit
by the tsunami escaped. In Oregon, Corcoran
fears, it might be the reverse: the 90% might
well be the victims. 6
Ring of Fire . . . and Water
Cascadia is part of the Pacific “Ring of Fire,”
where volcanoes (and subduction zones) rim
the planet’s most tectonically active zone. Seven
of the ten largest earthquakes in recorded
history 7 have occurred here—sixteen of the
2
“When Will We Learn,” Newsweek, March 13, 2011, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/
2011/03/13/when-will-we-learn.html.
3
Ibid.
4
Of the 200,000 who died in that earthquake, only three are known to have been killed by the wave,
but there might have been others who survived the collapse of their houses only to drown. See
Richard A. Lovett, “Haiti Earthquake Produced Deadly Tsunami,” Nature News (online) 25 February
2010.
5
It also spawned legends among coastal tribes, and produced a tsunami described by Japanese historians.
See Richard A. Lovett, “From Atlantis to Canoe-Eating Trees: Geomythology Comes of Age,”
Analog, September 2009.
6
Northern California might fare slightly better if people remember 2011, when four people (three of
whom survived) were washed out to sea by 8-foot waves from the Japan earthquake. See “Tsunami:
Much of Crescent City harbor destroyed; 4 people swept into sea, 1 feared dead,” Los Angeles Times,
March 11, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/03/crescent-city-harbor-destroyed-people-swept-into-sea.html.
But history isn’t on the side of memory. The person who died was reportedly
photographing the waves — despite the fact that well within living memory, Crescent City had seen 11
fatalities from a tsunami generated by Alaska’s 1964 “Good Friday” earthquake (magnitude 9.2).
7
“Largest Earthquakes in the World since 1900,” U.S. Geological Survey, http://earthquake.usgs.gov/
earthquakes/world/10_largest_world.php.
WAVES OF THE FUTURE
19

ANALOG
top seventeen, in fact, if you include the Indian
Ocean side of Indonesia, which may not
border the Pacific but is part of the same tectonic
region.
Another high-danger part of that region lies
offshore from Lima, Peru. “[Since] the Spanish
conquest in 1543, Lima has been destroyed
three times by a major earthquake with
tsunamis,” says Emile Okal, a geophysicist
from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.
“How large, we are not sure, but enough
to completely wreck the city as it was built [at
the time]. Now construction would be a bit
better, but the population has increased tenfold
or something, so I would put Lima as a
city very much at risk.”
Also at risk is Indonesia (and the same farflung
regions of the Indian Ocean that were
hard hit in 2004). At one level, that’s surprising,
because classic tectonic theory says that
earthquakes release long-accumulating strain.
This means that a fault should not rupture
again in the same place until enough time has
passed for strain to re-accumulate.
But faults appear to come in segments, and
an earthquake in one segment can transfer
stress to adjacent ones. And, while Indonesia
has seen more than its share of giant earthquakes,
one segment of the Sunda Subduction
Zone—the fault that generated both the 2004
Indian Ocean tsunami and a subsequent magnitude
8.6 earthquake nearby—hasn’t seen a
major earthquake since 1833 . . . and even that
earthquake may have released only a portion
of the accumulating strain.
That segment lies offshore of the densely
populated city of Padang, which is several
times larger than Banda Aceh, the largest Indonesian
city hit by the 2004 tsunami. “There
are places where we know of very large historical
earthquakes that are more or less ripe
for [another],” says Okal. “I would put Padang
as [such] a bad place.”
Other “bad” places circle much of the Ring
of Fire. For example, Okal says, there may still
be strain to be released in northern Chile. “We
know there was one earthquake [there] in
1877, and a smaller one in 1922,” he says.
“But there is the possibility [of another].”
Moving north, he notes that Mazatlán, Mex-
ico, could be at risk, though probably not of a
mega-quake (magnitude 9). Similarly, southern
California doesn’t seem likely to have a giant
subduction-zone earthquake, though, of
course, it’s always vulnerable to waves coming
from far afield. And, as we’ll discuss later,
subduction zone temblors aren’t the only
source of tsunamis.
Continuing to move north, we hit Cascadia,
then Alaska, where the giant “Good Friday”
earthquake of 1964 (magnitude 9.2) unleashed
a tsunami that killed people as far
away as Crescent City, California. But that was
less than fifty years ago and it’s unlikely that
enough stress for a repeat will reaccumulate
anytime soon.
Better primed for big earthquakes are the
Aleutian Islands, parts of which, Okal says,
haven’t seen large earthquakes since 1788.
“But they are very lightly populated.” Still, he
notes, a big earthquake here could beam
tsunami waves toward Los Angeles and other
parts of California. “This is a scenario which is
considered by some people [to be] a major
priority in terms of hazard assessment on the
U.S. West Coast,” he says.
Other parts of the Aleutians, he adds, could
produce a tsunami that “would strike Hawaii
pretty badly.”
Continuing around the Ring of Fire, Kamchatka,
Russia, had a huge earthquake in 1952
(variously reported as magnitude 8.2 to 9.0)
that produced a tsunami whose effects the Soviet
Union long kept secret. “It killed upward
of seventeen thousand people,” Okal says. But
here, too, the strain has probably been fully
released, making a near-future repeat unlikely.
Moving to Japan, the best thing that can be
said is that the fault zone that produced the
2011 earthquake is probably safe for hundreds
of years. But there’s always the threat of a big
tsunami from other areas hitting Tokyo, as
happened in 1923, when one hundred thousand
died, with another forty thousand missing.
8 Farther south, Okal adds, the big
question is a fault zone known as the Nankai
Trough. “Some parts are ripe for rupture,” he
says.
Continuing south, the Ryukyu Islands
(which run from Japan to Taiwan) appear to
8 Not all, or even most, of these people died from the tsunami. The earthquake produced fires, which swept
through the city, killing tens of thousands. A subsequent typhoon added to the misery, and the death toll.
20 RICHARD A. LOVETT

have had some history of seismicity in the
1700s, but have been quiescent since. In
earthquake risk, that’s not a good thing.
“There is a possibility to fit a very large earthquake
in there—up to magnitude 9—which
would be bad for the Philippines in addition
to the local islands,” Okal says.
The Philippines themselves, he adds, are a
“tectonic mess.” Mega earthquakes have never
occurred there in recorded history, he says,
but it’s possible that a region known as the Luzon
Trench might produce such an earthquake.
“If all of this were to rupture at
once—and there is no reason to think it could
not—you could have a major event,” he says.
The resulting wave, he adds, would be a disaster
in the South China Sea, which borders not
just Manila but much of Southeast Asia. “It
could be one of the very few scenarios in
which the coastlines of Vietnam, western
Malaya, and perhaps Singapore, could be
threatened,” he says, adding that Hong Kong
might also be hit by the resulting wave.
It’s a very poorly understood area, tectonically,
but—for those worried about mega-disasters—probably
the scariest setting we’ve yet
discussed, simply because of the enormous
number of people living along the coast and
their lack of tsunami preparedness. 9
Continuing south, Okal says an earthquake
on the southern coast of the Indonesian island
of Java would not only be disastrous for local
communities, but is one of the few that could
produce a wave that would hit Western Australia,
including the harbor city of Perth. “Economically,
that is of great concern to our
friends Down Under,” he says.
The final big risk in the Pacific is Tonga,
which lies near a subduction zone that shares
some characteristics with Indonesia’s Sunda
zone. But, Okal says, it’s another “big question
mark” because we don’t know much about its
seismic history.
Luckily, it’s not a densely populated area.
Other than Tahiti, Okal notes, an earthquake
there would beam its tsunami energy mainly
at uninhabited areas—though, he says, an
1865 event in the region did produce a tsunami
that hit the Marquesas Islands.
* * *
JUNE 2013
Sloshing the Middle East
The Ring of Fire is well known. But other
than the South China Sea, some of the globe’s
most dangerous tsunami zones may be elsewhere.
One such potential disaster area is the
Makran Subduction Zone, which lies in the
Arabian Sea, paralleling the coasts of Pakistan
and Iran. Virtually unknown to Americans,
this region’s most recent large event was a
magnitude 8.5 quake in November, 1945,
which produced waves reported to be as high
as forty-five feet and killed four thousand people
in southern Pakistan.
One might think that this released all of the
accumulating strain, but only about one-third
of the “available” fault ruptured, Okal says. Is
the rest primed to go any day? Who knows.
But, Okal says, “There is a concern. We are
talking about a major impact on places like
Karachi and Mumbai.”
Another place that’s ripe for a major tsunami
might be Istanbul, Turkey.
It’s another place most of us wouldn’t associate
with tsunamis. After all, it’s inland, miles
from either the Black Sea or the Aegean. But it
happens to lie on a body of water known as
the Sea of Marmara, which is the lake-like
zone between the Black and Aegean Sea. And
Turkey’s most dangerous fault, the North Anatolian
Fault, runs right along the northern
edge of Turkey, directly toward that sea, says
Costas Synolakis, a tsunami expert at the University
of Southern California and president of
the Hellenic Center for Marine Research in
Greece.
Since 1939, that fault has been rupturing,
piecemeal, starting at the eastern end, and
heading toward Istanbul. The most recent
earthquake, in 1999, was a magnitude 7.4 in
Izmit (only sixty miles east of Istanbul) that
left seventeen thousand dead and produced a
small tsunami in the Sea of Marmara.
The 1999 tsunami wasn’t a major source of
destruction, but the next segment of the fault
lies directly beneath the sea and is likely to
produce a more substantial tsunami, Okal
9 It is only very recently that the Vietnamese appear to have become aware of the risk. See, “Tsunami
in Vietnam is the Real Risk,” VietnamNet English, April 2012, http://en.baomoi.com/ Info/Tsunamiin-Vietnam-is-the-real-risk/6/256298.epi.
WAVES OF THE FUTURE
21

ANALOG
Megatsunamis
Not all tsunamis originate from beneath the ocean’s surface. Giant landslides falling into the
waters from above can also set off big waves, at least locally. 1
The biggest tsunami ever known happened exactly this way, in a place called Lituya Bay,
Alaska, on July 9, 1958. The earthquake that triggered it, magnitude 7.9 to 8.3 (depending on
which estimate you believe), wasn’t undersea, but on a fault about thirteen miles inland. But
there were steep mountains near the sea, and one of them gave way, dropping forty million
cubic yards of rock into the head of a fjord. Some of the rock plunged as far as three thousand
feet.
The resulting splash sent water surging across the narrow fjord and 1,720 feet up the opposite
wall—a height that could be precisely measured simply by looking at areas denuded of
vegetation. It then sped out of the fjord, still reaching as high as eighty to one hundred feet as
it approached the mouth of the fjord, seven or so miles away, killing five people on its way.
Once out of the fjord, it quickly dissipated in the Gulf of Alaska. 2
Such events aren’t all that uncommon. In Lituya Bay alone, geologists have found signs of at
least three other one-hundred- to five-hundred-foot tsunamis in the past 160 years—not the
type of place in which I’d like to live.
Volcanic islands are another possible source of megatsunamis. In the Atlantic, geologists
have long had their eyes on the Canary Islands, where a somewhat controversial theory holds
that an eruption might trigger an above-water flank collapse that might unleash a rather nasty
tsunami on the U.S. East Coast, Brazil, and the Western Caribbean. 3
The mother of all such megatsunamis, however, would be from a mega-landslide flank collapse
on Hawaii’s 13,100-foot Mauna Loa. If that occurred in the right (or wrong) place, Honolulu
could be wiped out before most people could evacuate, a National Geographic TV
segment called “Ultimate Tsunami” claimed a few years ago. 4
1 An asteroid impact can do the same, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
2 There is a good map here: http://geology.com/records/biggest-tsunami.shtml
3 For opposing views on this, see: Ian Gurney, “A Wave of Destruction Will Destroy America’s East Coast,”
The Daily Express (UK), 8 October 2004 (I think; the date reads “8-10-4”), www.rense.com/general56/tsu.htm,
and “Canary Islands Landslides and Mega-Tsunamis: Should We Really Be Frightened?,” Science Daily (Aug.
15, 2004). www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/08/040815234801.htm.
4 http://natgeotv.com/uk/ultimate_disaster/about
says, “right in front of Istanbul.” And, he adds,
Turkey’s seismic-based building codes aren’t
the world’s best enforced. “The next earthquake
along the North Anatolian Fault is going
to be a humanitarian disaster,” he says. “We
can bet on this.”
“Misery Beyond the Intolerable”
Turkey isn’t the only part of the Eastern
Mediterranean that might be at risk. One of
the least studied and least understood subduction
zones in the world is the Hellenic Arc,
which runs south of Greece and Turkey, says
Synolakis.
In the last two thousand years, Synolakis
says, that region has produced two giant
earthquakes, with magnitudes estimated to
have exceeded 8.5 and “tsunamis to match.”
One, in 365 AD, devastated ancient Alexan-
dria, Egypt. The other occurred in Crete in
1303, also hitting Alexandria. On average, Synolakis
says, the Mediterranean appears to have
seen one or two tsunamis per century (although
he notes that not all of the historic reports
are equally reliable). “The exposure is
huge,” he says. “The Mediterranean is heavily
populated along its shores, with millions of
tourists in the summer. The awareness is
abysmal, and there is no tsunami warning center.”
What this means is that in addition to the
ongoing risks of well-known fault zones in the
Pacific Ring of Fire (Chile, Alaska, Cascadia,
Japan), there are three areas of dense population
and low preparedness where a tsunami, if
it occurs, could be horrific. Thirteen million
people live in Istanbul. Another thirteen million
live in Karachi. Hong Kong, Macau, Mani-
22 RICHARD A. LOVETT

la, and a host of other cities are within striking
range of a tsunami in the South China Sea. “I
refuse the temptation to compare the exposures,”
Synolakis says. “It is like choosing your
poison or imagining degrees of misery beyond
the intolerable.”
The Atlantic isn’t immune to tsunamis, either.
One of the worst such disasters in history
occurred in 1755 when Lisbon, Portugal,
was rattled by an earthquake now estimated
to have been magnitude 8.5 to 9.0, centered
about 120 miles offshore. Frightened survivors
ran to the docks, only to watch the water
recede so far they could see shipwrecks on
the harbor floor. Unfortunately they didn’t
know what the receding water meant, and
when it came back, it rushed in so quickly
that by some accounts the only way to escape
was on a galloping horse. All told, some thirty
to forty thousand people died, nearly 20% of
the city’s populace.
More recently, a smaller earthquake struck
offshore from Newfoundland in 1929. Even
though it was only magnitude 7.2, the earthquake
produced a tsunami that killed 28 and
left ten thousand homeless on the south coast
of Newfoundland. Unlike Japan, which has a
long history of dealing with tsunamis, the
Newfoundlanders had no idea what was happening.
“We thought the place was sinking or
something,” one survivor said later.
This comment and many others were collected
years later in a St. John’s, Newfoundland,
retirement center. 10 The stories make
fascinating reading. One of the most amazing
came from Pearl Brushett, who at the time
was five years old, snug in bed when the first
wave hit. The water lifted her house off its
foundations and carried it out to sea, where it
grounded in shallow water, next to an island.
Before the frightened family could figure out
what to do about this odd predicament, another
wave struck, refloating the house. This
time, it wound up back on the beach not far
from its original location—at which time
everyone escaped with only minor injuries.
Nobody is sure exactly what caused the Lis-
JUNE 2013
bon tsunami, other than the obvious fact that
it was produced by the earthquake. The problem
is that the fault, the Azores-Gibraltar
Transform Fault, isn’t a subduction zone fault,
which is the type normally associated with
mega-earthquakes.
Subduction zones are “thrust” faults in
which one plate is shoved beneath another.
Transform faults are more like the San Andreas
Fault, in which blocks of crust scrape horizontally
past each other, a motion that geologists
describe as strike/slip. “When an
earthquake generates a tsunami, it’s because
the sea floor went up and down,” says Seth
Stein, a colleague of Okal’s at Northwestern
University. “An earthquake which is pure
strike-slip doesn’t do that.”
Since we don’t know how the Azores-
Gibraltar Transform Fault produced a big
tsunami in the first place, it’s impossible to
figure out whether it’s going to be safe for
hundreds of years or on the verge of doing it
again. “I have colleagues in France, Portugal,
and Spain who have done excellent work trying
to figure out what happened,” Okal says.
“[But] it is very difficult.”
Turbidity Flows and Cruise Ships
In the case of Newfoundland, however, scientists
mapping the seabed and taking core
samples have found debris fields indicating
that the tsunami was caused by a giant underwater
landslide. Running for hundreds of
miles, that landslide raced down a series of
submarine canyons fanning from the Gulf of
St. Lawrence into the deep-water abyss, mixing
mud with water to form what is known as
a turbidity flow. Reconstructions of the event
indicate that the flow may have carried as
much as 75 cubic miles of mud at speeds of
up to 60 miles per hour, sloshing huge volumes
of water in the process. 11
It’s only recently that scientists have come
to realize that turbidity flows may be quite
common. In 2001, researchers at the Monterey
Bay Aquarium Research Institute, in Santa
Cruz, California, planted equipment in
10 Not Too Long Ago . . . Seniors Tell their Stories, The Seniors Resource Centre, St. John’s,
Newfoundland (1999), available free online at: http://www.nald.ca/library/learning/ntla/ntla.pdf.
11 I.V. Fine et al, “The Grand Banks landslide-generated tsunami of November 18, 1929: preliminary
analysis and numerical modeling,” Marine Geology 215 (2005) 45–57, http://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/
science/oceans/tsunamis/documents/1929.pdf.
WAVES OF THE FUTURE
23

ANALOG
Monterey Canyon, a deep submarine canyon
running offshore from Central California.
Three months later, their equipment had vanished.
Eventually, the scientists found it 550
meters further down the canyon, partially
buried in mud. They installed a new experiment,
only to have it mangled by at least two
turbidity flows in the space of five months. 12
These were small turbidity flows, but if
small ones are common, it’s unlikely that
Newfoundland’s tsunami-triggering giant is
unique. If you’re looking for a recipe for disaster,
all you need are three factors: a sloping
seabed, a triggering earthquake, and the presence
of a lot of loosely consolidated sediment,
either deposited by a river or washed down at
the end of the last ice age. “These features
aren’t remarkable,” says David Mosher of the
Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth,
Nova Scotia. “We see similar features
all along the Canadian east coast.”
The same features also occur in Alaska,
where glacial rivers have brought huge
amounts of mud down into the ocean, only to
deposit it in large banks of sediment, perched
at the heads of deep fjords. In the 1964 earthquake,
in fact, only a fraction of Alaska’s 106
tsunami deaths were from the main tsunami.
The rest were from local tsunamis produced
by landslides. 13 And Alaska isn’t the only place
facing such threats. “In Los Angeles, the
biggest tsunami risk would probably be from
a landslide somewhere in the Channel Islands,”
Okal says.
Another region where submarine landslides
pose a tsunami risk is the Caribbean.
“The Caribbean is an important place that is
often overlooked,” says Matthew Hornbach, a
geophysicist from Southern Methodist University,
Dallas, Texas, who spent part of 2012 in
the region helping to take submarine core
samples in an effort to assess the region’s landslide
history.
Here, the risk isn’t so much from perched
sediments as from undersea “flank collapses”
of the submarine slopes of volcanic islands
such as Montserrat.
Okal agrees. It doesn’t take a magnitude 9
earthquake to trigger such an undersea
avalanche. In 1918, an earthquake of magnitude
7.5 occurred in the strait between Puerto
Rico and the Dominican Republic, hitting
Puerto Rico with twenty-foot waves that killed
forty people. 14 “All indicators point to a landslide,”
Okal says.
Another danger zone, Okal says, is the U.S.
Virgin Islands, which had a magnitude 7.5
earthquake and associated tsunami as recently
as 1867. 15 The big risk there, he says, is to
cruise ships, of which five or six can be in
port at once, each with several thousand passengers
and crew.
Cruise-ship captains have said they could be
under way within five minutes of an earthquake,
Okal says, but he doesn’t believe it.
“You’re going to have a traffic jam trying to
move these enormous things,” he says. And
he notes, “If you do get your ship out in five
minutes, you’re going to leave people on the
shoreline to be washed away by the waves. It’s
a tsunami trap.”
Chaotic Effects
There have, of course, been movies and
novels about tsunamis. But the real story for
science fiction probably wouldn’t be the raceagainst-time
disaster story. The real story
might take a longer view.
One obvious aspect of this is the degree to
which such a disaster would shake up the
global economy. If the eruption of a single Icelandic
volcano in 2010 could shut down air
traffic in Europe for days, what would be the
effect of a harbor-wrecking wave in the poorly
prepared Mediterranean?
But the effects can be far more subtle than
that.
Jelle Zeilinga de Boer of Wesleyan University
in Middletown, Connecticut, has proposed
what he calls the “vibrating string” theory, in
which he argues that natural cataclysms can
have impacts that ripple through history for
years, decades, and centuries. It’s a bit like
chaos theory’s famous “butterfly effect” or
12
Richard A. Lovett, “The Wave from Nowhere,” New Scientist, 24 February 2007, pp. 52-53.
13
Ibid.
14
University of Southern California Tsunami Research Group, www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis/caribbean/
webpages/1918prindex.html.
15
www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis/caribbean/webpages/1867viindex.html.
24 RICHARD A. LOVETT

Ray Bradbury’s classic short story, “A Sound of
Thunder,” and he’s argued it at length in two
books: Volcanoes in Human History:The Far-
Reaching Effects of Major Eruptions (2001)
and Earthquakes in Human History:The Far-
Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions
(2004). The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami,
for example, sent shock waves through both
the Catholic Church (Portugal was a Catholic
country) and the European intelligentsia, both
of which tried to make sense of what had happened
and what it said about the world in
which we live.
The Newfoundland tsunami was smaller,
but its effects might have been even more
sweeping because it snapped more than a
dozen transatlantic cables.
Scientifically, those cables were one of the
clues that helped geophysicists piece together
the cause of the tsunami, because they
broke one at a time, in sequence as the flow
moved down-canyon. Since the earthquake
was long over by the time the last one broke,
it was a strong sign that something other than
ground shaking was happening beneath the
waves.
The loss of the cables, however, was more
than just a scientific curiosity. Expensive and
not easy to replace, they were the era’s equivalent
of today’s communication satellites. Losing
that many of them put a serious pinch on
transatlantic communications.
“This was shortly after the Wall Street
crash,” Mosher’s Bedford Institute of
Oceanography colleague, David Piper, told
me a few years ago. The breaks, he speculates,
may have contributed to the Great Depression
by impeding communication
between American and European banks at a
critical time.
Speculative? Absolutely. But that’s what science
fiction is about, as well. So if we’re going
to write about disasters, let’s think about
them in greater depth than simply the classic
plots of who will survive. And if you’re looking
for background for future histories, any
one of the tsunamis described in this article
not only might occur, but not far in the future
at least one of them is likely to have occurred.
JUNE 2013
And when each of them does, something will
change.
And if you’re looking for the possibility of
long-term ripples from the Japan tsunami, all
you have to say is “nuclear power.” Most likely
these won’t amount to much, although, as of
this writing, the Japanese have announced
plans to cut in half their reliance on nuclear
power, which, one day before the tsunami
sent the Fukushima nuclear plant into meltdown,
amounted to thirty percent of their
electrical generating capacity. 16 Had the nuclear
disaster been a little worse, however,
there might have been major effects, with the
entire globe shifting course . . . toward what?
Coal? Smog and global warming? Conservation?
A Manhattan-Project—style crash solarpower
program?
Those are exactly the type of questions science
fiction excels at addressing. Are such
changes the result of broad sociocultural effects,
as envisioned by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation-novel
psychohistorian Hari Seldon? Or
are they driven by powerful individuals, such
as Asimov’s character The Mule, whose
unique talents upset Seldon’s plans? Or are
they actually based on chaos theory, in which
pretty much anything can happen because
small, unexpected factors can count as much
as supposedly “big” ones? A Google search reveals
that there is at least one novel called
Tsunami! I know nothing about it, but the
one I’d like to read would use the wave to explore
at least some of these questions. ■
About the author:
Richard A. Lovett has been a full-time writer
since 1989. In addition to being a regular contributor
to Analog, he has written more than
3,000 articles for such publications as Nature,
Scientific American, New Scientist, Science,
Cosmos, National Geographic News, Travel &
Leisure, Running Times, and Psychology Today.
His short-story collection, Phantom
Sense & Other Stories (all collaborations with
fellow Analog writer Mark Niemann-Ross)
was released in 2012 by Strange Wolf Press.
Follow his professional page on Facebook, or
find him on the web at www.richardalovett.com.
16 Linda Sieg, “Japan Nuclear Energy: Japan Unlikely to Exit Nuclear Power,” Huffington Post (from Reuters),
May 25, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/25/japan-nuclear-energy_n_ 1544875.html.
WAVES OF THE FUTURE
25

I
WANT BEANS.
Luna took the sentence strip Ben offered
her. She thought he was asking for
sungka, but didn’t have the right icon—
he only had his small travel communication
book.
“Oh, okay,” she said, pulling her sungka
board from its place under the coffee table.
She held it up. “Sungka?”
Ben reached for the wooden board, so she
knew she had guessed correctly. He placed
the board on the couch between them. Luna
stuck her hand underneath the table, grabbed
a clear plastic box full of pinto beans, and began
counting beans into each of the seven
bowl-like holes in her side of the oblong
board. She had three done when Ben finished
filling his side. He was good with numbers.
“Man, you’re fast, Bennie-boy.”
Ben cleared his sentence strip and had a
comment ready by the time Luna had finished
counting her beans.
I LIKE BEANS.
Luna took the sentence he offered, reading
it quickly before placing it back on the Velcro
strip at the bottom of Ben’s book. “You like
sungka. I know. I do too.” She made a mental
26
In the
Green
K. S. Patterson
note to make a “sungka” PCS for Ben’s travel
book.
She paused for a moment, looking at Ben.
His eyes slid away from hers, but she knew he
was listening. She tapped her palm against her
chest, “It’s my turn to go first.” She didn’t feel
the faint spike of anxiety that usually meant
Ben would protest. Smiling, she leaned forward
to lightly squeeze his forearm in a couple
of places.
“Thanks Ben.” She withdrew her hand and
removed all of the beans from one of the
bowls on the board. Moving counterclockwise,
she dropped one bean in each bowl until
she ran out, then gathered all the beans
from the bowl her last bean had landed in and
continued until her last bean landed in an
empty bowl.
“Your turn.”
Ben made his selection, rolling the beans in
his hand for a good minute before beginning
to drop them in the bowls. Luna leaned back
in her seat, knowing she was going to be waiting
a while. Ben always seemed to be able to
think three or four moves ahead in sungka, so
his turns usually lasted a lot longer than hers
did. She watched Ben’s hand as he played. He

used his thumb to slide a bean up to his fingers
and rubbed it before dropping it into the
board.
It was the same motion he had used when
he was a kid and still playing with giant plastic
containers of beans and uncooked rice. He
still needed lots of tactile sensory, but Luna
had noticed the weird looks and faint feelings
of discomfort coming from Nanay’s friends
when they saw a teenage boy sitting at the
table squeezing and dropping handfuls of uncooked
beans. So she had replaced all the
shells and tamarind seeds her family used as
game pieces with beans, and taught Ben to
play sungka.
When Ben finished his turn, he had a huge
mound of beans in his ‘mother house.’ Luna
glanced down at hers. Three. She managed to
get two more beans before her turn ended. “I
think you’re gonna win again, Bennie.”
When they finished (Ben won, of course),
Luna made a quick phone call to her mother
while Ben cleaned up. “Na’ay, Ben and I are
heading over to Lola’s now. I think I’m going
to keep him with me for another night, if
that’s okay with you.” She cradled the phone
to her ear, absently listening to her mother’s
rote response and absorbing the bubbles of
calm contentment coming from Ben.
He scooped up a small handful of beans,
and allowed them to flow off of his palm into
their plastic case. Clink. Clink. Clink. Cling-
ClinkClink. Each muted sound elicited another
bubble. Luna noticed that her lips had
curved into a small, relaxed smile.
Ben put the lid on the beans and signed “All
done.”
“Okay Ma, see you tomorrow.” She paused
to give her mother a chance to ask to speak to
Ben, but only silence came through the line.
She sighed, unsurprised. “Bye, Na’ay.”
She hung up and looked out through the
milky opaque glass of her reinforced window.
The sky was still a soft green, so it was safe
enough to walk. “Let’s go see Lola,” she said to
Ben.
He hung the lanyard attached to his book in
the crook of his elbow and took her hand.
They walked down the street together. Luna
struggled to keep Ben in the Green Zone. It
was the safest part of the walkway, but he hated
it. He walked as close to the edge as he
could, often attempting to slip into the Yel-
IN THE GREEN
JUNE 2013
low. Her arm began to ache from the effort of
keeping him by her side.
When Petra II was colonized, it was designed
to be as Earth-like as possible. Only
Earth-imported building materials had been
used when creating structures, and imported
plants and wildlife had been integrated into
the local ecosystem. The native flora and fauna
tended to be larger than that of Earth, and,
in less than a century, the imported wildlife
that survived had evolved into larger, more aggressive
versions of their original Earth counterparts.
The Green Zone was constantly flooded
with sonic pulses and various inaudible frequencies
designed to keep the wildlife away.
Luna wouldn’t have noticed the dissonance if
it weren’t for her brother. A vague, but steadily
rising stream of unease trickled out of him
whenever he was within the Green. He tolerated
the Yellow Zone—where the protections
were muted—much better. The emotions she
picked up from Ben reminded her of the way
she had felt in dark spaces during childhood—
before the tolerance training and desensitization.
She wished the therapy had worked for
Ben.
They were on the receiving end of several
odd looks from people walking in the center
of the Green. Walking on the edge, as Luna
and Ben always did, was considered unwise—
a slightly irresponsible action most often done
by groups of young teenage boys. People obviously
in their twenties should have better
sense.
Luna let out a deep breath when they arrived
at Lola’s house. It was a simple square
building the same size and shape as every other
home on America Street. But the bold sapphire
blue color made it seem larger and more
imposing than its white and tan neighbors.
Ben had verbally expressed a preference for
the color when Lola was having her home retinted.
He placed his hand on the palmplate. The
door recognized him as a familiar entity, and
opened easily. Luna and Lola tried to keep Ben
with them as much as possible, so he was a
frequent visitor at Lola’s house. Nanay didn’t
seem to mind.
“Lola! Are you home?” Luna called once
they were inside.
“Grandson! Granddaughter!” They walked
27

ANALOG
through the hallway into the family room. Lola
was sitting in her usual chair, a black leather
recliner only slightly younger than Luna and
Ben. Drops of moisture decorated her brow,
and her black curls were a little wilted from
the humidity. She didn’t like artificial air or
heat, so Lola’s house relied on insulated curtains
to keep the heat out.
Lola scooted out of her chair and squeezed
Ben in a powerful hug like he was still a little
one, and didn’t tower over her slight five-foot
frame. She grabbed Luna’s hands in both of
hers and kissed her cheek. “Sit down, Granddaughter.”
I SEE LOLA.
He didn’t smile as he gave Luna his strip,
but her pleasure in seeing her grandmother
suddenly increased. Sometimes it was hard to
separate Ben’s happiness from hers, but it was
a positive emotion, so Luna couldn’t bring
herself to care.
“You’re right, that is Lola,” she said. She
looked at Lola. “Ben’s loving you right now.”
Lola signed “I love you” to him, then pointed
to a large stack of magazines on the floor.
“Pick up please, Ben.”
He lifted the heavy stack, placing them on
the table Lola patted. She immediately began
shuffling through the magazines.
“I saved a good one for you, Grandson.” She
squinted, then looked up at Luna, “Please.
Open the light.”
Luna flipped the light switch, and Lola offered
Ben a travel magazine, “I got this one
from that lady who always tries to get me to
go vacation off-world. It has lots of new places
in it.”
Ben quickly grasped the magazine, but she
held it fast, eyes on his face. After a moment,
he flicked his eyes to hers, briefly. “Thank
you.” His voice was barely audible.
Lola smiled and relinquished her hold on
the magazine. She squeezed his shoulder as he
began flipping through the pages. Her wrinkled
hands were still strong, her grip steady
and confident. After watching a few minutes,
Luna walked into the kitchen and looked in
the refrigeration unit. “I’ll make you some sinigang
tonight.”
“Okay, Granddaughter.”
Luna lost herself in the ritual of cutting vegetables
for the soup. Her hands remembered
Lola’s lessons from her childhood—-a tradi-
tional way to cut that gave a nod to both style
and function. Her contentment mingled with
Ben’s as she set water to boil on the stove and
listened with half an ear to the verbal part of
the conversation behind her.
“What do you see?”
“I like the ocean too, Grandson . . .”
“You’re right. The sky is red in that picture.
That’s Petra I . . .”
Even though he didn’t speak, Ben was talking.
The evidence of Ben’s communication
still made her happy. When they were children,
Ben had rejected the small electronic
communication device Ben’s teachers had
tried to get him to use. Even as a child, Luna
knew that being unable to communicate was
like a prison for Ben. She used the Net to research
and found out what they had used back
on old Earth, before palm-tablets had been developed.
The paper symbols served the same
function as a palm-tablet, but without the electronic
sounds that Ben was unable to tolerate.
The sky darkened to olive, then forest
green. By the time they finished eating and
Luna had placed the leftovers in the refrigeration
unit, the sky had deepened to a thick, velvety
green that was almost black. “You be
careful, granddaughter. It’s late already. Go
straight home.” She wasn’t about to argue;
they had lingered over dinner longer than usual,
and night had crept in while they talked.
The idea of walking home in the dark made
her vaguely uncomfortable, but the path was
well lit, and she would have Ben with her. She
was soothed by his company almost as much
as he was by hers.
“We will, Lola. See you tomorrow.” Luna
kissed her cheek, and opened the door while
Lola gave Ben another tight squeeze.
Ben stared at something above and to the
left of Lola’s head, but his too-soft voice made
another appearance. “Bye.”
Lola patted his hand, “Bye, bye Grandson.”
She signed a quick, “I love you,” before turning
to settle into her chair. She used her palms
to scoot herself all the way against the backrest,
her feet dangling a good foot off the floor
before she reached down to recline the chair.
The door closed behind them, shutting
away the soft light from Lola’s lamps. The lock
engaged with a soft electric buzz, followed by
the hiss of escaping air. Ben pressed his hands
over his ears. She pressed them down again.
28 K. S. PATTERSON

The walkway glowed in front of them. A fivefoot
wide section in the middle of the path
was illuminated by eerie green light, and sandwiched
between two yellow-lit sections of the
same width. The path home.
Luna took Ben’s hand. “Stay on the Green,”
she reminded him.
The road was empty, and Luna’s occasional
reminder, “Green. Stay in the Green please,”
sounded odd and echo-y over the loud chirping
and chittering of the night creatures hidden
in the heavy dark looming outside the
path.
They were only a block from Luna’s home
when Ben stopped, abruptly. A spike of intense
distress that made her instantly nauseous
warned her the moment before Ben
twisted his hand out of her grasp. He pressed
his hands over his ears, his entire body vibrating,
lips emitting a low, repetitive sound. He
lunged into the Yellow Zone. Luna grabbed
his arm, and his body weight pulled her into
the Yellow after him. Ben’s footsteps stuttered
at the outer edge of the Yellow, and he
stopped. Luna’s momentum carried her further;
she managed to release Ben’s arm before
she tripped out of the Yellow and into the
darkness beyond.
She was alone. Her breath hitched, and her
hand landed on something small and sharp. It
burst under the weight of her hand, coating
the ground with warm slime, and her palm
slipped out from under her. Her chin hit the
ground. Pain shot into her jaw, but was soon
overwhelmed by deep fear. Luna couldn’t tell
if it was her own. Alone, alone, alone. Her
thoughts and motions were sluggish and she
struggled to push the feelings aside. She had
to get back on the walkway.
The night seemed to fold around her and
constrict. Anxiety coiled in her stomach. She
forced herself to stand, and move toward the
yellow light. Something hit her head hard,
shrieking. She grabbed at it. Her fingers slid
over a mass of fur and scales. Its frantic motions
made it tangle itself in her long, straight
hair. Claws scraped across her hands, and she
cried out in pain as a warm wet substance
dripped from her scalp into her eyes. She
stumbled. The ground sloped beneath her
feet, and she began to slide downward, barely
keeping her footing. The yellow got further
and further away until it finally faded from
IN THE GREEN
JUNE 2013
sight.
Abruptly, hands grasped her arms and
pulled her forcefully backwards. The high
pitched shrieking and struggling of the creature
trapped in Luna’s hair increased. She felt
a pulse of the familiar emotional scent that
was Ben’s alone, and realized he followed her
into the dark. She reached up and gripped a
furry body and what felt like a claw-tipped
wing. She tucked her chin to her chest and
Ben released her arms. His hands moved to
her hair, gently pulling, that low noise coming
from the back of his throat. Luna felt his anxiety
rising and ebbing in waves, but he continued
to work his hands in her hair. Luna tried
to keep the unknown animal as still as possible.
Finally, Ben was able to pull the creature
from her hair. Her eyes had adjusted somewhat,
so she was able to see him carry it a few
steps away, and deposit it gently on the
ground. She wiped the blood from her face
and hands on the hem of her shirt. He returned
to her side and took her hand.
“We’ve got to find the Yellow.”
Luna looked around her. She was completely
disoriented. Ben waited expectantly by her
side. She felt no anxiety form him, only calm
patience. She always took care of him, kept
him safe.
Several minutes ticked by. Ben’s confidence
pounded in her head, and she stood immobilized
because she knew, knew, that she
couldn’t lead him home.
“I’m sorry, Bennie. I don’t know the way.”
She spoke the words, even though she didn’t
know if he understood.
She was afraid to take a step in any direction.
What if she only led them farther from
the path?
As more time passed by, and Luna remained
paralyzed, unable to choose, to move,
Ben’s calm finally began to ebb away. His rising
anxiety mingled with her own until her
whole body felt tight—like it was about to explode.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She
couldn’t stop repeating the words. A sticky,
cottony feeling lodged in her throat. The panic
wasn’t all her own.
He took a step to the left. Then another,
pulling her along with him, his hand tightening
on hers like he was afraid to lose her. His
29

ANALOG
steps were hesitant at first, then his stride
lengthened and quickened until they were
both running headlong through the dark. A
thin ribbon of yellow light appeared before
them and they ran steadily forward, bursting
onto the path, across the Yellow, and into the
Green.
Ben dropped her hand, frantically placing
symbols, and ripping the Velcro-backed sentence
strip from his book. He dropped to his
knees on the pavement, and pushed his strip
roughly into Luna’s hands. He touched each
icon heavily.
I WANT. BEANS.
“Bennie, Bennie. I don’t have it with me.”
His hands were covered with bite marks and
scratches. His panic increased, seeming to fill
her lungs and chest with thick paste. Each
beat of her heart felt hard and intense, like
punching through water. She sucked in air,
trying not to hyperventilate. “Ben, it’s okay.
Calm down.”
Ben tapped the strip in Luna’s hand, over
and over again, bobbing his head up and
down rhythmically, the silent movement of his
lips echoing in the still air.
I WANT. BEANS.
I WANT. BEANS.
I WANT. BEANS.
I WANT. BEANS.
I WANT. BEANS.
She grabbed him around the torso, pulling
him against her chest. She squeezed him as
hard as she could, but their panic didn’t ebb,
the tightness in their chest didn’t ease, the
need to scream rose in a steady eruption up
their throat.
Luna opened her mouth and let the sound
explode, “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” It cracked
against the air and shattered the sky with lightning
as invisible as Ben’s voice. He wrapped
his arms around her and they rocked together
until the storm . . . suddenly . . . stopped.
As one, they released each other. Luna took
a deep breath. The air flowed sweet and easy
in her lungs. She stood, silently watching as
Ben retrieved his book. The laminated icons
were a bit worse for the wear after lying face
down in the dirt. Luna smoothed the crumpled
sentence strip in her hand and returned
it to its place.
Ben quickly flipped through the pages; the
soft sound of icons being pulled from their
Velcro was strangely soothing. He held out the
strip and Luna took it automatically. She
looked at Ben’s face, and for once he actually
met her eyes.
I SEE BEN.
Luna stared into his brown eyes for a long
moment. She tasted the complex mire of emotions
blending inside her as she looked at her
reflection in Ben.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. We’re the same, Bennie.
Exactly the same.”
They walked home, side by side, and stumbled
tiredly into Luna’s house. She turned on
the light and saw the sungka board sitting on
the coffee table next to the neat little plastic
box. She hadn’t put it away before they left.
Luna flopped onto the couch, and pulled the
board onto her lap.
“Hey, Bennie,” she said, as he sat down on
the couch next to her, “I want beans!” Ben
dropped his book on the carpet by his feet,
wiped his bloody hands on his pants, and
smiled.
Then, he began counting out the beans. ■
30 K. S. PATTERSON

Wavefronts
of History
and
Memory
There is a coldness at my heart, colder
even than the airless space around me:
a ball of laser-cooled cesium gas mere
billionths of a degree above absolute.
Surrounded by layers and shells of vacuum
and ceramic though it may be, still I feel the
tendrils of cold creeping like threads of ice
through my chest. I shudder at the necessity.
But the promise . . .
In one facet of my mind, a jewel-toned
transparent sphere clicks open to reveal a profusion
of layers: Paleoelectromagnetic Era,
Broadcast Age, Late Encrypted Period. The
vertical scale absurdly exaggerated, of course.
The surface of the sphere divided into sectors
whose names predate even the Eoradio Age:
Centaurus, Pisces, Canopus. And here, in
Aries sector at the lower edge of the Second
Global War period, where the earliest dawning
fragments of the later technophilian empires
can just barely be detected, a pulsing
point of blue-white light. Me.
I have emerged from Keene space into Ein-
David D. Levine
stein space exactly where I meant to be.
Where I want to be?
Perhaps not. But here I am.
I have not revisited this sector in eight
years, despite its rich promise, because of
memories of Aleá . . . the hope of what I might
find here outweighed by the dread of what I
know I will recall. But when the Institute extended
this cold bright promise to me, a signal
honor indeed, I knew immediately where
I must put it to use.
Oh, sweet Aleá, my lost love, the source of
so much pain . . . will the treasure be worth
the hazard?
I extend my antennae, fingers and toes
stretching outward—atom-thin wires shooting
from my ship-body—tiny impellers drawing
my substance out into a cobweb a
quarter-year wide. I turn the great ear toward
the rubble of Earth. I listen. I feel for the shredded,
attenuated signal.
And yes. Yes, oh yes, oh there it is.
Crisper than I’d ever before felt; clearer
31

ANALOG
even than I’d dared to hope. Forms and shapes
and . . . yes, artifacts, emerging from the noise
and dust under my mental fingers’ touch.
My heart pounds with excitement. My fingers
itch to probe and pry the treasures from
this lode. But the demands of the Institute
must first be met. I extract my attention from
my work and open a speaker within my cabin.
“We’ve reached the target coordinates,” I
say. “Signal’s clear.”
“No errors?” my passenger asks, his voice as
hard-edged and inelegant as the awkward prototype
in my guts. “No malfunctions?”
Evon is his name, a technofactor imposed
on me by the Institute to install, monitor, and
tune the new cryomagnetic detector. I’ve
worked alone these eight years; I tolerate his
presence with ill grace. My internal cameras
are off, but the sound of his voice brings to
mind his rough unstyled hair and beard, his
coarse, merely practical clothes. He is a gray
man with a gray mind, but I need his skills.
In grudging response to his questions, I focus
on my own systems. The chill of the new
detector pierces my belly with icy talons but
there are no other, unanticipated pains. “No.
Everything seems to be in order.”
“Good. I run diagnostic now.”
“Wait!” Even the thought of his hairy knuckles
beneath my panels feels like a violation.
Even worse, a diagnostic on the new detector,
so intimately interwoven with my own systems,
could damage my mind. “Let me disengage
first.”
With one last covetous glance at the crystalline
beauty of the new data, I draw my
awareness down and in, releasing the tug and
whisper of the electromagnetic spectrum and
focusing on the command couch in my forward
cabin. A figure there sits up, reaches disused
fingers awkward to the fastenings at the
nape of the neck. A sucking sound, a harsh
moment of transition . . . and I am embodied.
Heart pulses, ship gravity draws down on
arms, legs, breasts. I pull the heavy helmet
from my head and blink.
The action may look like waking, but to me
it feels like falling asleep. The ship has no
awareness of itself, but when connected to it I
am empowered; I feel correlations and make
intuitive leaps impossible to my human brain
alone. Without the helmet I am half myself.
But there are compensations.
To ground myself in my body I run fingers—my
physical fingers—along the command
couch’s seams, the nubbly lines of
warm buttery leather waking the connections
between skin and brain. I stroke the cold firm
metal of the couch’s frame, feel the play of
joint and tendon in my hands, smell my own
sweat. Not conventionally pleasant, but warm,
human. Me.
I squeeze my own breasts, bringing a brief
bright shock of arousal. Compensations, oh
yes. I smile, enjoying the play of muscle and
the slip of lips across teeth.
I rise from the couch, my small unsteadiness
the result of only mental disorientation;
as always, my human body has been as well
maintained as any of my other systems by the
ship’s faithful, silent mechanisms. A robe of
maroon silkfish skin hangs by the door, and I
glide its delicious texture over my nakedness.
Usually I maintain the ship at blood heat, but
Evon hails from snowy Svyataya Kirill and
both heat and nudity make him uncomfortable.
He barely acknowledges my entrance, eyes
and hands busy with the console of some device
he’s brought with him. It’s hard and boxy,
its slick gray finish an intrusion on the lush
curved surfaces and rich textures of my cabin.
A thick cable runs to one of my ports, probing
and analyzing the new detector and its interfaces
with my systems. “Would you like some
tea?” I offer.
“Is enough,” he grunts, pointing to a glass
of water he’s poured himself. We’re speaking
Languedoui, our best common language, but
his thick Kirilian accent strips it of articles and
pronouns. A half-eaten food bar litters the
table beside it; he eats nothing else. “Efficient,”
he’s explained. His screen jerks and
tics with graphs and numbers. I can’t wait until
this desiccated man is finished with his
work, off my ship, out of my life.
I take snowberries and fresh mint from the
larder, muddle them with sugar and cinnamon,
add water and just a tinkle of ice. Ahh.
As I drink, I settle myself cross-legged on the
long padded bench that rings the main cabin,
watching Evon work. There’s little else to do
and nowhere else to go; the ship has only one
sleeping cabin and I’ve ceded it to him for the
duration. Not that I use that berth much myself.
Ever since Aleá left, eight years ago, I
32 DAVID D. LEVINE

sleep in the command couch. The ship’s systems
tickle my mind as I dream, the weird disturbing
visions the price I pay for the
occasional astonishing insight.
The ship and I are one, in this as in so many
things. The ship does not even have a name;
my own name, Kell, is what appears in dock
registries and bills of lading when I am in port.
“How’s it going?” I ask after a while.
“Eh?” He does not look up.
“Your diagnostic. Will it be finished soon?
I’d like to get back to work, if I may.”
Now he does look up, his gaze flicking
across my hairless scalp, the glossy metal
plates at crown and temples and nape, before
settling on my eyes. I know the plates disquiet
him; on Svyataya Kirill what I’ve done to myself
for my studies is illegal. Even in the wider
human community, few are willing to undergo
the surgeries, the therapies, the learning to
walk all over again. Augments like me are a curiosity
to many, monstrous to some. Defiant, I
go bare-headed in public. “Half hour,” he says.
“Have you found any problems so far?”
“No, no, no. Is very good. See?” He turns his
screen to me, showing a twitching chart. It is
meaningless to me; how can I understand
something I can’t touch? “Excellent sensitivity,”
he explains, pointing to a peak on the
graph. He smiles, the charts and numbers
bringing his face alive for the first time. “Better
than expected.”
“I’m pleased,” I say, and I really am. The
frigid box of barely-tested hardware welded to
my ship’s core makes me uneasy, but I salivate
at the promised results. “I can’t wait to try it.”
“You will like.” Evon turns his shoulders to
face me, politeness winning out over his habitual
reticence, though his eyes still dart to
the screen at intervals. “What do you hope to
find,” he says, “with new detector?”
My area of study, I explain, is the Showa period
of the Nihon culture: a single century in a
single culture of the Late Telegraphic and Early
Broadcast strata. Despite its obscurity, I believe
this period is a key hinge-point between
the pre-electromagnetic culture of ancient Nihon
and the daikeiretsu governments that
dominated the planet in the twenty-second
century and pioneered the industrialization of
space. Somewhere in the vast middens of
noise and garble that form the electromagnetic
landscape of the Tojo Shogunate, I am con-
WAVEFRONTS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY
JUNE 2013
vinced, can be found the seeds of the
Kikkasho Efflorescence that birthed our modern
world.
But it’s a hard period to study, a deep deep
layer of the fuzziest, most tenuous signals. The
radioartifacts of the Late Telegraphic were indistinct,
weak, and drowned in noise even
when they originated; today they are smeared
across the outermost surface—the bottom, in
radioarchaeologists’ upside-down traditional
terminology—of a sphere nine thousand years
in radius that expands further each day. Torn
by dust clouds, punctured by stars, and dispersed
by nebulae, most of this enormous
spherical surface is useless; the areas of good
seeing are rare and eagerly sought. We have
come to one such location because of its unparalleled
view of Nihon in years 16 through
19 of the Showa period, or 1941 through
1944 in the anno domini system also in use at
the time.
“It was during that period,” I tell Evon, “that
the baryonic energy technologies that eventually
both powered humanity’s expansion into
space and demolished the Earth made their
first crude weaponized appearances. It’s well
known that Nihon was the first Earth culture
to feel the impact of these weapons, at the
end of the Second Global War, and that attack
had a profound impact on the culture’s development
and attitudes toward those technologies
in the following centuries. But the
reasons Nihon was attacked are unclear; even
the identity of the attacker is disputed. I hope
to unearth radioartifacts of the Tojo Shogunate
to definitively answer this question.”
“What kind signal strengths, these artifacts?”
“Four point three femtojanskys.” Numbers
are not my forte, but this cruel figure is etched
on my heart. “No more.”
Evon’s lips purse in concentration. His eyes
had wandered during my discussion of history
and culture, but this statistic is something he
can get his hands around. “Is very weak, yes.
But new detector can do, I think.” He nods, as
though to reassure himself. “Yes. Can do.”
I can’t help but recall my last dig at this site.
Aleá had squealed in delight as the first signals
had come through. “My God!” she said. “Listen
to this!” She pulled the headphones from
her ears and jammed them down on my head.
Through hiss and whine I heard a voice in
33

ANALOG
archaic Nihongo—syllables shaped by lips and
tongue gone to dust nine thousand years ago.
It was nothing more than an advertisement for
cosmetics, but still . . . to hear that voice, that
ancient breath, across so many years was like
a miracle. I gasped and hugged Aleá close, the
headphones making the gesture awkward.
But the miracle had soured over the following
weeks, as we realized what a fluke that
first clear signal had been, how filthy and attenuated
most of the data was.
Perhaps the stress of that failure was the reason
Aleá had left. It is certainly the reason I
haven’t returned before this. But in eight years
I haven’t found any other site nearly as promising;
the new detector offers a chance to redeem
my reputation as a researcher, perhaps
even heal the still-raw hole in my self-esteem.
I’ve cashed in every favor I had at the Institute
to get myself selected for this pilot project.
Evon’s harsh voice breaks me out of my
reverie. “Can inspect data?”
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“The data, the artifacts, that you find with
new detector. May I inspect?”
“Certainly not!” The very thought of this
bloodless technician pawing through my artifacts
is an affront. But his startled eyes remind
me there isn’t any technical reason for me to
refuse. “I, uh, it’s . . . it’s too preliminary,” I
prevaricate. “Raw research data is . . . it’s subject
to misinterpretation. You understand.”
“I understand.” His face shows that he understands
all too well.
“So, uh . . . may I use the detector now?”
He gestures to the wall behind which the
device is installed. It is only in my mind, I’m
sure, that a wave of chill air flows from it.
“Certainly,” he says, then grins. “Good hunting!”
I manage, just, to remember to say “thank
you” on my way out. So eager am I to get to
work that I tear the sleeve of my silkfish robe
as I shuck it off. My fingers tremble as I fit the
heavy helmet to my head.
In the helmet’s close dark, I shut my eyes
and hold my breath. I press the activation
stud. After a moment of transition, the site
spreads itself out in my sensorium, so dense
with possible artifacts I practically salivate. I
ready my tools.
My mother has never understood why I
travel to barren, desolate areas of space thou-
sands of years away from Earth to study its history.
Archaeologists, she thinks, unearth physical
artifacts. But those traditionalists in their
heavy shielded suits can do little more than
scrape up shattered, melted fragments—ruined
bits of jetsam they can never even touch
with their own hands, nor display to the public
except behind thick glass stained yellow
with lead. We radioarchaelologists, on the other
hand, can reach across the years to grasp
Earth as it was, alive and buzzing with activity.
With any point in Einstein space just a step
away in Keene space, all we need do is travel
to a place with a clear view of our selected period
of history and bring a good enough detector.
And now, I hope, I have both.
Although the subjects of my work are only
tenuous wisps of radio waves, with the ship’s
help I perceive them as solid objects. Illusions
of weight, color, and texture help my ape-descended
brain distinguish signal from noise,
diamonds from dross. I use metaphors of hammers,
chisels, brushes; I chip and scrape away
at radio noise to reveal fragments of data like
jawbones and potsherds teased from the rock.
Then I fit those fragments together into useful
information.
Most of the artifacts I find were never intended
for public consumption: state secrets
sent along telegraph lines, messages of love
whispered over telephone, continent-wide
patterns of activity revealing hidden geopolitical
strategies. All preserved in time like rose
petals in amber, though fearfully attenuated
and torn by passing stars and veils of dust;
now revealed in vivid detail by the new detector.
My ship-enhanced mind identifies, sifts,
sorts, discards with thunderous speed.
I am entranced, overwhelmed. An unending
feast of data unveils itself: names, dates,
motivations. Details long lost to history. Astonishing
revelation after astonishing revelation.
Within mere hours the answers to some of
my field’s most vexing questions are laid plain
beneath my fingers. The baryonic bomb had
not been launched by either Sina or the Socialist
Republic Union, but by the American
States—a major power in later periods of history,
but isolationist and barely industrialized
during the First and Second Global Wars. Or
so we had thought. There are even tantalizing
hints that the isolationism of the States had
34 DAVID D. LEVINE

een broken by an ill-timed surprise attack by
Nihon itself.
There is more. Much more. These finds will
do more than repair my reputation; they will
make my name.
But as exciting as the artifacts are, the matrix
in which they are embedded is equally recalcitrant—a
hard, fibrous mass that must be
painstakingly chipped and scraped from each
new find. This is the ship’s representation of a
powerful noise source that requires significant
computation to separate from the desired
signal.
I’m spending far too much time removing
the same encrusted junk from artifact after artifact.
I decide to take a moment to analyze it,
in hopes of determining its source and factoring
it out of the data at a low level.
Usually this type of interference comes
from a nearby pulsar or black hole. But as I examine
the noise I find it is too hard-edged, too
gritty, for any natural source.
How can this be? I’m thousands of years
from the nearest inhabited world. I look more
closely, run a correlation with a database of artificial
noise sources.
The result comes back quickly, but it takes
me a long moment to understand it. When I
do, I feel a disorienting rush of vertigo—as
though I’ve been staring out the window at a
craggy landscape and suddenly realize it’s a
micrograph of human skin.
My own skin.
For the source of the interfering signal is
myself.
I laugh out loud at the realization, the sound
echoing harsh and moist within my helmet.
I have placed myself at the single point of
intersection between the grand expanding
sphere of human history and a tiny bubble a
mere eight years in radius: the wavefront of
the weeks I and my partner-lover Aleá studied,
coupled, and fought together while digging in
this exact same electromagnetic midden eight
years earlier. Although my earlier ship was
well-shielded by the standards of the time,
even the tiny amount of electromagnetic radiation
that leaked out is inescapable to the new
detector at this close remove.
I consider moving the ship to avoid the interference
from my earlier self, but a quick regional
scan reveals the futility of such an
action. The spherical wavefront of noise from
WAVEFRONTS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY
JUNE 2013
my earlier ship, though minuscule by comparison
with the sphere of history, is expanding
at the same rate of one light-year per year;
from now on, any attempt to study this point
in Earth history from this area of clear seeing
will find the ancient signal entangled with this
later, stronger one. And eight years of searching
have failed to find a better location.
I have no alternative but to find a way to filter
it out.
From a little-used drawer in the ship’s mind
I pull other tools, hard and shiny, better suited
to the fine jittery signals of the modern world.
I step back to a higher level of abstraction and
apply the tools to the direct feed from the new
detector, seeking to identify and eliminate all
signs of my previous self.
The low hum of the engines and the whirr
of the navigational sensors are the first, most
obvious targets, and I begin by adjusting the
antenna parameters to filter them out. These
adjustments are as familiar as my own breathing;
I used to have to do this every time the engine
was serviced.
As I work, I remember the self I was then.
Excited, driven, full of ideas, yes. But also arrogant,
conceited, too convinced of my own
genius. It was Aleá who kept me sane, helped
me focus my energies on the work and not on
self-aggrandizement.
Beautiful, compassionate, brilliant Aleá. It’s
true we spent nine hours in bed together on
the day we met. But it was always more than
just sex—she was the other half of my heart,
the completion of my mind. The papers we
wrote together were far more than the sum of
our skills; they were the product, the exponent,
of two fine minds operating in perfect
harmony. After she left I couldn’t work at all
for six months, then spent two years more in
an angry, wasteful thrash. It’s only in the past
year that I’ve been able to do productive work
again.
And now this. She—and the previous me—
are getting in my way again.
Distracted, I manage to mess up the compensator
settings. I have to reset, start over.
Beneath the helmet I feel my teeth grind.
Our work, like our loving, had always been
full of violent passion. Whenever we worked
a site together we would argue vehemently,
screaming and throwing things before reuniting
in a mad rush of intellectual and sexual en-
35

ANALOG
ergy. But eight years ago—in this very spot—it
had been different. We’d first sniped at each
other, then fought openly, then sullenly retreated
to separate work spaces as the signals
we’d worked so hard to locate fell apart under
our hands. We used different tools, I merged
with the ship and she with goggles and gloves,
but both of us were frustrated, angry, despairing—lashing
out at each other because the distant,
roaring stars and nebulae that were our
real enemies were beyond our reach. When
we gave up and transitioned back to the Institute,
we hadn’t spoken in days. I awoke the
next morning to a cold void in my bed and a
paper note: “Don’t try to follow me.”
I tore the note to pieces with my teeth,
then set it on fire.
But I’d never been able to burn away the
pain in my soul, the question that seared my
heart.
Why?
Why did she leave me?
We’d fought many times before. Why had
this fight been so different? So . . . terminal?
At last I am done filtering out the engine
and sensor noise. But pulling those away reveals
finer structures, fidgeting like a tangle of
fine wires. I’ve never seen signals like these
before; they were below the threshold of my
detectors at the time, even at a range of zero. I
look more closely.
These signals are the leakage from the ship’s
internal electronics. In a way, I am looking at
the workings of my own earlier mind. It’s a fascinating
and slightly disturbing thought.
I wish I could ignore these vibrating wires,
but I can’t; faint though they may be, these signals
are stronger than nine-thousand-year-old
radioartifacts. I must strain them out of the
data stream now or I’ll have to chip them off
of every single item later. I pull the old ship’s
documentation from storage and begin the
painstaking work of building a filter to remove
them.
Later. I find myself in the cabin, blowing the
steam off a bowl of miso soup. The hot bowl
trembles in my hands and I realize I haven’t
eaten in over twenty hours.
Evon is munching on one of his ubiquitous
food bars. “Is good, new detector?” he asks in
a conversational tone.
“Too good.” I sip cautiously. Still too hot.
“It’s picking up new sources of noise as well
as the new signals.” I find myself reluctant to
explain exactly what those noise sources are.
I’ve always been a private person, and never
shared the pain of my severed relationship
with anyone.
“I see on my readouts,” he replies. “Signal
source is nearby. Probably ship.”
“I know what it is.” I won’t let this bloodless
man tell me how to do my job.
“I can help filter it out.”
I feel my teeth grind together. “I have the
situation in hand.”
“You be careful,” he says, waving the food
bar. I wince as crumbs dirty the table. “Detector
is verrry sensitive. Focus on strong signal
could damage. Or worse.”
“I’ll be careful,” I snap, and take another sip
of soup to calm my nerves.
Damn it. I’ve burned my mouth.
After finishing my soup, I retire to the command
couch for a few hours’ rest.
In my dreams I’m back in school, my hair
luxuriantly curly and my mind still entirely organic.
I’m on a dig, a physical dig, in some
hot, sandy place where an unremitting sun
hammers down from a pink sky. An infinity of
scraped earth, neat terraces of precise excavations
divided into squares by glittering laser
beams, stretches away to the horizon.
With brush and pick and trowel I work
down through layer after layer of char and ash,
the ruins of some ancient disaster. The dark,
gritty stuff embeds itself beneath my fingernails
and makes me sneeze black goo. And
then I find a pair of skulls.
One bears a diadem of fine wire. The other . . .
I pick it up. Embedded in the skull are metal
plates, scratched and pitted with age.
The skull’s eyes open, and they are my own.
I thrash and gasp awake.
It takes only a few more hours’ work before
I’ve pared away the last of the intruding signal.
Or so I think. But I find the artifacts still gritty
with hard, encrusted noise. What have I
missed?
I switch back to the data stream. Although
I’ve filtered out every trace of my old ship’s
systems, and even my own augments, one
fine jittering wire of signal remains.
A wire like the wire diadem on the first
36 DAVID D. LEVINE

skull.
My pulse catches in my throat as I realize
the message my subconscious and/or the
ship’s autonomic systems were sending me in
my dream.
Aleá’s personal datappliance. The one electronic
system on board that was never, ever
connected to the ship’s network. This is its
signal.
I tease out the trembling wire with a fine
probe. It pulses between my fingertips like a
tiny bird’s rapid heartbeat.
I have spent my entire professional career
extracting meaning from electromagnetic artifacts
like this.
Secrets. Ancient mysteries. Solutions to
questions long unanswered.
Why did Aleá leave me?
No. I set the wire down. I never, ever
probed or pried into Aleá’s personal data
when we were together. To do so now would
be immoral, illegal, wrong.
What I should do is simply filter it out.
I sharpen a narrow chisel and apply it to the
wire . . . and a buzzer breaks my concentration.
“What are you doing?” comes Evon’s
groggy voice from the intercom in the sleeping
cabin. It’s three in the morning ship time,
not that I have been paying much attention to
that.
“There’s one last bit of signal I’m removing.”
“Detector is on verge of heterodyning!”
“I told you, I’ll be careful.” I cut the connection.
I feel the wire’s pulse through the chisel
handle.
I swallow.
I am an archaeologist. I study, I analyze, I decrypt.
I can’t ignore this data . . . this chance to
unearth the truth about my own past.
In my place I’m sure Aleá would do the
same.
I set the chisel aside, bring out probes and
brushes. The wire magnifies itself at my attention,
revealing its details.
This modern radioartifact is like a jeweled
bracelet beside the potsherds and spear points
of the Late Telegraphic, but the principles of
analysis are the same. The signal is crisp and
clean; the storage is encrypted, but that protection
is a paper shield against the powerful
blades of the ship’s processors. With a delicate
WAVEFRONTS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY
JUNE 2013
hook I tease out the shining strand representing
the decrypted signal.
I pull out my loupe, a metaphor for a sophisticated
pattern-matching algorithm, and
focus it on the glittering strand of data. I seek
my own name in a strong emotional context.
Long moments pass while the loupe does
its work. And then I hear Aleá’s voice, for the
first time in eight years. A sweet acid music
that pierces my heart and closes my throat.
I do love Kell, it says, but—
The buzzer interrupts again. “What!” I
shout through the ship’s speakers.
“Whatever you’re doing, stop it! Signal is
too strong! Detector is overh—”
I cut him off. I lock his door. I have to know.
I peer through the loupe again.
I do love Kell. Aleá’s lips, her breath, flutter
in my ear. But I must resign myself to the fact
that I can never be with her.
What?
I’ve tried for years to reconcile the one I
love with the body that shares my bed.But ...
but it’s finally gotten to the point that it’s too
painful. I can’t go on like this. She takes a
long, trembling breath. Lying with Kell is . . .
it’s . . . it’s like screwing a brain-damaged
child.And the worst thing is that she sounds
like my beloved.While the real Kell, the Kell I
love, is just a voice on a speaker and an unmoving
mannequin with a hard metal helmet
for a head.
The floor drops away and I feel the thousands
of empty light-years beneath me, a gap
of cold vacuum so far beyond human scale we
don’t even attempt to comprehend it. In
Keene space we can step across that gulf in
moments, but it is still vast beyond understanding.
I cannot kiss my beloved’s lips, Aleá sobs.
She cannot feel my caresses.
A long pause filled with shuddering sighs. I
feel a hot pain rising up from somewhere
deep within.
It was never me that Aleá loved. It was the
ship . . . or the union of the shipmind and my
organic brain . . . but my body, my warm sensual
body that has brought me so much pleasure,
by itself was not enough.
It was the tension between who I am and
what I am that tore Aleá and I apart. A tension
that I will never be able to resolve.
Aleá’s voice returns: I cannot touch the one
37

ANALOG
I love; I cannot love the one I touch.
And at that moment the detector overheats,
its cold ceramic casing shattering as the cesium
gas within expands a millionfold. Pain
tears through my systems as searing-cold gas
pours into spaces it was never meant to
touch.
My heart bursts because it has taken in too
much.
Oblivion.
Light stabs my eyes. I wince and squirm
away from the pain, raising hands to defend
myself, but something restrains me.
“Whoa, whoa, malyutka!” It’s Evon’s voice,
Evon’s hands on my wrists. “Don’t fight. Is
only me. You okay?”
“Uh . . .” My voice is ashy. “I’m alive . . .”
“Here. Drink.” A cool glass is pressed into
my hands. Water. I realize I’m parched. “Not
so fast!”
The glass is taken away. My thirst tells me
I’ve been insensate and unserviced for some
time. “How . . . how long?”
“Sixteen hours.” He hands me another glass
of water, and a food bar. It’s the most delicious
thing I’ve ever tasted. “Was getting pretty cold
before I managed to get door open. Lifesystem
working now, anyway.”
I shiver. It’s still pretty cold. “I’m sorry I
locked you in.”
“I’m sorry detector exploded. Next one will
have better compensators. Big question is, can
you fly ship?”
The helmet’s indicators have all gone black,
but the wall displays are operative. Drive systems
are good; navigation is running on back-
38
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www.analogsf.com
ups, but the coordinates of the last transition
are still locked in. “Yes. I can get us back to
the Institute, anyway.”
Evon blows out a sigh. “Is good.”
I turn the cold helmet over in my hands.
The shipmind is dead. A new one can be
grown from backups, of course, but it won’t
be exactly the same.
I won’t be exactly the same.
What do I want me to be?
I stare into the blind eye of the helmet’s
dead power indicator. It stares blankly back . . .
and suddenly I realize there’s a more immediate
problem. “My data!”
Evon quirks an eyebrow at me.
“All the data I’ve gathered here. Is it safe?”
He shrugs, spreads his hands. “I would never
consider looking. Raw research data, after
all. Subject to misinterpretation.” Though his
words are light, his eyes are as hard and cold
as one of his technical readouts. “You understand.”
I gather breath to snap a response . . . then
stop myself, letting it back out slowly. I begin
again. “Will you . . . would you, please, check
it for me? Make sure it’s properly stored and
backed up before we fire up the system for
the transition back to the Institute?”
A small smile, and a nod. “Since you ask so
nicely.”
“Thank you.”
There’s still a lot of noise crusted on my
soul. It will take a while to scrape it all off.
“Okay,” he says. “Where are manual controls?”
Together, we set to work. ■
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DAVID D. LEVINE

Jeff Sanford and several colleagues had
been sitting in the conference room
when the news came. The door
opened and Linda Wilson stuck her
head in. “Hey, guys.” she said, “the Crab Pulsar
has gone missing.”
Myra snickered. “Maybe we need to wipe
the lens.”
“We got an alert from the Navy,” said Linda,
referring to the U.S. Naval Observatory, also
located in Flagstaff. “They can’t find it. Neither
can I.”
Jeff checked his watch. His son Brian was a
sophomore at Northern Arizona. “He
promised a surprise this evening,” he said, getting
up, “but removing the Crab Pulsar’s a bit
much.”
It was well past visiting hours and the Lowell
Observatory was quiet. One of the interns
looked up from the Clark scope. “It’s still not
visible,” she said, backing away as they approached.
“The pulsar’s not there. I can see
the nebula, but nothing’s happening.”
The Crab Pulsar was seven thousand lightyears
away, in the constellation Taurus. It rotated
thirty times a second, providing a
flashing light that was impossible to miss.
Jeff checked the control console. “Radio
waves and x-rays are normal,” he said. “Must
be a dust cloud.”
Myra frowned. “A dust cloud couldn’t block
that thing off overnight.”
Glitch
Jack McDevitt
Linda was listening to her cell phone. She
nodded. Told them to wait. “Mauna Kea says
visibility was normal three hours ago.”
“Not possible,” said Myra.
Live and learn, thought Jeff. It was obviously
possible. He checked his watch. There’d be
an explanation in the morning, and Brian was
waiting for him. The surprise, he suspected,
would be a young woman. And probably talk
of an impending marriage. Kids, like pulsars,
tended to spring surprises.
But it was only an electronic gadget. A
game station of some kind, he guessed. “It’s a
Y-Box,” said Brian. He was taller than his father,
big, with wide shoulders and an easy-going
personality that sometimes seemed too
casual. Though when his mother ran off with
a supermarket clerk three years ago, he’d
blamed Jeff.
“What’s a Y-Box?”
“Come on, Dad. They’ve been advertising
them for two months.”
Jeff shrugged. “So what is it?”
“It creates artificial realities.”
Jeff smiled. “Okay.”
“Dad, you need to stop trying to hang onto
the twentieth century.”
“If you say so, Brian.”
“Good. Just give this a chance. You’ll like
it.” He produced a pair of helmets and held
one out for his father. “Have a seat and put
39

ANALOG
this on.”
It mattered to his son, so he settled into a
chair and pulled the helmet on. Brian touched
a computer key. “Pull the flap down over your
eyes,” he said. “Show starts in thirty seconds.”
Jeff complied. Everything went dark.
“Adjust it, Dad, so you aren’t getting any
light.”
“Believe me, there’s no light in here.”
“Good. Ten seconds.”
Stars appeared. It was still night, and he was
looking out across a bleak, dismal landscape.
Brian was beside him, still seated comfortably
on the sofa. But the living room, the coffee
table, the TV, were gone. “We’re on Mars,
Dad,” Brian said.
Jeff looked up at familiar constellations. “It’s
a bit more realistic than any other virtual landscape
I’ve seen. But—”
“Until now,” Brian said, “every landscape
you’ve been to has been like this, right?”
“More or less.”
“But no people? Right?”
“Sure there were.”
“Projections, you mean.”
“Yes, of course. Lots of people on the
beach, whatever.”
“You ever try talking with any of them?”
“Brian, they’re projections.”
“Okay, Dad. Let’s try somewhere else.”
Jeff laughed. “Okay. Go ahead.”
Mars faded. The world became brighter.
The sun came back. And some trees. A couple
of houses. His chair changed shape and he
was sitting on a horse. A warm breeze
brushed his cheeks. “Careful,” said Brian, riding
beside him. “Don’t fall off.”
Jeff was about to ask where they were
when he spotted the white obelisk rising into
the distant sky. The Washington Monument.
“Where are we?”
“K Street.”
Hoofbeats were approaching. And he saw
movement through the trees. A horse with a
tall, bearded rider came toward them. He
wore a jacket, a top hat, and hunting boots.
“Who is he?” asked Jeff.
Brian raised a hand to the rider. “Hello, Mr.
President.”
The rider stopped. “Hello,” he said. “Glorious
day, isn’t it?”
He did look like Lincoln. “You are good.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, sir.”
He touched his hat and was about to ride
off when Brian jumped back in: “Mr. President,
my father would like to ask a question.”
“Of course,” said the President. “I’ll be happy
to answer if I can, sir. What is it you wish to
know?”
“Umm—” Jeff felt lost.
“Go ahead, Dad,” said Brian.
And he understood. The projection could
have been programmed to respond to a specific
question from his son. But that possibility
was off the table if he was the source. “Mr.
President,” he said, “how high do you expect
the casualty list to be in this war?”
“What war is that, sir?”
Oh. “They haven’t seceded yet?”
Lincoln managed a smile. “Seceded? No, I
doubt it will come to that. Now I really must
go.”
Jeff shook his head. “You know, that’s a very
slick creation.”
Brian smiled. “Artificial intelligence.”
“I didn’t think it was possible.” Jeff
frowned. “Where is President Lincoln now?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“You want me to repeat it?”
“I guess the short answer, Dad, is that he’s
dead.”
“You’re talking about the historical Lincoln.”
“Of course.”
“What about the one we just talked to?”
“I turned it off.”
“You turned him off.”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“Was Lincoln aware that we were there?”
“It doesn’t say anything about that in the description.”
“But it does say that the Y-Box generates artificial
intelligences?”
“I guess it does. Yes.”
“So from his perspective, that virtual world,
with its virtual history, is real. He’s real.”
“I guess so.”
“So where is he now?”
Brian shrugged.
“Got one more question for you.”
“Fire away.”
“The Washington Monument.”
“What about it?”
“It wasn’t completed until something like
twenty years after the Civil War ended. The
40 JACK MCDEVITT

one we just saw was perfect.”
Brian rolled his eyes. “I guess it was a
glitch,” he said.
Jeff was getting ready for bed when his ringtone
sounded. It was Myra. “The pulsar’s
back,” she said.
He was on his way to the observatory next
morning when Myra called again. “Jeff ?” she
said.
Her voice sounded strange. “Don’t tell me.”
“Yep. Not a sign of it.”
“That can’t be right.”
“There’s something else.”
GLITCH
JUNE 2013
“What?”
“Pluto and Neptune have gone missing,
too.”
“What?”
“According to Beijing.”
“Well, that’s crazy.”
“Hold on a second, Jeff.” Seconds later she
was back. “We just lost Uranus.”
Jeff felt his stomach tighten. “Can’t be,” he
said.
“It has to be an equipment failure.”
“I hope.”
“What else could it be, Jeff ?”
“A glitch.” ■
IN TIMES TO COME
Our lead story for July/August is “Thaw,” by Arlan Andrews,
Sr. It takes place in a setting that may not seem very science
fictional at first, but a careful reading reveals quite a
bit going on under the surface, and it’s all the more interesting for it.
Then we take advantage of the double-issue format to bring
you a pair of novellas: Howard V. Hendrix’s “Other People’s Avatars”
and Brad Torgersen’s “The Chaplain’s Legacy,” a sequel to his popular
short story, “The Chaplain’s Assistant.” Of course, we’ll also have
the final installment of Edward M. Lerner’s Dark Secret.
We’ll have a pair of fact articles this time out—one for the
astrophysicists: “Galactic Cannibalism: Who’s on the Menu,” by H.G.
Stratmann; and one for the biologists: “The Fabulous Fruits of
Mendel’s Garden,” by Fran Van Cleave.
There’s also plenty of shorter fiction, such as Bud
Sparhawk’s “CREM d’Etiole,” Rick Norwood’s “Love,” Marissa K.
Lingen and Alec Austin’s “Milk Run,” K.C. Ball’s “A Quiet Little Town
in Northern Minnesota,” and a Probability Zero by Jamie Todd Rubin,
as well as stories from newcomers Seth Dickinson, Rosemary Claire
Smith, Haris A. Durrani, and Mary Lou Klecha.
41

THE ALTERNATE VIEW Jeffery D. Kooistra
ON THE SUCKING OUT OF INERTIA
So I was minding my own business, getting
ready to hang Christmas lights in
early December, when I checked my
Facebook account before going outside
and found an email from Rajnar Vajra. He
was writing a story for an anthology and
wanted to ask me a physics question, or
more precisely, a “super-science physics”
question. Here’s how he put it: “So here’s my
question: assuming some miraculous device
that can temporarily remove a person’s inertial
potential, and considering all net forces,
if said person jumped off a building, how fast
would they fall?”
Actually, Rajnar had already thought this
over, but wanted me to think it over as well
to see if I would independently come to the
same conclusion he had, which he did not
provide me with in the email.
The most dramatic and vivid memory I
have of a device that “sucks out inertia”
comes from Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children.
Therein, Lazarus Long’s long-lived
“families,” in an attempt to escape persecution
on Earth, steal an enormous generationtype,
slower-than-light starship. Prior to this
theft, Lazarus had discussed with his genius
friend Andy “Slipstick” Libby the possibility
of developing a “space drive” to aid in their
escape. This Libby accomplished. It fit inside
a satchel. Heinlein described how it looked
thusly: “Assembled from odd bits of other
equipment, looking more like the product of
a boy’s workshop than the output of a scientist’s
laboratory, the gadget which Libby referred
to as a ‘space drive’ underwent
Lazarus’ critical examination. Against the polished
sophisticated perfection of the control
room it looked uncouth, pathetic, ridiculously
inadequate.”
42
A few sentences later he says it’s a “giddy
little cat’s-cradle of apparatus.”
This is typical of Heinlein when describing
something entirely made up—he makes the
reader do the heavy lifting of envisioning it.
It is up to you to decide what an uncouth, pathetic,
cat’s-cradley thing looks like.
For the next several pages the starship is
taken on a trajectory very near the sun, the
idea being that Libby’s machine will be
turned on, the inertia in the ship will go
away, and the Sun’s light and wind will instantly
accelerate the ship to near light
speed. Bear in mind that they don’t as yet
even know for sure if the drive will work—
but then comes that inevitable moment
when they’re going to find out that it does.
Or die.
The scene is as follows:
“(Lazarus) poked a thumb at Libby’s uncouth-looking
‘space drive.’ ‘You say that all
you have to do is to hook up that one connection?’
‘That is what is intended. Attach that one
lead to any portion of the mass that is to be
affected.’
Andy hooked it up.
‘Go ahead,’ urged Lazarus. ‘Push the button,
throw the switch, cut the beam. Make it
march.’
‘I have,’ Libby insisted. ‘Look at the Sun.’
‘Huh? Oh!’
The great circle of blackness, which had
marked the position of the Sun on the starspeckled
stellarium, was shrinking rapidly. In
a dozen heartbeats it lost half its diameter;
twenty seconds later it had dwindled to a
quarter of its original width.”
No doubt about it, that’s exciting stuff! I

loved it when I read it the first time, and I
still love it. But now I’m a bit more critical.
For instance, take this “attach that one lead
to any portion of the mass that is to be affected”
business. Why? Why can’t the lead just
hang in the air? The air is part of the mass to
be affected, isn’t it? If the air doesn’t have the
inertia sucked out of it along with everything
else in the ship when the drive is turned on,
you’ll get one shredded ship in an instant.
A bit later, with the ship moving comfortably
close to the speed of light, but not yet
even outside the orbit of Mercury, Libby
wants to turn off his space drive. Lazarus is
concerned that the ship will slow down
again once it has its inertia back, but Libby
tells him that their current velocity is as real
as any other velocity. He points out that turning
off the drive will not instantly transport
them back to the spot where it was turned
on, so why should turning it off return the
ship to the velocity it had initially?
It’s a fair point. Made up physics is fine in
SF as long as you keep it consistent, and
Heinlein’s version of inertia removal in
Methuselah’s Children marks a sort of upper
limit for inertia-removal gizmos. That is, 1.)
inertia is removed instantly, and 2.) it is reduced
to zero, and 3.) there are no “penalties”
involving either energy or momentum
conservation.
But I’m not convinced this particular version
of the gizmo can ever actually be treated
in a consistent way. Consider point 2 and
look at the implications. Inertia is the tendency
of a mass to resist a change in its state
of motion. It doesn’t like to be sped up, but
once it has been, it doesn’t want to be
slowed down, and it doesn’t want to change
direction. Now suppose we have a spaceship
under thrust, and we drop the inertia to zero.
Regardless of the amount of push from the
propulsion system, our ship will suddenly accelerate
to—Well, to some very high speed.
The limiting speed will depend on the
propulsion method and the environment the
ship is in. In Heinlein’s tale, the push wasn’t
from the engines, but from the sun. If we are
pushing our ship with a big laser from the
Moon, it will be near lightspeed in very short
order, limited only by the build up of the resistant
opposing force of the tiny amount of
matter that exists even in “empty” space (es-
ON THE SUCKING OUT OF INERTIA
JUNE 2013
sentially, wind resistance). If the push is coming
from some kind of rocket, the limiting
speed will depend not on the total thrust,
but on the exhaust velocity of the jet (I
think—I’m willing to be convinced otherwise).
And what happens when the laser or the
rocket is turned off ? I don’t know. It isn’t defined.
Even if our ship was in perfectly empty
space, with the push gone, there is no reason
for the ship to keep going at all, since the inertia
is gone and that is the only thing that
keeps something moving when the force
goes to zero. But there’s also no reason for it
to stop, and no reason for it not to just go any
which way at any old speed.
So we’d be better off living with some restraints
on our inertia sucker. Like with point
one. Why should the inertia go away instantly?
You don’t cool a beer instantly by putting
it in the fridge, nor can you suck all the air
out of an airlock instantly. And let’s not have
all of it go away. As long as there is always
some inertia, we can continue to use Newton’s
laws and treat removal of inertia exactly
the same as a removal of mass.
Under these conditions, suppose we have
our spaceship out in deep space moving
along at some velocity. It doesn’t even need
to have the rockets firing. Now we turn on
our gizmo, reduce the inertia (or mass) of
our ship to a tenth of what it was, and assuming
momentum conservation is in effect,
what happens? Momentum is defined as the
mass times the velocity, so if we reduce the
mass to one tenth of its initial value, to conserve
momentum our ship is going to have to
move ten times faster. Keep sucking out inertia
this way and eventually we’re pushing
lightspeed, and to slow down, all we need to
do is put the inertia back in.
Okay, before you rush off to write a letter
to Trevor, I am aware that even though I imposed
momentum conservation, I ignored
energy conservation. As most of you know,
though momentum is directly related to the
velocity, kinetic energy is related to the
square of the velocity. So in general, most of
the time you are not going to be able to satisfy
the demands of both momentum and energy
conservation with this particular approach.
However, if you’re writing a
super-science SF story, what you can do is
43

ANALOG
bring in the designated distinguished bafflegab
expositor to explain how the energy imbalance
is “borrowed from the fabric of
spacetime itself!” and paid back in full when
the gizmo is turned off.
It might also be fun to consider some other
options. Momentum is, after all, a vector
quantity. So maybe in addition to (or even
just instead of) varying inertia at will, perhaps
we should think about varying it by direction
as well. You know, turn down the inertia
in the direction you want to go, and
turn it up in the directions you don’t. This
would nullify the force of drag we’d get
when plowing through the interstellar medium
at high speed, and also make it harder to
be deflected off course.
But exploring this could run into a lot of
words and I want to come back to Rajnar’s
question. You guys run with it.
The thing with gravity is that it doesn’t
care what the mass of something is—on
Earth it’s going to accelerate rocks, people,
spaceships, raindrops, at 32.2 f/s/s. Suppose
Rajnar’s jumper leaps off the building and
starts falling, then turns his inertia way down
(but not to zero) like we discussed above
with that spaceship. Once he’s falling he’s
got velocity, so regardless of gravity he’s going
to gain speed dramatically and hit the
ground far faster than gravity would get him
there.
However, with less inertia, air resistance
(we ain’t out in space here) will work on him
much, much more effectively. So depending
on how thick the air is (among other things,
including when during the fall he sucks out
his inertia), the jumper might actually slow
down. And if there is any cross wind, he’ll be
taken along with that at the speed of the
wind so God only knows where he’d actually
hit the ground.
Come to think of it, since he’s in an atmosphere,
there is another force we’ve ignored
completely that we really can’t ignore at all.
It’s buoyancy!
A submarine at the bottom of the sea
blows out ballast that reduces its weight (and
thus, its density) and the force of buoyancy
floats it up toward the surface. So if our
jumper up on the roof just turns down his inertia
enough, without even jumping off at all
he’ll soon find himself floating up into the
sky like a helium balloon. If he did jump,
with a suitable dial and a bit of finesse, our
jumper could adjust his inertia on the fly and
come down to a nice soft landing.
So my answer to Rajnar’s specific question
is this: If he jumps and the building is in an
atmosphere, and he removes his inertia soon
enough, ultimately he’s going to rise, but exactly
how fast depends on too many things to
provide a number.
And with that, and I know this is coming
pretty late, Merry Christmas, Happy New
Year, and congratulations Trevor on your rise
up the masthead! ■
Know when to tune out. If you listen to too much advice, you may
wind up making other people’s mistakes.
—Ann Landers
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to
stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.
—Mark Twain
44 JEFFERY D. KOOISTRA

Hydroponics
101
Farmer slept in the crook of the MudderTree’s
limbs and dreamt of murder.
This was the most dangerous dream to
dream, and though he recalled none of
it by morning, he knew of his transgression
from the wilding spiders bearing down from
MudderTree’s top branches when he awoke—
spiders to be dealt with before they ate all the
sweet green leaves and the golden meat-fruits
that were his most cultivated fare.
Farmer shuddered as he snapped the legs
off each and piled their leathern bodies high
on a flat of bark midway down the Mud-
Maggie Clark
Illustrated by Mark Evans
derTree, a chorus of bright, beady eyes twitching
after him as he worked upon their kin.
Even near death, each pair of mandibles wended
a sticky, translucent substance between
them, which stuck to the bark like last-ditched
anchors as he lifted them one by one and
drank their bitter innards from a perforated
corner in each fuzzy husk. He could have
thrown them into the water and watched
them drown, but MudderTree was sometimes
not abated by this gesture, and left their bodies
floating in the pool where he daily swam
and bathed and hoped to drink. Better not to
45

ANALOG
displease her any further, so Farmer swallowed
his deepest fears gulp by gulp until he
choked on them and then, only then, did MudderTree
make swift work of all the rest.
Morning was a façade the lights outside his
sphere brought, and which illuminated the
sliding metal rack along which his entire
world rolled in yearlong cycle, the glass of it
clinking from time to time against other enclosures
down the line. Reverberations from adjacent
cells were the only sounds that slipped
with any surety into Farmer’s sphere; though
he could see the observation deck at the heart
of the facility, it might as well have been painted
to the ceiling of his heavens, for all he
could choose his interactions with the distant
figures moving silently within. Farmer knew
no help would be forthcoming if he failed to
slay his unwanted morning guests all on his
own, or if MudderTree withered further under
his return to violent thoughts; or if ever he fell
catatonic or worse within this seamless shell.
What use were they who would never intervene?
After Farmer had cultivated his MudderTree
to bioluminescence, he liked to watch the
blue glow of her skin turn the glass near perfectly
opaque—to pretend that there was
nothing of note beyond his sealed cocoon,
and never had been. But today he could not
even bear to watch his own reflection, his
face a shag of dark, matted hairs through
which the whites of his bloodshot eyes shone
through. Not much difference from the spiders’
faces, when he came to think of it. He
wondered if that was why he loathed them,
too.
The day’s good work lay in further cultivation.
Farmer soothed his MudderTree with
coarse hands upon her thrumming skin and
songs for the night’s other, unintended
wounds along her bark. When he swam in the
water that housed her roots, he scrubbed
fresh black slick from them and picked the
smallest of her fallen twigs to clean his teeth,
then chew. He could sit for hours half-submerged
in the near-pristine pool that made up
the bottom third of his sphere, and so he
did—resting his head against her trunk and
thinking what a different course his life would
run if he were as dependent on the water and
the light as she. In a way, of course, he was.
Farmer held up his hand against the maze of
roots sprawling beneath the surface of the water,
shifting his focus from one to the other until
he could humor, if only for a moment, that
the roots he saw were his.
For lunch, he climbed to the top of the
MudderTree and ate of the sweet green leaves
surviving there, their juices catching as much
in his grizzled beard as in his belly’s keep. After,
he swung down to the mid-range limbs he
used for exercise—willing them with thought
and physical demonstration to reshape themselves
more fully to his body’s needs. Beyond
the glass of his enclosure, he watched his
neighbor shatter the flimsy stalk of his own
MudderTree for the second time that week,
and thrash about in murky water just to beat
his head against the glass. Farmer focused on
his breathing between reps, but the lonely
smear of blood soon splayed before him became
too much; his mind dipped into its own,
dark reservoir, and as if burned by his
thoughts, MudderTree’s limbs suddenly refused
to hold him. Farmer fell hard and far
enough to hear his leg snap on a root raised
high above the water before he, in turn,
passed out.
His family had been there to wheel him into
the facility. It was this or the vacuum of space,
the courts had said—but once Farmer was
strapped down, sedated, gagged, and two
doors deep within the prison compound, the
law was lax enough to let his loved ones help
him endure the final stage of his departure
from the outside world. The director, for his
part, did not even evince surprise to see so
many at Farmer’s side, but then, Farmer’s case
file held none of the usual genetic, neurological,
or environmental markers for violence on
the level he had somehow managed when he
broke. Nor was there a moment’s hesitation
from his parents about the deservedness of
drastic punishment for such drastic crimes—
yet still his youngest sister, barely ten, would
not let go his unresponsive hand.
“Most of the others you’ll see here are
rather cut-and-dry cases—some with callousindifferent
behavior sets their whole lives
through; others with perfectly compassionate,
rational personalities right until their breakdowns—though
there are some indications,
46 MAGGIE CLARK

of course, if you look deeper in their family
trees.”
“And all of them . . . ah . . . they’ve all . . . ?”
His mother’s voice—tired, disoriented. Farmer
remembered that there was a great deal of
steel-gray about the walls, the ceilings. No effort
even on the observation deck to make
more of the facility than it was.
“Oh yes,” said the director, holding a useless
clipboard in useless hands Farmer envisioned
breaking all through the interview. Distantly he
remembered someone sponging saliva from
the corner of his mouth when he tried to snarl.
“All of our residents have been involved in truly
brutal altercations, with many casualties—
not, of course, that even one casualty at such
hands is permissible, but . . .” The director
glanced at the sliding series of glossy spheres
behind them. “Make no mistake, in this whole
system you’ll find no greater density of violent
persons than we keep here.”
“And the recidivity rate?” Farmer recognized
his father’s attempt at composure
through the acquisition of statistics, and was
surprised to find he resented the old, doddering
man for none of it. His little sister was now
stroking the whole of his hand, his wrist, his
lower arm. It would be the last human contact
he remembered.
The director pushed up his glasses and
smiled a most meaningless smile at Farmer’s
father. “Zero, of course. You must understand:
this is by all practical accounts a terminal
move for our residents.”
“But isn’t there any hope? Isn’t that the entire
point of—” His mother again, overexerting
herself with concern. Farmer tried to comprehend
the essence of her existence with
one long, fixed stare, but the sedative would
not allow it; his eyes rolled of their own, lazy
accord inside his head. He thought he could
make out patterns after all along the walls.
Nasty ones, at that.
“Please don’t get me wrong,” the director
said. “MudderTree technology is remarkable—
truly the wonder of our age. Used on terraforming
runs, in medical rehab, for persons without
full use of their limbs, the autistic—and all with
considerable success rates, too. In theory,
therefore, we absolutely allow that some of our
residents might eventually graduate from the
program we have in place here . . . but in practice,
you must understand, we simply haven’t
HYDROPONICS 101
JUNE 2013
seen any resident succeed just yet.”
“But how could they?” Farmer heard his little
sister’s voice ring out—tiny, but already
hardened by circumstance. Had he really
come back and hugged her first, his jumpsuit
still drenched in colonist blood? “Locked up in
glass like that for years at a time, with no one
to talk to, not ever?”
The director’s bland smile came too close to
her for Farmer’s liking; Farmer’s arms tensed
against his restraints but his head was still
swimming, his muscles weak.
“I promise you,” the director said, touching
her shoulder ever so lightly. Farmer’s vision
went a blanket red, but he gnawed at his gag
to no avail. “Your brother will never be alone.
Not here. Not with a MudderTree to call his
own.”
After his family had left, Farmer remained
on the observation deck, a violent heat still
coursing through his arms, while the director
pulled footage less than appropriate for a tenyear-old’s
purview—a triptych of Don’t Do
What Johnny Don’t Does selected from the
worst of the enclosures in the facility. As the
director explained, step by step, the procedure
by which Farmer would soon be entombed
in his own glass sphere, and how to
interact with the latent MudderTree he found
within, Farmer’s eyes flicked from panel to
disastrous panel with no shortage of amusement
for the human suffering he found there.
In the first panel, a man stood neck-deep in
blackened water, sticks of MudderTree strewn
hopelessly about him—each dissolving every
time he reached for one. In the second, the
MudderTree bore the crude, misshapen figure
of a woman, which its owner seemed recklessly
intent upon even as the long black nettles
along its limbs scored deep into pre-existing
wounds across his back. In the third there
was no sign of life within the water; just a
man’s body in a state of extreme decomposition—the
MudderTree in turn wholly dissolved,
presumably at work preparing the
compartment for the next fool resident to land
a berth. The director tapped the last panel
with his middle finger. Though he seemed to
be trying for sorrow, his lips were too much
upturned at the corners for Farmer to believe
a word he said.
“A very sad case, that—but you must under-
47

ANALOG
stand, we simply cannot interfere. If death is
what you wish, that’s what the airlock option
at your trial was offered for. To be sure, this
needn’t be as hard a life as these three men
have made it, but if you cannot muster
enough cooperative, compromising spirit
even to feed yourself, eventually the added nutrients
in your water will not be enough. It
took this man one hundred and eleven days to
die. One hundred and eleven days in which he
simply could not be bothered to exercise any
goodwill toward his MudderTree at all. With
some people, it’s just . . . incredible how much
they’ll nurse a grudge. You know? But I trust
you’ll find another way. I certainly hope you
do.”
Farmer glanced back at the first panel, then
at the director, grinning. As another doctor
wheeled him out, his thoughts lay with how
many pieces he could tear a man into.
Farmer’s leg was halfway healed when his
sphere slid before the observation deck, marking
its sixth tour around the whole facility
along rails that held what seemed like a thousand
such microcosms suspended. This time
there was a woman behind the panel of flat
glass set just beyond his rounded own; Farmer
entertained himself with the thought that she
was trapped in her own enclosure, too. The
woman was not particularly young, but she
smiled and waved at him in a kindly way while
the mechanical arm swung about to affix a
communications device to the outside of his
sphere, her voice thereafter reverberating inwards:
the device transmitting trace frequencies
of his own in turn.
“Good morning,” she said. “Mr.—”
“Just Farmer,” he said. His vocal cords surprised
him with their reliability; he had been
at best crooning all love songs to his MudderTree
over the past three weeks.
“A good name, Farmer. It says here you
chose that one for yourself two years ago. I
feel like the name has done you well—quite
well, I dare say, since.”
Farmer studied the woman from his comfortable
roost midway up the MudderTree, his
leg in a ropey sling MudderTree had woven after
extricating him from the bottom of the
pool. The woman hesitated and referred again
to her notes.
“Yes, well—my name is Dr. Chang. I’ve
been appraised of your progress over the
years, and frankly, I’m very excited to finally
meet you. Your work with the program has
been quite exceptional—like nothing we’ve
ever seen before.”
“I’ve noticed,” said Farmer, after a pause. He
indicated the sphere to his left with a slight
nod of his head. The smear on the neighboring
glass was now a crusty dark brown.
“Ah yes. About that.” Dr. Chang frowned
and adjusted her glasses. “There is some conjecture
among the staff here that your neighbor
played a contributing role in your fall
three weeks back. It was quite unexpected for
us—especially in the wake of so much peace
within your sphere for so very long. And yet,
you came back from that ordeal with no clear
resentment toward the MudderTree itself.
Would you care to comment on that?”
Farmer paused. “On my lack of resentment
toward my MudderTree, or the fall?”
The older woman shrugged. “Whatever you
wish, Farmer. On what you attribute your exceptional
progress in the program to, if you
can name it.”
Farmer smiled rather grimly through his
beard: a mere year since his last encounter,
and already he had almost forgotten how
vague was human speech—nothing like his
MudderTree’s precision and clarity of response;
nor the simplicity of her demands of
him.
“Zero tolerance,” he said at last, scratching
an ingrown hair along his shaggy neck. “I had
a moment of weakness when I saw my neighbor
through the glass, but a moment of weakness
is enough. MudderTree knows me well.
She is stern, but fair.”
“Indeed, she must be. And is it true—I hear
you’ve got your MudderTree glowing on
comm—” Before she had finished her question,
Farmer had his MudderTree flood the
sphere a radiant and calming blue; the inquiry
had been voiced for three years running, and
its presence as much amused as irritated him.
His MudderTree was not for show.
“Remarkable,” said Dr. Chang—and indeed,
there was something breathless about the
quality of her speech. “Hold, please.”
Farmer puzzled at the function of her last
request, but not for long; MudderTree was
thrumming all the while at him—pleased, perhaps,
by his protective streak—and at this
48 MAGGIE CLARK

much clearer entreaty, he rubbed her soft bark
in turn. In reward, a sweet, flowery warmth
suffused him within minutes; ensconced in a
latticework of bracing limbs, Farmer nuzzled
closer to his MudderTree and nodded off.
There had been terror in Farmer when he
was first dropped into the sphere—minutes,
then hours, when he struggled just to remember
how to breathe as the water was dumped
in after him and the enclosure fully sealed. It
would be months before Farmer began to relate
his feelings then to how the colonists
must have felt—the ones he’d frozen, the ones
he’d suffocated, the ones he’d left swimming
in their own blood. In the meantime, Farmer
was neck-deep in warm water, surrounded by
the facility’s lackluster version of a clear and
starry night; if he wanted to, Farmer could certainly
have drowned himself then and there,
and one part of him was very much inclined
to—but the other part was just too scared. He
leaned instead against the glass and studied
the long, narrow pole of composite materials
that protruded from the other side of the
pool—this was MudderTree? It seemed at
once a monstrous cosmic joke.
And sure enough, he knew someone, somewhere
was laughing at him; even in near-total
darkness, Farmer could make out figures in
the spheres to either side—haggard, shaggy
men peering at him, leering, their teeth bared
in hungry grins. Farmer made a go at the glass
with his fist and found his flesh and bones
wanting. He clapped his hands to his ears at
the heavy sound that followed, a resonance
that struck him to the quick and seemed to
make his whole sphere lurch. As it did, Farmer
despaired to see the narrow pole of MudderTree
slip beneath the surface of the pool;
he did not yet comprehend its power, but he
knew that pole was all now that he had. He
lunged after it with sluggish, throbbing hands.
Still, his first contact with the substance
was all wrong—wrong enough to haunt him
even months after he’d got the hang of it. As
he gripped the strange, rough pole that first
time, he recalled the first panel in the triptych
and imagined snapping the length in two,
since the enclosure itself would not give way
instead to excesses of his fear, and rage. But
the MudderTree beat him to it—dissolved itself
at the merest thought of violence. An-
HYDROPONICS 101
JUNE 2013
gered all the more by its escape, Farmer dove
after it—again and again in the darkening water.
But though the substance routinely reformed
into floating solids, it never held
shape long enough for him in his mood to
latch on, and so Farmer stood a wretched,
seething, starving resident inside his spheroid
home for days on end before it occurred to
him to be sorry for his anger—and then, if
possible, to try to make amends.
“—Sorry for the wait, Farmer. I needed to
consult with the rest of the team before I
could go any further. You are, you must understand,
a real rarity here. A light in the perfect
darkness of a difficult new field. There’s a
case study of you on its way as we speak to
The Modern Review of—”
But Farmer did not catch all that the good
doctor had said or was saying—MudderTree
rousing him as much as he roused himself at
the return of such prattling reverberations
from outside the sphere. He rubbed his eyes
and blinked vaguely through the glass. There
were five men and women on the observation
deck now—four with bright, keen expressions;
the fifth, the director, with something
still tempered by conscious affect in his smile.
“Farmer,” said Dr. Chang. “Do you understand
what we’re trying to tell you? You have
exceeded all our expectations. There is nothing
left in the program for you. We’re ready to
make you our first ever graduate—to transfer
you to medium security for the rest of your
sentence, with a chance of parole if you reach
your fifteenth year without incident.”
When Farmer did not reply, he caught the
tail end of another doctor murmuring “He’s
still in shock—” before the comm system shut
off, and he was left to observe the group conferring
amongst themselves. Before long, one
of the other doctors was sent out and returned
with her hand on the arm of a much
younger woman—a teen at best, with long
sleek hair and eyes much older than the rest.
“Farmer,” said Dr. Chang, switching the
comm back on. “We’ve brought a visitor for
you. Do you remember your little sister?
Well—not quite your little sister anymore.”
The young woman exchanged a nervous
smile with the doctor and stepped forward.
Farmer needed no such prompting to recognize
his kin, strange and far-off as she now
49

ANALOG
seemed to him—but the ache in his chest was
a different matter altogether. It clamored at
him in a way he had not felt in ages, and hardly
knew how to put to words.
“Hello,” came the not-so-tiny voice, which
paused for corroboration on what to say next.
“. . . Farmer?”
Farmer took in every line of his sister’s face,
every feature he could bear to shore up in his
mind’s eye, every thought he still had of her
from when she was small and tender to him
over those last steps within facility walls. And
then he tipped back his scraggly head, clawed
at his chest, struck out at the MudderTree until
she dropped him, howled and cursed when
he hit water, and beat himself bloody against
the unrelenting glass.
Farmer was almost caught by surprise when
his next annual stop before the observation
deck rolled around; for many months after his
violent outbreak, his MudderTree had sat a
withered, reluctant companion in his sphere,
and all his attention had been fixed upon
mending their broken ties. It had taken many
nights, many songs, many explanations, and
above all many apologies to bring her back to
whole. But eventually she understood. Eventually
all was forgiven. Eventually she
thrummed at him anew.
There was only one doctor behind both layers
of glass this time—the director himself,
wearing no trace of his usual false smile as the
mechanical arm affixed the communications
device to Farmer’s self-contained sphere. A
tremendous pause ensued—Farmer preoccupied
midway up his MudderTree with some of
the weaving arts; the director’s eyes fixed
firmly upon his resident.
“I know why you did it,” the director said at
last.
Farmer neither looked up nor spoke.
“You’re right, of course. Your MudderTree
would have gone right back into regular circulation
with you gone. Hacked to bits, perhaps,
by the next occupant. And the next. Or maybe
fashioned into a series of crude holes for the
obvious. Or simply left a stringy, blackened
thing—but whatever its future, certainly as
nothing like your fortress of a home. Doubtful
ever to sing or gain bioluminescence to this
magnificent extent again.”
Farmer met the director’s gaze with great
uncertainty. Could the watery film in Farmer’s
blood-shot eyes be viewed through so many
layers of thick lenses? Farmer got no clear answer,
but the director did seem to hesitate; he
even dropped his own gaze and bowed his
head, hands clasped behind his back.
“I imagine I’d be a fool to remind you that
these are, after all, only nanites that we’re talking
about. Nanites routinely performing brain
scans, then responding in accordance with
your most up-to-date statistical profile logged
here at the observatory. But still . . . nanites, in
the end. Machines. Although I suppose an argument
could be made that little more is true
of us.” When Farmer said nothing, the director
shrugged and opened his hands before
him. “So tell me, Farmer—what would you
have me do? Do you want to stay in here forever?
Is she so important that you’d choose
these walls for life?”
Farmer rested a hand on his MudderTree,
her soft bark warming to his touch. “No,” he
said at last. “I don’t want the facility. Not with
these neighbors. Not for life.”
“I can’t give her to you, though. I wish I
could, but I can’t. The front door out of this
place is paved in property laws you can’t defeat.
Medium security simply isn’t equipped.”
“And I can’t leave her,” said Farmer. “I won’t
even say I wish I could. I can’t.”
The director sighed, dropping heavily into a
lone black seat before the facility’s massive
monitors. Farmer wondered again whose enclosure
was really the worse. “What, then?
What would you have me do?”
Farmer’s reply was as swift as it was tranquil.
“Let us go,” he said. “Just . . . let us go.”
The director sniffed, and in the ensuing
look of resignation Farmer saw, at last, an honest
smile. “Yeah, right. Like I could just open
the cargo bay doors and . . .” The director
paused. He looked at Farmer, but Farmer did
not look back. They looked together at his
MudderTree. The MudderTree began to sing.
From the great, uneven silence of outer
space, the opening of the cargo bay doors
would seem a singular sensory affair—light
from the nearby white dwarf illuminating the
station’s side panel as it rolls back, then catching
on the many glass enclosures strung like
polished gems on a necklace trailing deep
within. The following maneuver would be a
50 MAGGIE CLARK

precarious one—each shining bead rolling
with unusual speed along the metal rails, and
then the rails simply parting to let slip one errant
pearl.
But forget, thereafter, all about the folding
of those same rails back into place, and the
cargo bay doors gradually reclaiming the other
gems in turn, and the red and flashing lights
signaling some form of serious alarm within.
Observe, instead, the darkness and the points
HYDROPONICS 101
JUNE 2013
of distant starlight reflecting off one half of
the sphere then drifting gently out; the dazzling
white light gleaming off the side set toward
the ancient, black-bodied sun.
It won’t take long.
Count to ten, perhaps, and think good
thoughts.
Watch the little round of glass bloom a pale
but sturdy blue. ■
51

Working on the Space Program at the
Kennedy Space Center was a unique,
rewarding, challenging, and a sometimes
frustrating and boring experience.
As a kid I watched the astronauts walk
on the moon, sometimes at the nineteenth
hole at the golf course with my dad while we
drank a coke and watched it on a black and
white TV. It inspired me. I, like many others,
wanted to be an astronaut. I loved science
and math in high school. I applied to MIT and
was accepted. I got a degree in electrical engineering,
but my thesis (we all had to do a
thesis for our bachelor’s degree) was an astrophysics
topic. So I was always interested in
space science. I had a Navy scholarship, and
was commissioned as an officer. I served for
six years. The first three years of my time I
was on an aircraft carrier. A message arrived
that said NASA was accepting applications for
astronauts, and they wanted scientists. I applied,
and was rejected because of my eyesight.
This was the first of five rejection letters
I would receive from NASA.
After serving on the aircraft carrier, the
Navy made me a Captain of a small ship. I de-
52
Special Feature
Working on
the Space
Shuttle
Jeff Mitchell
cided to leave the Navy at age 27. Once you
are Captain Kirk, what else do you do? Fortunately
my ship was stationed in Cape Canaveral,
so I applied for jobs at the Kennedy Space
Center and got a job very quickly.
I started working in 1983 for McDonnell
Douglas. Other contractors processed the
shuttle for launch; McDonnell Douglas
worked on the payloads that flew in the shuttle
making all the new science discoveries. I
was excited, I would have paid them to allow
me to work on this stuff. The program I primarily
worked on was called Spacelab; it was
built by the Europeans and run by McDonnell
Douglas and NASA. My job was to test all the
systems on Spacelab—electrical, cooling,
computers—before the experiments were installed.
Then we tested all the experiments,
and when everything was ready, we loaded it
into the shuttle’s payload bay and tested the
interfaces of Spacelab and the experiments to
the shuttle. (One note, the shuttle folks originally
called it the cargo bay, but scientists
didn’t like the word cargo, made them think
they were on a ship going from England to
America. But all of us military guys used the

term payload for things you dropped on the
enemy that went bang. Absolutely the wrong
word for a scientific experiment.)
My first launch was STS-9 in 1983; the last
launch of the shuttle I worked on was the last
launch of the shuttle STS-135 in 2011. Yes,
I’m ancient.
Sounds pretty boring, doesn’t it? But it was
exciting: imagine, the experiment I worked
on was going to look at areas of the Universe
and discover new things. PhDs were made on
the data that came back from these Spacelab
missions. And that was just Spacelab. I also
worked on the launch of Galileo, Ulysses, the
Hubble Space Telescope, and other probes.
More knowledge gained for mankind. Very exciting
to those of us working on the payload
side of the shuttle.
Launch
The first mission I sat on console in the
Launch Control Center (the LCC) was nerve
racking. It was the launch of STS-51F on July
12, 1985, which carried Spacelab-2. At T minus
7 seconds (roughly) the three main engines
are started, one at a time.
During that countdown we monitored the
payload. If certain parameters went out of limits,
called Launch Commit Criteria, (LCC), the
launch would scrub. Our LCC went down to
T minus 31 seconds. Imagine, you are 28
years old and you can stop the launch of the
shuttle with a single word, “Cutoff.” We went
through a lot of training for this moment: simulations,
practice countdowns. But now it
was real. I have been on an aircraft carrier
landing planes in rough weather. I’ve had helicopter
flights to other ships in rough seas being
lowered by a “horse collar” on a pitching
deck hoping I wouldn’t break a leg. All that
was scary, but I was okay with it. Now, for the
first time in my life, my palms were sweating.
I had a headset and microphone on with my
left hand touching the transmit button, and I
had to constantly wipe my right hand. LCC
started six hours prior to launch. At that
point, if a problem arose, you had time to do
troubleshooting. You could issue commands,
look at data, talk to people on the phone, and
figure out if it was a real problem. When it got
down to T minus a minute or so, you had no
time, you just had to scrub. At T minus 31 seconds
the Ground Launch Sequencer (GLS)
WORKING ON THE SPACE SHUTTLE
JUNE 2013
takes over, and if it sees anything out of
bounds, its software will shut down the
launch. That’s when I can breathe again. At T
minus 3 seconds, the engines were shut
down. Damn—so close. Then the entire
launch crew had to safe the pad and get the
astronauts out of the shuttle. A very tense
emergency.
On July 29, 1985, we tried again. My palms
were sweating all the way to T minus 31 seconds
as before, and I should mention that I
had a team of 12 people sweating with me.
They were all highly trained, and under as
much stress. I was the only one that had to report
to the Payload Test Conductor (PTC),
who reports to the NASA Test Director
(NTD), the person who makes the final decision
to launch. My people made the decisions
to tell me what to say to the PTC. At T-7 seconds
the engines fired successfully, and at Tzero
the boosters ignited and we had liftoff. A
few seconds later, the windows facing the
pad started to vibrate from the shear power of
the engines and boosters. The noise was loud,
even though the shuttle was a mile away. If
you are there for a launch, and your heart isn’t
racing, and your mouth doesn’t open, you
must be dead.
At T plus 3 minutes and a half, one turbo
pump turbine discharge temperature sensor
failed. Two minutes later the second sensor
failed, and that caused the engine software to
shut down. If another engine failed it would
mean that the shuttle might have to land overseas
at a contingency landing site. Eventually
our payload would have to be removed which
means I would have to fly to help them. We
sat on the console hoping and praying it
would make orbit. I’m thinking: I don’t want
to process this payload all over again. Fortunately,
the shuttle made it to orbit.
I worked on many other missions. I was the
lead test conductor for the Ulysses mission.
That means that, again, we had Launch Commit
Criteria for that mission. But I wasn’t making
the technical evaluation, because I was
now the PTC. I was just telling the NTD what
my team told me. Much easier than Spacelab.
Later I started being a part of the team that
simulated the Launch Commit Criteria. I
served on various boards to make sure the
payloads were ready for launch. Mostly boring
stuff.
53

ANALOG
Then came the International Space Station.
I was asked and so volunteered to test the first
piece of the ISS that the good old US of A
launched called Node 1. We were told that it
would be shipped to KSC with 90% of everything
installed. It came to KSC with about
10% installed. Worse, the test cables that we
needed to test what it was installed with were
being built in California and weren’t ready. It
was a mess. I would go to a meeting at six AM
and we would get a report about which cables
had arrived at KSC the day prior. Then I
would look at my test procedures and figure
out what we could test, if anything. I had volunteered
for this testing for six months. With
all the cable delays, hardware delays, and
hardware failures, the job lasted 19 months.
Beware what you volunteer for.
After the launch of Node 1, I took a variety
of jobs working for the Space Station. I was
then hired by Spacehab, Inc. to be the Director
of Operations. Spacehab was a little like
Spacelab—it flew in the shuttle, astronauts
did science experiments in it, and it took a lot
of material up to both the Russian Mir Space
Station and the International Space Station.
The difference was that Spacehab was a commercial
enterprise. In other words, NASA was
not involved. We processed our module, delivered
it to KSC, and loaded the material at
the pad. We made a profit without government
involvement. This is what Elon Musk
and Space-X does as well.
My final job was to be an Astronaut Representative.
That means I represented them at
meetings, testings, and other events that they
couldn’t attend. I was trained in a lot of the
same areas that they were. During my training
I had to use a Pistol Grip Tool (PGT), which is
basically an electric drill that sockets can be
attached to. It has knobs big enough for your
space suit glove to manipulate when setting
torque values for the drill to stop at, or a finite
number of turns. I learned how to use this
and asked the instructor, “How much does
this cost?”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
So I have held in my hand a quarter of a million
dollars.
I also went through the shuttle-landing simulator
at JSC. It has a complete cockpit, with
everything from switches to the front seats to
back seats. You had to strap in because the
simulator bounced you around to demonstrate
launch and re-entry. We launch facing
up, then after Main Engine Cutoff they rotated
the simulator to horizontal, and then reset
it for landing. I watched my friend go from
high altitude to landing at KSC. He did a great
job, despite not being a pilot. Then we
changed seats. I strapped in and grabbed the
stick, confident that I would do pretty well—
after all, I had landed a real plane. I only
crashed a little short of KSC. We might have
survived . . . but I don’t think so. Later that day
another friend turned off the heads up display,
and all the other helpful things that the
astronauts get to use, and landed the shuttle
flawlessly. He is really good, much to my
envy.
Landing
The best thing about being an Astronaut
Representative was escorting the astronauts
off the shuttle after it landed.
My first landing was on STS-122 on February
20, 2008. It was a beautiful Florida morning.
I was at the runway, but couldn’t actually
see the landing. The shuttle came in from the
north, and we were on the south part of the
runway. The shuttle came in at a very steep
angle and we watched it as it turned around
and lined up with the runway. It was a stunning
sight. It was a dead stick landing; the
shuttle had no engines for landing. We
couldn’t actually see it touch down on the
runway because there are trees in the way.
You may not know this, but KSC is a wildlife
refuge, so they don’t cut down trees. Before
the shuttle lands on a day landing, they chase
the alligators off the runway. No, really they
do—the alligators like the warm concrete. As
the shuttle rolled down the runway, it cleared
the trees and we saw it stop. Our vehicle, the
Crew Transport Vehicle (CTV), drove up to
forty meters or so of where the shuttle
stopped. People in fully encapsulated suits
sniffed for hypergolic fuels and oxidizers (hazardous
stuff) and then gave us the go to proceed.
The CTV drives up to the “white
room,” which is a small room up against the
shuttle. I’ve been in the shuttles many times,
but never on the runway. This was very exciting.
Technicians opened the hatch. I went in
with my boss, Jerry Ross, an astronaut who
54 JEFF MITCHELL

has flown seven times, and we installed a flat
platform that made entering and exiting the
round hatch easier. Equipment started coming
out—parachutes, helmets, gloves, you name
it. I carried them back into the vehicle and
stowed them. Then the first astronaut exited.
They had been weightless for 13 days, and so
were not used to gravity. My biggest job was
to make sure they didn’t fall or trip. (This is an
inner ear problem when coming back to gravity.)
All of them walked out unassisted. In fact,
Dan Tani (an MIT graduate like myself), who
had been on the International Space Station
for four months, had no problem walking. We
were all impressed.
Suit technicians helped them out of their
orange launch and landing suits. They got into
their blue suits, had some water, maybe some
food, and sat in chairs for a while. Doctors
and nurses examined them briefly. They
talked about the landing, how great it was to
be in space, whatever came to mind. They
were excited and you could feel it. Everyone
in the CTV was excited. At their request, I had
marked some stuff used on the space walks
with letters or numbers using a flight-qualified
Sharpie marker. I ask the three who did
space walks if what I had marked helped
them. “It was great, I don’t know how I could
have wrapped that around the quick disconnect
without the markings.” It is good to be
useful. And yes, my handwriting is on the
space station.
The next thing they did was the walkaround.
This is the tradition where the crew
walks around and under the shuttle to take a
look at it. Afterward there are photo opportunities
and speeches. The commander of the
shuttle told his crew that they shouldn’t look
up at the tiles on the bottom of the shuttle because
when they tilted their heads back, they
might fall over. I now had a new job—to accompany
them and make sure they don’t fall
over, or trip on the big cables and other
things on the ground—and there were a lot of
things on the ground. The tile was still hot,
but there was no smell. We walked around
the vehicle and there were cameras everywhere.
We had a German astronaut, so the
German press was there in droves. I was talking
to one of the astronauts and there was this
video operator filming us. We ignored him
and continued our discussion. Sure enough,
WORKING ON THE SPACE SHUTTLE
JUNE 2013
I’m on the nightly Orlando news that evening.
We drove back to the Astronaut Crew Quarters
and unloaded all the gear. Later on we
had lunch with the shuttle astronauts and all
the support astronauts and medical people.
One of the many astronauts I met saw my
brass rat (MIT class ring) and said that he
went to MIT too.
When I wasn’t helping the astronauts off of
the shuttle, I was in the crew quarters taking
care of their families. After the family watched
the landing at the Shuttle Landing Facility,
they were put on busses and taken back to
the crew quarters. It took an hour or so for
the astronauts to get back to the quarters.
One time I had to figure out how to use the
new big screen TV to make sure that the kids
could watch Harry Potter while waiting for
their mother or father to come back to the
quarters. It took me, a coworker, and an astronaut
to figure out all the remote controls.
We got it working, and the kids were happy.
Life can be rough. I rewarded my hard work
by grabbing a couple of cookies that the
cooks had made for the astronauts and took
them to my wife. Astronaut cookies!
That’s what a shuttle landing is like.
The workers at KSC were, in a word, dedicated.
Imagine all the different jobs. There are
the normal ones, like manager and secretary,
which are important. But there were jobs that
are not anywhere else. There are people who
applied the heat resistant tiles on the shuttle.
People who lifted a shuttle and attached it to
the external tank, and this is after they lifted
pieces of the external boosters, loaded with
highly explosive fuel, stacked these, and then
lifted the tank between the two boosters.
Other people drove the shuttle out to the
launch pad at a staggering one mile per hour
on the same crawler that they used on the
Apollo missions. People had to make sure payloads
and the shuttle were very clean. People
made sure that there were no sharp edges
that would cut the spacesuit during their Extra
Vehicular Activity (spacewalk). Then there
were software writers, software testers, and
numerous other jobs needed to propel X
pounds to 17,500 mph into orbit.
All the jobs were important. Everyone was
concerned with the safety of the shuttle and
the astronauts. They were dedicated. They
worked long hours. Of course some were
55

ANALOG
paid overtime for working long hours, but
many volunteered whether they got paid or
not. It was their life, it was their calling.
So what was it really like to work there?
Like any place—many meetings. Some really
important, some boring. Take trying to convince
NASA to change the software used during
testing. You had to convince multiple
NASA people that changing the software
would save testing time. If you only had to
convince your boss, that would be one thing.
But you convinced your boss, then a couple
NASA folks, then go to a NASA engineering
board and convince a joint NASA and contractor
board. A waste of time, too much bureaucracy.
I hated it.
But, making things more efficient was
worthwhile. Despite going through all the
hoops, it was satisfying when you improved
the testing, made it simpler, more efficient,
and reduced the costs. And there were many
NASA people that helped you along the way.
They hated the inefficiency as well.
It was not just the people at KSC, but also
the people at Johnson Space Flight Center,
and the Marshall Space Flight Center, the
Goddard Space Flight Center, all the space
flight centers. All of them are just as dedicated
to making space flight for people and machines
safe and successful.
Challenger and Columbia
On January 28, 1986, I walked outside my
building, got my binoculars from my car, and
watched the Challenger launch. We all know
that it blew up, but right then we at KSC
didn’t know what happened to the shuttle. I
went back into my office and talked to
coworkers. Some people thought the astronauts
might have survived. Those of us who
were in the military just shook our heads.
We’d seen explosions before; we knew they
had been disintegrated instantly. Later we
found out that we were wrong, the crew survived
the explosion and died on impact with
the ocean. In fact, there was evidence that
one astronaut turned the oxygen on the Commander’s
helmet after the explosion. I never
watched another launch through my binoculars;
it was too painful.
We spent two plus years updating the procedures
to test everything. We looked at what
could go wrong, whether it was likely or not.
We questioned everything because we didn’t
want another Challenger accident. Many
meetings, many questions, much paperwork.
Then we flew again. During that return to
flight launch, the firing room folks were told
not to cheer at liftoff, which was the natural
thing we did before. We could only cheer or
applaud after the boosters separated. When
they did, there was clapping, cheering, and
crying. It was very emotional.
Then there was Columbia. On February 1,
2003 I was at home and saw the news when
the Columbia accident happened. I never expected
the Challenger accident, I thought
burning up on re-entry a much more likely
proposition. Even from the first mission, STS-
1, there was tile damage. On STS-1, sixteen
tiles were missing, and 148 damaged and had
to be replaced. So burning up was an option.
But I didn’t expect it after a hundred missions.
We knew what we were doing by then.
Ha! We had fooled ourselves as an engineering
community.
I had other duties, too. One day I got a call
from a co-worker:
“Hey, you live near the Orlando airport,
don’t you?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well these two astronauts have a broken
airplane, and need a lift.”
So I drove them to the airport, a 45-minute
trip, talking to them the entire time, waited to
make sure they got on the airplane, and then
went home. Work is tough sometimes.
The International Space Station partners
were a joy to work with, whether they were
the Italians on Node 3, the Germans and Italians
on the Columbus module, or the Japanese
on their modules. You would think we
would have trouble communicating, but even
the ones who didn’t speak any English still understood
gestures. For instance, I was able to
tell the Japanese that the tape securing their
hardware needed to be able to be pulled off
easily on orbit using only hand gestures.
The Japanese were very interesting. Normally
when you go into a clean room, you
wear a smock or bunny suit and a hair cover
to keep your hair out of the hardware. Why
do we do this? Remember, all that stuff will
float and the crew could breathe it in, which
could be a big problem if it’s a small nut or
bolt. Dirt and hair will also clog up the air fil-
56 JEFF MITCHELL

ters, which will have to be cleaned in orbit,
using time that an astronaut could be using
for an experiment. If you have a beard, you
would wear a beard cover, if you have hair, a
hair cover. But every company and nation has
different rules. The Japanese had everyone
wear beard covers, even if they didn’t have a
beard, and even the women, who obviously
will never have beards. Hair covers for bald
guys as well.
The Russians were great. NASA launched a
piece of Russian hardware called MRM-1. As
an astronaut representative, I had to inspect
the interior for sharp edges and take photos. I
was one of only four Americans to go into
MRM-1 while it was being processed in Cape
Canaveral. That’s the good news. The bad
news was that the Russians required certain
medical tests before I could go in. I had to
give a stool sample—and I don’t mean the
stool at the bar in your house. On another day
I had to inspect the exterior for sharp edges.
We finished the inspections on a Saturday
morning and signed the official paperwork. A
big political and engineering step. It turns
WORKING ON THE SPACE SHUTTLE
JUNE 2013
out, that this was also International Women’s
Day, so after signing everything, we drank
champagne, took many photos, shook hands,
and celebrated. You had to celebrate with the
Russians to be sociable. One of the female
U.S. engineers didn’t drink, so she pretended
to sip the champagne. She admitted this to
her co-worker, and he finished most of his
drink, handed it to her and said, “Here, hold
this for the look,” and grabbed her glass. Then
the Russians broke out the hard liquor, there
were more toasts, and by eleven thirty I was
happy.
After the final landing, I, like thousands of
others at KSC, was out of a job I loved. I don’t
have a problem with this though, for at least
28 years I was a member of a team trying to
get us off the planet. We launched telescopes
that see the far reaches of the Universe. We
launched probes to the outer planets. We
even built the science fiction fan’s bread and
butter, a space station. Quite a series of accomplishments
that all America should be
proud of.
I know I am. ■
57

A
fter three years out in the dark among
the rocks, Kiel Chaladur docked his
prospecting boat, the Gold Witch, at
Sato Station. It had been a successful
voyage. He’d found, sold, and sent in-system a
comet remnant dense with volatiles. The
money he’d taken for it had made his fortune
and that of his two-person crew—but wealth
wasn’t the only prize Kiel Chaladur brought
back with him. Against all odds, he’d found a
wife out there, born and grown among the
rocks.
Shay Antigo stepped through the port gate
at Sato Station as an unknown citizen. She
was met by the local watch officer of the
Commonwealth Police, who confirmed her
status and shepherded her through the
process of establishing a legal existence. As I
read the brief, it struck me as an engaging story—and
almost certainly untrue.
Three days after the initial report was filed,
I was assigned to investigate.
“Name?” the brisk voice of a Dull Intelligence
asked, prodding me into wakefulness
within the close embrace of a cold-sleep pod.
I drew a deep breath into lungs that had
58
Out in the
Dark
Linda Nagata
never been used before. “Zeke Choy,” I answered.
And then, anticipating its next question,
“Field officer, Commonwealth Police.”
I’d entered cold sleep in the inner system,
ghosting to Sato Station as an electronic persona,
completing in eleven minutes a journey
that would have consumed years if I’d traveled
in physical form. The arrival of my ghost
had wakened a stored husk—a precisely
grown replica of the body I’d left behind. By
Commonwealth law, a citizen was limited to
one physical incarnation at a time. It was part
of the definition of being human, and no exceptions
were allowed, not even for an onduty
cop. So that version of me that I’d left
behind eleven minutes ago would remain
locked down in cold sleep until I’d finished
my investigation at Sato Station.
When the DI was satisfied that I fully occupied
my new platform, it opened the coldsleep
pod. I got up, glancing at my projection
in the image panel. I stood taller than most
men, strong and lean and with a stern gaze. It
was a physical appearance considered ideal
for instilling order and compelling respect. I’d
been less imposing when I’d entered the
academy, but judicious engineering during

my months of training had given me the size
and bearing of a cop.
A locker linked to my identity popped
open. Inside was a uniform and a collection of
glossy gel ribbons in different colors, each ten
centimeters long and containing a different
chemical armament. They were the standard
weapons of a field officer. I laid the ribbons
against the skin of my forearms and they adhered
immediately, syncing to my atrium—a
neural organ used by all residents of the Commonwealth
to link mind and machine. Of
course, Daoud Pana, the watch officer I’d
come to investigate, would be similarly
armed, but if it came to an overt confrontation,
I had an authorization level that would
shut down every one of his police-issue
weapons.
A DI popped into my atrium with a map of
Sato Station. Around the wheel, the location
of each one of 308 current residents was
marked, some as stationary points, others on
the move, all of them tracked by their implanted
ID chips, marking them as citizens of
the Commonwealth. Neither Shay Antigo nor
Kiel Chaladur was among them. The brief I’d
scanned when the case came in had told me
they’d already left through the station’s data
gate, their ghosts bound for Mars. Chaladur’s
other two crew had taken off to destinations
of their own, all of them authorizing that the
husks they left behind be dissolved, indicating
that none of them intended to return.
Officer Pana’s position was highlighted. He
was the only officer-in-residence at Sato Station,
and presently he was outside the station
itself, doing a walk-through inspection of a recently
arrived ship. He didn’t know yet that
he was suspected of colluding to manufacture
a new identity for Shay Antigo, and that an investigation
had been launched against him.
And he didn’t know I was here. The alert that
would normally have gone out when anyone
arrived in the cold-sleep mausoleum had been
suppressed.
I pulled on the uniform: knee-length shorts
and a black pullover with long sleeves designed
to hide the gel ribbons. I was not a police
officer by choice. I’d been drafted into
the service, where it became my duty to enforce
the Commonwealth’s conservative definition
of what it meant to be human: a
singular physical existence and no invented
OUT IN THE DARK
JUNE 2013
quirks—only natural, human physiology, except
that aging had been ruled a defect and
had been cured, and we were all allowed an
atrium.
In my primary duty I was the watch officer
at Nahiku, a small celestial city in the inner
system, but every cop takes on special duties
too. Mine was to investigate other officers.
Commonwealth law is strict, punishment is
severe, and the unfortunate reality is that cops
hold the power of life and death over the citizens
of their watch. Some cops are judicious,
but others take advantage of their power. It
was far more likely that Daoud Pana was a corrupt
cop who’d fabricated this case for some
kind of payoff, than that Shay Antigo was truly
unknown.
Using my atrium, I linked into the station’s
surveillance network to get a first look at my
quarry. Pana had set a flock of inspection
bees buzzing through the levels of the newly
arrived ship, each one of the tiny devices
sending back datastreams as they used their
camera eyes to search every visible space, and
their molecular sensors to taste the air and assay
the surfaces.
I commandeered an inspection bee that
was hovering close to Pana, turning it around
so that its gaze fell on him: a man as tall as
me—cop height, we called it—with a broad
face and wide nose. No smile at all as he questioned
the crew. Brusque and imposing in his
black uniform. I watched him for several minutes,
and found him neither overly friendly
nor overly strict. If he was looking for a bribe
or a kickback, I couldn’t see it. Maybe he only
did favors for those who took care to make
arrangements in advance.
The mausoleum was in a warehouse district,
so at first I saw only small transport robots
in the main corridor, but as I rounded
the wheel I encountered people. They looked
at me in idle curiosity, until they realized I
was not the cop they’d grown used to seeing.
Then their expressions shifted—sometimes
to curiosity, but often to shock, and even fear,
because the appearance of a strange cop at a
remote station like this one could only mean
trouble.
I was still watching Pana within my atrium,
and I found it easy to mark the precise moment
someone pinged him with the news
59

ANALOG
that I was there. His jaw tightened. His lips
drew back. He looked up, looked around, until
he spotted the surveillance bee that I controlled.
“On my way,” he growled in an undertone.
Then he barked at the cargo ship’s three-person
crew. “Do not attempt to disembark. You
have not been cleared and you will not be allowed
to pass through the station gate.”
He waved off their objections, and, leaving
his flock of bees to continue the job, he left
through the ship’s lock. The station gate
knew him, and he was allowed back into the
wheel with only a cursory surface scan.
Pana worked out of an office with a small
reception room in front, and interrogation
and lab space in the back—a standard layout
for watch officers. I let myself in, did a quick
walk-through of all the rooms, checked the
storage lockers, and then took a seat on a
couch in one of the interrogation rooms to
wait for his arrival. A DI had put together a
summary of the surveillance recorded on the
day the unknown citizen, Shay Antigo, had
come in. I used the time to review it.
After Kiel Chaladur’s prospecting boat had
docked at the station, Daoud Pana had gone
onboard to do a walk-through inspection just
like he’d done today with the cargo ship. Inside
the Gold Witch, he’d been met by Chaladur,
a small man with sharp features and not
much flesh beneath his charcoal skin, whose
thin shoulders were a little hunched even in
Sato’s low-gee. The video identified Shay Antigo
as the woman standing beside him. They
both wore their hair close-shaven, but that
was the limit of the resemblance. Shay stood
taller by a few centimeters, with a wide, pretty
face, and demure features. My DI confirmed
the anxiety I sensed in her gaze as she
eyed Officer Pana.
In the video, an alert spoke, notifying Pana
that she lacked an ID chip. He drew back. His
hand rose slightly, and I knew the gel ribbons
he carried under his sleeve were gliding
down his forearm to his palm, where they
would be ready for use.
But no resistance was offered—not by Shay
Antigo, or Kiel Chaladur, or his two-person
crew. Shay submitted to every scan and test
that procedure required, and in the end Pana
certified her as a previously unknown citizen,
granting her a Commonwealth ID chip, and a
new existence without the burden of a past.
Daoud Pana was scowling when he strode
into the interrogation room. He didn’t bother
with introductions. “It’s the unknown, isn’t
it?” he demanded. “I knew trouble was coming
when I filed that report.”
“You filed it anyway.”
“It was my job to file it. I conducted the required
investigation and I drew the only conclusion
I could. She was legit. No record of
her in the system. I didn’t write her a free
pass.”
Every celestial city operated under its own
charter, but in matters of molecular science,
biology, and machine intelligence, Commonwealth
law applied, and it was merciless. For
most violations, those found guilty-with-intent
faced death as a penalty. Their only recourse
was to disappear and become someone else.
Cops had been bribed before.
I studied Pana. My DI had flagged no lie in
his words, but some people learned to fool
the DIs.
Pana’s lip curled. “You’ve done this before?
Investigated another cop?”
“I’ve been called out a couple of times.”
“Yeah? And were they experienced cops
that you investigated? Or were they new?” He
shook his head. “You don’t have to answer.
Only the new-issues are dumb enough to
think they can pad their accounts and no one
the wiser.”
It was true that most cops who leaned toward
corruption were exposed in their first
years, but I saw it as a Darwinian process.
Those who didn’t get caught early were the
smart ones, and the longer they survived, the
smarter they got, and the smarter they got,
the more they tried to get away with. People
believe all the time in the magic of their own
success.
I guess I believed in magic too. “Tell me
about her,” I said, confident that I could discern
his thoughts and intentions by watching
his face, hearing his voice, even though I
knew moods could be quirked, and voice
rhythms could be steadied with tranks.
He scowled and shook his head again, making
it clear I was wasting his time. “It’s all in
the report. Everything. You’ve watched it,
haven’t you? The detainment vid?”
60 LINDA NAGATA

“Tell me anyway.”
Pana understood that the best way to get
rid of me was to cooperate, so, sitting on the
couch opposite mine, he started talking, his
deep voice flat and fluid, as if he was reading
the words.
“I meet every ship that comes in. It’s not
strictly required—I could just send the bees
to inspect the cargo—but it’s my policy.
We’re spread thin out here. Indies working
out in the rocks, they’ll try out illegal biomods,
figuring it’s long odds on getting
caught—but eventually everyone comes in. If
they know I’m going to be down at the gates
every time, they might think a little harder before
they push the wall.”
I hated to admit that this made sense to me.
People get in trouble when they think no
one’s looking. But did the threat of a cop waiting
at the station gate really balance out the
temptation that grew in the dark, in those
years when you were out in the rocks, alone
with your thoughts, and free to run any experiment
your tools allowed? Pana must have
seen a lot of mods over the years, but his arrest
record was thin. Sometimes that’s a sign
of a good watch officer—someone who
knows how to make a mess quietly disappear
before it’s ever official. I’d done it myself. People
who understand their jeopardy willingly
cooperate, and life goes on.
Pana leaned back in his chair and scowled
again. It seemed to be his default expression.
“So, this prospecting boat came in. The Gold
Witch. There’d been chatter about it. They hit
big. Found a snowball. Auctioned it for a nice
gain. That was over a year ago.”
“It took them that long to come in?”
He nodded. “They were way out in the
dark. God knows what goes on out there.”
“What did go on?”
He shrugged. “No one patrols the Belt.
There’s no way to really know, but everyone’s
heard stories. Sometimes these prospectors
let the dark inside their heads, and they decide
they don’t want to come back. They find
a rock far away from everything, and they tunnel
it, set up housekeeping, declare themselves
beyond the bounds of the Commonwealth.”
The legality of independent holdings was
heavily debated, but the cold fact was that the
Commonwealth police could establish jurisdiction
simply by force of arms. It was only
OUT IN THE DARK
JUNE 2013
ever a matter of time.
“And Shay Antigo? She came from an indie
holding?”
Doubt shadowed his face. I caught it before
my DI did.
“That was her story. I couldn’t refute it. The
DI picked up a low level of deception, nothing
clear cut. I think she’d been in a station,
but not one with a police presence.”
“So she wasn’t scanned.”
“That’s my guess. I couldn’t ask for a full
history without cause.”
“Being an unknown citizen isn’t sufficient
cause?”
“Didn’t seem like it at the time.” His eyes
narrowed, and he leaned forward. “You think
she’s a fake because she doesn’t look like a
freak, because she could hold a human conversation,
because she knew what a cop was,
and what it meant to get through a station
gate.”
I nodded. “She grew up in the dark.”
He shrugged. “She has an atrium. You
know how indies get by out there? They live
through their atriums. They spend all their
downtime in virtual worlds, a lot of ’em based
on real places. It’s the damnedest thing. They
interact with machine personas, learn the accent
and habits of some city they’ve never
seen, and you’d swear they were birthright
citizens. Indies can masquerade as anyone
they want to be.”
A DI brought a report into my atrium. I’d
sent it hunting through Pana’s background.
He’d saved up a good-sized nest egg. He had
family, but none that were close. He’d been
married twice, both had ended when the contract
expired. He held citizenship in two celestial
cities and one Earth nation. Nothing in
his record was suspicious . . . but he would
have known to keep his record clean.
He was studying me, no doubt using the
same interpretive DI that I was using to assess
his mood. “You won’t find anything,” he told
me in a satisfied tone. “Because there’s nothing
to find.”
I took a walk around the ring of the station.
Eight ships were docked to the gates, one of
them the Gold Witch. Kiel Chaladur had ordered
it cleaned and refurbished immediately
on his return. It had been on the market a little
more than forty hours when it sold to an
61

ANALOG
experienced prospector. I found her supervising
the loading of food and supplies for what
looked to be a long expedition. Pana must
have warned her I was on my way, because
she didn’t look surprised when I came
through the station gate—a small, gray-eyed
woman, soft and plump, with a smile sincere
enough to hide mass murder behind it.
Most people don’t smile when a Commonwealth
cop comes to ask them questions.
“Do you want to inspect us?” she asked me
without preamble.
The cleaning crew had been through. We
both knew there would be nothing to find.
“Did you know Kiel Chaladur?” I asked her.
Her eyes were fixed on me with eerie intensity.
Despite her smile, my DI picked up
hostility, but I didn’t think it was directed at
me. “I knew him. I crewed with him twice,
way back. He had no luck then, so I moved
on.”
“He had luck this last trip.”
“You never know when it’ll hit.”
“What do you know about Shay Antigo?”
She crossed her arms and her smile disappeared.
“It’s hard to believe sometimes, what
goes on out there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Some stories are hard to
believe.”
“You’ve been prospecting a long time,
haven’t you?”
“Nineteen years. Six expeditions. Maybe
this time I’ll finally hit gold.”
“You must have seen a lot out there.”
Her smile flashed, fierce and bitter. “I
wouldn’t say that. The Belt’s a big place. But
it’s mostly empty space, and you know what?
There’s nothing much to see out there. There
aren’t any mysteries. Just a few rocks and a
whole lot of silence.”
“No mysteries? No unknowns?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen.”
Pana’s report included a copy of the Gold
Witch’s log file, which had a few entries from
the start of the voyage, but nothing more. As
an owner-operator, Chaladur wasn’t required
to keep a log and I guessed that if he’d kept a
record at all, it was locked up safe inside his
head. I knew that he’d set out with three souls
aboard and returned with four, and that there
was no data gate on the Gold Witch, and no
crèche in which a fresh husk could be grown.
So Shay could not have been regenerated. She
had come from somewhere: either an independent
holding as she’d claimed, or from another
boat.
I sent a DI to look for any discrepancies in
ship crews: a list of the dead and the missing,
all those who had never come back. I set another
DI to assembling a map of radio chatter
recorded over the years, to see if a pattern
could be recovered suggesting a habitation in
the sector where Kiel had found his strike.
Then I went over the DNA evidence collected
by Pana. He’d run a standard assessment
of Shay’s profile and had found no
matches in the Commonwealth central library.
I decided to look deeper.
I ordered the sample pulled from storage
and subjected it to a more detailed profiling.
The new report turned up a fair amount of radiation
damage—nothing that couldn’t be repaired,
but highly indicative of time spent in
the rocks. More suspect were the splices:
well-known segments of artificial DNA with
no actual function. They’d been devised as
copyright marks, but they’d been adapted for
use as placeholders that could throw off a basic
DNA match. It was possible Shay had inherited
the splices, but a smart amateur with
the proper molecular toolkit could easily
achieve the result.
The two reports I’d requested earlier had
come back while I was working. The radio
map failed to show any consistent point
source of chatter in the sector Chaladur had
been prospecting, but the list of the dead was
more interesting. It was longer than I expected:
a hundred ninety-seven who’d had to be
restored from backups. Most had died of injuries
or air loss, with a few suicides in the
mix. Nearly all the bodies had been recovered
and the organics recycled.
A single exception caught my eye. Thirtytwo
years ago a prospecting boat had disappeared
with its crew of three. No one had
ever reported sighting the ghost ship. No
word had ever come of its crew.
The radiation damage in Shay’s DNA sample
had indicated a long time spent in the rocks.
I sent a DI hunting information on the missing
crew—and in seconds it returned an initial
report: only one of them had been female,
her name was Mika Brennan, and the last time
62 LINDA NAGATA

the local database had been synced with the
Commonwealth central library, the version of
her that had been restored from backup was
living with her family in one of the oldest celestial
cities, Eden-2. I compared her video ID
with that of Shay Antigo and found marked
differences. Mika’s face was more slender, her
features sharper than Shay’s, her eyes green
not gray . . . but people changed their features
all the time.
I wanted to hear what the surviving Mika
Brennan knew about her long-ago disappearance.
So I generated a ghost within my atrium
and, leaving my physical presence behind to
continue searching the historical records, I
passed through the station’s data gate.
There is no awareness during the journey
between data gates and none in the receiving
platform. It’s like stepping through a door,
from one world to another. In my next moment
of awareness I existed in a virtual reality
within Mika Brennan’s atrium, one that perfectly
reflected the hard reality around her.
Most people get nervous when a cop
comes to talk to them. Mika Brennan only
seemed perplexed. “Officer Zeke Choy?” she
asked, her head cocked to one side. “The request
said you had questions? About my
death?”
We were in a park in Eden-2. Not far away,
two young girls were climbing boldly through
a jungle tree. They shared Mika’s lean features,
her thick, dark hair, and the deep,
clove-brown color of her skin. “Mommy,
watch!” one of them shouted.
My ghost existed within Mika’s atrium. I
was written onto her reality, so that from her
perspective, I was as solid and real as the two
kids—but from the kids’ perspective I did not
exist. At best, I was a phantom that only
Mommy could see.
“I’m talking,” she called back to them.
“We’ll play in a minute.” Then she cocked an
eyebrow at me. “At least I hope you don’t
plan to detain me?”
“I’d like to hear the story of what happened
to you out there. It might have some bearing
on a current case.”
“I went out there more than once, you
know.”
That surprised me, but then I hadn’t bothered
to pull a complete dossier.
OUT IN THE DARK
JUNE 2013
She nodded. “I don’t remember what happened
that first time, of course. That branch
of my existence ended. I presume there was
an accident. After a couple of years with no
word from me, no word of my ship, my parents
sought permission to restore me from a
backup made before I left.” Her gaze followed
the progress of the girls as they clambered
around the jungle tree. “It shook me up,
knowing I’d died out there. But that other me,
she’d sent a lot of video journals to my parents.
I watched them, and I came to understand
that I’d loved it out there in the raw,
cold dark. We went places where no one had
ever been, where no one was ever meant to
be.” She grinned. “And anyway, she’d left me
with a lot of debt. So I went out again, and
twelve years ago, I got lucky. We found a rock
loaded with rare metals. Everything I owed to
anybody was paid off, with wealth to spare,
so I came home.” She nodded at the two kids.
“And started the next phase of my life.”
I asked her if she knew anything about indies
living in holdings out in the rocks, raising
families there. She snorted. “Fables. People
like to tell stories, but that’s all they are. I remember
one time, a couple, a man and a
woman, were marooned on a rock. They did
some excavating. Lived there a few months,
while their ship self-repaired. And then they
got the fuck out of there as soon as they
could.” She looked up at me, with an open,
honest gaze that I admired. “No one lives out
there. Not that I ever saw, or heard, and I was
out there more than twenty years.”
I asked her if she’d ever go out again, and
she laughed, bright-eyed and buoyant.
“Maybe. We have forever, don’t we? To do
anything we want?” She turned again to the
kids. “Not any time soon, though.”
“So you didn’t leave a husk out there?”
“No. You understand . . . the years in microgee,
the constant radiation. Even with ongoing
repairs, the integrity of the husk is
doubtful. If I ever go back, I’ll start fresh. I can
afford a new husk. So I had my old one dissolved
and the matter sold off. There’s nothing
of me out there anymore.”
Back at Sato Station, I started to pull Mika’s
DNA record from her latest scan, but I hesitated.
There were implications to what I might
find. Mika could be drawn into this case, even
63

ANALOG
if she had no immediate involvement . . . but I
needed to know what had happened, before
I could know what to do—and I didn’t have
to include everything I found in my final report.
So I went ahead with it, comparing DNA
samples from Mika and Shay. And I found
what I expected: outside the spliced segments,
and with some exceptions for radiation
damage and repairs, they were a match.
Somehow, the Mika who’d disappeared thirtytwo
years ago had finally made it back from
the dark.
How had it happened? And had Officer
Daoud Pana known the truth? Had Kiel Chaladur
given him a cut of the profits for certifying
Shay as an unknown citizen? Or had Pana
been played?
I’d been so sure of this case when I started,
but I wasn’t sure anymore.
I got up from the couch where I’d been
working. Pana was in his office, talking to a
ghost I couldn’t see, but he turned his attention
to me when I looked in the doorway.
“I’m leaving.”
“Did you find anything?” he asked in a cold
voice. “Should I start preparing a defense?”
“I’ll let you know.”
It was time for me to go to Mars.
On Sato Station I returned my husk to cold
storage, and a moment later in my perspective,
I opened the eyes of another husk, this
one in the mausoleum in Confluencia, the
largest city on Mars.
Confluencia was a good place for someone
with a questionable identity to disappear. The
city snaked for hundreds of miles through
Mariner Valley and the Martians weren’t big
on security, so no gates existed between the
city’s districts. A person could live a hundred
years in Confluencia and never be scanned.
I wondered about her, this unknown, Shay
Antigo, who was once Mika Brennan. What
had she done out in the dark? How had she
lost herself for so many years? And why had
she finally chosen to come back . . . as someone
else?
The Martian husk was heavier than the one
I usually used, adapted to a higher gravity, but
it didn’t take long to master my balance, and
within minutes I was dressed and armed and
heading out into the city.
In most parts of the Commonwealth, locating
a citizen is a simple matter of having a
city’s network of listening posts search for the
ping of an ID chip, but the Martians of Confluencia
liked their privacy, and the only listening
posts were on the walls of government
buildings. So I did the next best thing: I followed
the money, requesting real time account
activity for both Shay Antigo and Kiel
Chaladur.
In a city as vast as Confluencia, it’s impossible
to go anywhere without constantly paying
for transportation, and given that my quarry
was newly flush with money and fresh from
the austerity of the Belt, I expected to see frequent
transactions mapping a bright electronic
trail.
To my surprise, it took more than an hour
for the first transaction to occur, but a location
was attached to it, a mall, a few kilometers
down the valley.
By the time I reached the mall, a second
transaction put their location at a designer
clothing store—and minutes later, I saw
them. Kiel Chaladur looked taller and more
robust than he had stepping off the Gold
Witch at Sato Station, while Shay Antigo
looked much the same, her hair still closecropped
and her soft features suggesting
nothing of Mika Brennan’s bold face.
I didn’t need to talk to them right away. I
was close enough to register the ping of their
ID chips, and that made them easy to follow.
So I tracked them through two more stores,
then waited while they had a drink. Anything
said or done in public was likely to be recorded,
either by a security device or a passerby,
and then all chance of discretion was gone. So
I bided my time, and after an hour my patience
was rewarded when Shay and Kiel disappeared
through the lobby doors of a luxury
hotel.
I gave them a minute to get onto the elevator
before I followed. The hotel yielded their
room number, and before long a chime was
announcing my presence at their door.
No one answered, not for three minutes or
more. I imagined the frantic, whispered conversation
that must be going on inside as they
considered why a Commonwealth police officer
stood on their threshold. The door finally
slid back to reveal Shay, gazing up at me with
a sorrowful look.
64 LINDA NAGATA

Asking no questions, she stepped aside—a
gesture I took as an invitation to enter. Kiel
stood on the balcony, a glass-encased ledge
that overlooked the canyon as it wended
south. His arms were crossed over his chest
and from the look on his face, I knew that if
there was no glass barrier there, he would enjoy
throwing me over the precipice.
The door whispered in its tracks, and as it
closed my atrium informed me I was signaldead,
cut-off from the network. I froze in
shock—though I should have expected it.
This was a luxury hotel, offering the best, including
electronic privacy, and Shay and Kiel
were fugitives.
I sent a gel ribbon gliding down my arm,
wondering what else they were willing to do
to protect themselves.
Shay circled around me, keeping her eyes
fixed on me as she gave me a wide berth.
“What was I supposed to do?” she asked me
in a desperate voice.
“What did you do?” I wondered.
“I came in from the dark. That’s all.”
“So it is you? Mika Brennan. How much did
Officer Pana make you pay for your new identity?”
My DI confirmed the confusion I saw on
her face. “It wasn’t like that—”
“And her name is Shay Antigo,” Kiel interrupted,
stepping in from the balcony.
“Kiel, please. You need to stay out of it.”
He didn’t listen, no more than I would have
in the same situation. “She is Shay Antigo. An
unknown from the rocks. The cop at Sato
confirmed it and we didn’t pay him a damned
thing.”
“It’s true,” Shay said. “There was no record
of me in the system, because I came to life
out there in the rocks.”
The DI studied her, and to my surprise it
did not suggest she was lying—but then, time
changes the way we define ourselves. “You
came to life after Mika Brennan died?” I asked
her.
“The prospector? I heard that story. It was
a long time ago.”
“She never went home.”
“That’s not what I heard. I heard her family
restored her from backup. I heard she made it
home.”
Kiel added, “I heard that too. I heard she
made a fortune, and set up a life for herself.”
OUT IN THE DARK
JUNE 2013
“A good life,” Shay added, tears glinting in
her eyes. “A life I wish I’d had.”
“What happened out there?” I asked her.
She turned and, crossing the room, she
sank slowly onto a sofa.
“There was an accident.”
Mika Brennan had been one of a crew of
three, on a prospecting boat running on marginal
resources. They’d found a comet remnant
and knew their fortunes were made.
Engines were fixed to the ice, but there were
fault lines that they didn’t detect, and when
the engines fired, a massive chunk of ice
sheared away and struck the ship.
“We lost all power,” Shay said. “The reactor
was damaged. It was only a matter of time before
the radiation killed us. But we figured if
we could get back to the main ice fragment,
eventually another prospector would come
along and we’d be found.”
So they wrestled cold sleep pods and a
bivouac tent to the hopper bay. Mika jumped
first, taking her pod with her. And because
she was the lightest, she took the bivouac
tent too. Her hopper was fully fueled, and she
made it. Her companions didn’t. They overshot
the ice, and had no fuel left to turn
around.
The three of them talked, until the distance
was too great for the suit radios. Then Mika
bolted her cold sleep pod to the ice. She set
up the bivouac tent around it, inflating it with
the last of her air reserve. Then she stripped
off her suit, and before the cold could kill her,
she climbed into the pod.
“I thought it’d be a year or two before I was
picked up. But it was thirty-one years until
Kiel and his crew found me, and by then I
didn’t exist anymore. I mean, the Mika Brennan
of thirty-two years ago, she no longer existed
in the Commonwealth. It was too late
for me to go home.”
“Shay’s harmed no one,” Kiel said gruffly.
“She’s done no wrong.”
I wished that was true. “She lied about her
name.”
Shay wasn’t going to give in easily. “It
wasn’t a lie! That name didn’t belong to me
anymore—and you know what would have
happened if I tried to take back my life.”
I didn’t answer right away. Instead, I
walked out to the balcony, thinking about the
65

ANALOG
choice she’d had to make. She could have
claimed her true name. It was her right. She
could have seized back the life of Mika Brennan,
but she’d chosen not to.
I felt a shy touch against my arm and looked
down, surprised to see that Shay had followed
me. “She’s the version of me that my parents
know. She’s the one my brothers and sisters
love. She’s the mother of my children. For
thirty years we’ve grown apart, and it’s too
late now to ever put us back together.”
Shay was right, of course. A ghost can join
its memories to its progenitor, but only for a
while. As they grow apart, it becomes impossible
to meld one mind with another. But in
the Commonwealth, individuals are allowed
only one physical copy of themselves.
“If I took back my name,” Shay said, “I’d
take her life away. Do you think my family
would even want me if I could do a thing like
that?”
“You know it doesn’t work that way,” I told
her.
We all want to see shades of meaning in
what we do, but Commonwealth law is absolute.
It’s concerned with limits, not justice.
“You were first,” I said. “She was second.
Under the law, that makes her an illegal
copy.”
“No, she was approved. There was a legal
certification.”
“Based on the assumption of your death,
but you’re not dead. She’s the backup, so you
have precedence. You knew it. That’s why
you decided to disappear.”
Shay stared out at the sprawl of gleaming
towers and the canyon’s seemingly infinite
walls. Kiel came to stand on her other side.
He took her hand.
“What was I supposed to do?” she asked
me—that same question she’d met me with
when I first came in the door. Only this time,
there was steel in her voice, the stern conviction
of a woman who’d survived out in the
dark, alone. “I gave Mika my life. I didn’t ask
for it back. I just wanted my own.”
“And Officer Pana gave it to you.”
“He’s a good cop,” Kiel said. “With a reputation
for playing fair. Not like the jackboot
cops of the inner system.”
I wasn’t going to argue. Pana had done a
better job than me. Sometimes, being a good
cop means knowing when to stop asking
questions.
I’d been so determined to prove that Pana
had been paid off, I’d followed this case too
far. If I reported what I knew, the life of Mika
Brennan, resident of Eden-2, would be forfeit
as an illegal copy of a living person. And
when she was gone, Shay would be tried and
convicted of counterfeiting her identity, and
she would be executed for it. Hardly a just reward
for what she’d been through, and what
she’d given up.
I drew a breath and let it out slowly. “The
radiation out there in the dark,” I said. “It
damages the DNA. The repair programs . . .
sometimes it seems like they’re copying patterns
from the wrong DNA source.”
“Like a cousin or something?” Kiel asked
tentatively. “Even a sibling?”
“Like that,” I agreed.
Daoud Pana had known the truth, I didn’t
doubt it, and he’d chosen to let Shay through
the station gate because it was the right thing
to do. Now I’d entered into his conspiracy.
I turned and walked back across the hotel
room. The door opened at my touch. I felt my
connection restored. Looking back at Shay
and Kiel, I saw they were still standing together
on the balcony. “Thank you for answering
my questions,” I said. “Assessments
such as this one help us maintain the integrity
of our officers. My report will state that,
based on the evidence, Daoud Pana followed
procedure and made the right call. This case
is closed.”
I took a step into the hall before I thought
to turn back. “And welcome to the Commonwealth,
Shay Antigo. I think you’ll like it
here.”
“Better than the rocks,” she allowed, in
whispery relief.
I nodded and went on my way.
In my mind I started composing my report.
I would have liked to open it with the truth:
that strange things happen out in the dark.
But I don’t want anyone else to get curious
and start digging into this story . . . not
until the law is changed—and that will happen.
It must. ■
Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to
“Nahiku West.” (October, 2012)
66 LINDA NAGATA

The story so far:
The planet meets no one’s idea of paradise.
Its gravity is oppressive and its climate cold.
Oxygen is thin and the carbon-dioxide level
is almost toxic.The terrain is bleak beneath
sunlight scarcely half as bright as on Earth,
and the local biota have yet to make the
great leap to land. For several good reasons,
Blake Westford has named this world
Dark.
Blake and wife Rikki Westford fly a shuttle
from orbiting starship Endeavour to the
first landing on Dark.Without experience
how weather works here, they’re taken by
surprise by a blizzard.And an avalanche ...
Fade to almost seventy years earlier ...
Blake, a ship’s engineer, and ship’s captain
Dana McElwain, on a test flight in the Asteroid
Belt, are urgently summoned home to
Mars. Police impound Clermont, the ship
Blake and Dana operate for Bradbury University.The
police deliver Blake, Dana, and
their passenger, aerospace engineer Dr.
Jumoke Boro, to the planetary governor’s
residence.Astrophysicist Dr. Antonio Valenti
explains that two co-orbiting neutron stars
Dark
Secret
Part III of IV
Edward M. Lerner
“Those who do not learn from history . . .”
But there’s a lot of history to choose from
are at best a few years from spiraling into
each other.Their cataclysmic collision will
produce a gamma-ray burst. Or, rather, this
has already happened, and lethal radiation
will be following close behind the tell-tale
gravitational waves.The GRB will obliterate
life across the solar system.
Working in secrecy lest the doomed populations
panic, colony ships will be built using
Jumoke’s Dark Energy Drive. But the
DED is experimental at best. Clermont, into
which the prototype drive has been installed
and integrated, needs lots more check-out.
Only Dana and Blake are trained to fly the
ship and work out the DED’s bugs.As soon as
the DED is made reliable, they’ll scout the
path ahead to another star.They agree—if
Blake’s wife can join them.
As the distant neutron stars entered their
death spiral, the gravitational waves intensified—ending
all ambiguity. In months, not
years, the GRB will arrive.There’s no time to
complete any colony ships. Humanity’s last
hope of avoiding extinction is Clermont.Neil
Hawthorne, the governor’s aide, arrives at
the spaceport where Blake and Dana oversee
67

ANALOG
Clermont’s retrofit for the scouting trip.
Hawthorne brings Rikki, Antonio, and two
kidnapped specialists: microbiology/nanotech
expert Dr. Carlos Patel, and psychiatrist
and family counselor Li Yeo, MD.
Hawthorne also brings commandeered critical
supplies, including thousands of frozen
embryos and a few artificial wombs taken
from an in-vitro fertilization clinic.
To spare billions across the solar system
from spending their final months under a
cruel death sentence, the embryo theft must
go unexplained. Hawthorne remains on
Mars to take the blame, under the cover story
of a cult stealing Clermont and the embryos
for a utopia to be built in the outer
solar system. Clermont (carrying Blake, Rikki,
Dana, Antonio, Carlos, and Li) evades
pursuit by Space Guard cutters determined
to recover the stolen embryos.
At Li’s recommendation, as a morale
builder, the six refugees rename Clermont.
They choose Endeavour, emblematic of ambition
and new beginnings. Studying their
route to Alpha Centauri, Antonio discovers a
relic of the Big Bang: a cosmic string.He confesses
that escaping the GRB is the best-case
scenario, scarcely possible within the error
margins of his observations. But there’s new
hope, from an old astrophysical speculation
that along a cosmic string the speed of light
might exceed normal.They alter course,
headed for the string, and hand off navigation
to Marvin, the shipboard artificial intelligence.The
crew enters hibernation for the
long journey, wondering if the GRB will kill
them as they sleep.
They awaken in galactica incognita, fortunate
to be alive.The cosmic string had complexities
beyond the assumptions of Marvin’s
navigational programming, as a consequence
of which they’ve been traveling for
forty-five years! Their velocity along the
string topped out at thirty-nine times (normal)
light speed.Sometimes, to prevent being
drawn into the string, Marvin had needed
Endeavour’s back-up fusion drive as well as
the DED.Their deuterium tanks are all but
drained. Bearings taken on distant pulsars
locate them on the far side of the Coal Sack
Dark Nebula, more than 700 light-years
from home.Only home is gone forever ...
While Antonio searches nearby stars for
habitable planets, Li plays mind games:
—With Antonio (whose Asperger’s Syndrome
makes any social interaction
painful), Li uses the anticipation of responsibility
for thousands of children.
—With Carlos (middle child; orphaned
young;lost among his foster family;Peter Pan
Syndrome with an adolescent fixation on
sex), Li dangles prospects of a sexual relationship.
—With Dana (retired Space Guard searchand-rescue
pilot; ever duty-bound), Li intimates
the many ways in which the captain
is unfit to found and lead a civilization.
—With Rikki (insecure, painfully aware
that she wasn’t brought along for her skills,
oppressed by survivor’s guilt), Li flirts with
Blake, Rikki’s lone anchor.
—With Blake (devoted to his wife), Li exploits
his worries about Rikki’s frame of
mind.
Li has her own unresolved issues. She
broods about: her relationship with her
mother; a messy romantic break-up; and the
scandal that almost ensued.As a California
state legislator, Mother had the connections
to suppress the scandal and save Li’s practice
and medical license. Intercession came at a
price: Li’s emigration to Mars, so as never
again to embarrass Mother. Li was ashamed
to learn that her famously liberal mother
had, in fact, a Victorian streak.
Carlos almost died during the long cold
sleep and starts drinking. He needs liquid
courage to return to the cold-sleep pod when
the only candidate world is fourteen lightyears
distant.After “only” twenty-four years
this time, Endeavour reaches the new solar
system.
The crew discusses names for planets,
moons, and geographical features. Li had,
with her typical subtlety, maneuvered Dana
into proposing this conversation—and the
debate is divisive. Names offer a way to acknowledge
aspects of human heritage, and
preferences reflect philosophical differences.
From Li’s nominations, Antonio infers an
authoritarian leaning.Does Li hope to install
the crew as the new civilization’s aristocracy?
Herself as its philosopher queen?
Li insists that they name their future
home world. Goading the crew, pushing too
hard, she is conditioning them to believe she
68 EDWARD M. LERNER

isn’t subtle.There are six crew and six planets;
to end the arguments, they’ll each name
one planet. Blake draws the lot to name the
world on which they will live. He chooses . . .
Dark.
Blake and Rikki take a shuttle to the first
candidate settlement site (reference the opening
scene).
Blake escapes the avalanche and rescues
Rikki.After treatment aboard Endeavour for
frostbite and exposure, they return to Dark.
They find a location with caves for shelter,
an inland sea for deuterium, and a broad
river delta whose sterile silt offers a head
start toward developing soil.
With colonization imminent, Li recalls her
mother’s ineffectiveness in the California
state legislature—and Li’s own failed electoral
efforts.Li is determined to wield power.
She challenges Dana to ground the ship, to
commit the ship as an electrical generator
and emergency shelter, knowing the request
will make Dana determined to keep Endeavour
flying. Dana flitting about the solar system
is Dana removing herself as a rival for
authority.
Among Dark’s many differences from terrestrial
norms, its biology uses arsenic instead
of phosphorus.Dark’s algae mats won’t
serve as feedstock for synthesizer vats without
new supplies of phosphorus.As a better
feedstock, they start growing earthly bacteria.
Living in caves, living on slime, running
out of phosphorus . . . they’re off to a discouraging
start.
By a month after Landing Day, Dana and
Blake have found a phosphate-rich asteroid.
Rikki, nonetheless, is deep in depression—
pushed there by Li’s skilled and subtle interventions.
Rikki, become Li’s puppet, is
maneuvered into challenging Li to hurry up
and start bringing children into the colony.
Before Li “allows” herself to be convinced
they’re ready, she’s extracted everyone’s
promise to serve at her beck and call.
Whether stockpiling diapers or at midnight
feedings, the rest will serve her.Whenever it
suited Li, she could send off Dana and Blake
to gather some obscure trace element. Li
thinks: This, Mother, is how one exercises
power.
DARK SECRET
* * *
DYSTOPIA
(Spring, Year Four)
JUNE 2013
Chapter 27
Beneath a sullen teal sky, under the pitiless
glare of an alien sun, Blake plodded
forward. No matter the ceaseless wind,
despite the remnants all around of the
spring’s latest unseasonable snowfall, he
dripped with sweat. He was as tanned as a walnut,
as filthy as mud, as exhausted as . . . as . . .
Words failed him.
Somewhere beyond the too distant horizon
his destination beckoned. If only he could
reach it. If only he could see his goal. If only
he could spare a moment to rest. If only he—
To a flourish of trumpets, he shuddered
awake.
Bach? McCartney? Copeland? Some centuries-ago
composer. A way to keep alive a bit
of the culture they had left behind, that Li insisted
it was important for them to cherish.
Most mornings, the random selection was
okay.
This was just a discordant bleat.
“I’m up,” Blake croaked, so Marvin would
kill the noise. “Lights on dim.”
At Blake’s side, Rikki tugged the blankets
over her head.
“Time to get up, hon,” he said softly, sitting
up.
She burrowed deeper.
“We have things to do.”
“Yeah.” She threw aside her covers, but required
a minute to summon the energy to stir
further.
Blake understood. He hadn’t felt rested
since . . .
Since Eve arrived.
After willing themselves from bed, he and
Rikki quickly showered and dressed. Outside
their concrete cabin, the dawn air had a chill
to it. At the height of summer, mornings
would have a chill to them.
The sun had yet to clear the horizon. Almost
as baleful as in his dream, the dawn light,
blood-red, blazed down the settlement’s lone
street.
Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning,
the ditty bubbled up from his subconscious.
What about a sun that ever verged on
red? What about a greenish sky?
Blake turned toward the dining hall. Rikki, a
69

ANALOG
wistful look in her eye, faced the other way,
toward the much larger but no less utilitarian
squat concrete box that was the childcare center.
What the hell, they could gobble breakfast.
It was only fuel, best not noticed.
“We can spare a few minutes,” he told her,
offering his hand.
Rikki led them down Main Street, the rutted
path there was never the time or the resources
to pave, into the childcare center. A
broad corridor, its inner wall all one-way glass,
enclosed the facility on all four sides. They
paused first outside the gestation room, its
glow panels still night-dim. On forty-eight
empty wombs, READY lights shone a steady
green. Carlos expected to have another ten or
more units finished soon.
On a rear-wall display, above and behind
the wombs, counters ticked down toward
Family Day. Forty-five days . . .
Around the corner, in the gallery outside
the nursery, he and Rikki tarried longer. In
twenty-seven glass-enclosed cribs, eerily
hushed, babies slept, or stirred, or fussed. The
little ones only seemed silent; so that they
would not disturb each other, noise cancellers
in each enclosure masked most sounds.
Though the babies varied in size, they were almost
identical in age: about four months.
Through sensors wired into the cribs, Marvin
watched, listened, and sniffed ceaselessly
for any hints of distress. From displays at the
foot of each crib the AI’s smiling animation
would be beaming down, crooning or speaking
soothingly to each infant as it (or rather,
Li’s verbal generalities turned by Carlos into
updated programming) deemed appropriate.
Antonio, passed out on the room’s rumpled
cot, an out-flung arm trailing on the floor, remained
on duty for whenever the AI needed
hands or suspected a problem. To judge by
the line-up of empty formula bottles on the
table along the wall, and the overflowing diaper
pails, Antonio had had a long night.
As Rikki reached for the doorknob, Blake
said, “Don’t. You’ll wake Antonio.” Who, like
Dana, was old enough to be a grandparent. In
a fairer world, neither would be expected to
pull all-nighters like this.
Rikki jerked back her hand, looking sad and
relieved. “It’s so . . . cold.”
Impersonal, she meant. “I know,” he told her.
And yet inescapable. He nudged her around
another corner and they peeked in on the toddlers.
Marvin kept watch here, too.
Most here were awake, playing and babbling
in their cribs. By accident or with insight,
a few had opened the refrigerated
compartments in their cribs and helped themselves
to formula bottles. Antonio would be
along soon—roused by Marvin, if need be—to
help those who hadn’t managed to feed themselves.
And to change diapers. Lots of diapers.
Rikki reached for the knob of this door, too.
Once inside, she wouldn’t leave without first
rocking, cuddling, and cooing over each of
the twenty-six.
If any child would let her. A haunted expression
told Blake she, too, feared their recoiling.
“We need to get a move on,” he said, not
meeting her eyes.
Around the final corner they looked in on
the oldest children. This room had no cribs;
mattresses resting directly on thickly padded
carpet hid much of the floor.
Eleven of these children were just shy of
three standard years. Some played, as often
side by side as with one another. A few
rammed around, bouncing off padded walls
and each other. Three sat in a corner staring at
an animation with images of colored toys.
When Blake pressed an intercom button, Marvin
was teaching numbers. From other wall
displays, Marvin’s avatars praised, cajoled, and
chided its charges.
Then there was the oldest cohort. The
guinea-pig generation.
Blond, blue-eyed Eve, by almost a day the
grande dame of the Dark-born, was loading a
tray with snacks. Castor, burly and intense,
was piling plastic blocks. Pollux, his black hair
a tousled mess, frowning, sat hunched on one
of the room’s tiny toilets.
The trio struck Blake as wise—or was it
wizened?—beyond their five standard years.
He tried to remember when he had seen
any of them smile. And he pretended not to
notice Rikki brushing a tear from her cheek.
This . . . factory was no way to raise children,
but how else could six adults cope? And
duty demanded they bring yet more children
into the world, while growing food for everyone.
70 EDWARD M. LERNER

“Let’s get some breakfast,” he said gently.
Rikki nodded, too choked up to speak.
When they retraced their steps through the
gallery, Antonio was up, yawning, a red-faced,
bawling baby in his arms. From another room,
furtive scrabbling sounds announced that at
least some of the lab mice had awakened, too.
But not Li: they found her in the ICU, dozing
in a chair, her mouth fallen open. Her patient,
asleep in the room’s single occupied isolette,
was sticklike, its joints misshapen. Li had not
had any explanation beyond, “It happens.”
She works harder than all of us, Blake
thought. And she can’t leave the settlement,
can’t ever stray more than a few steps from
the children.
The moment of empathy almost kept Blake
from not dreading the remainder of his day.
Breakfast was as best-ignored as usual. He
and Rikki scarcely overlapped with Carlos and
Dana, heading out that morning on a quick
flight to gather more phosphates. Carlos
swigged from a tall glass; Blake guessed that
the synthed orange juice was laced with vodka.
“We can’t have too much phosphate,” Li
had said again and again, when she wasn’t
pushing them to stockpile other minerals and
trace elements. “If Endeavour ever breaks
down . . .”
And she was right, although phosphates
half-filled their largest storehouse.
Until recently it had been a full warehouse.
The crush of snow from the winter’s final
storm had buckled the roof; three days of torrential
rain only the week before had washed
away half their reserves.
Blake missed robins as the first sign of
spring.
He and Rikki packed lunches, grabbed a
tractor from the garage, and trundled down
Main Street. Past storehouses and workshops.
Past a massive, deeply buried bunker, showing
only its roof and slanted double doors. It safeguarded
their most precious treasures: embryo
banks, both human and animal, and seed
bags, and Marvin’s servers. Past their other
bunker, housing a fusion reactor. Past the
ethanol-fueled, steam-powered generator that
backstopped the reactor, and the ethanol refinery.
Past the chemical fertilizer plant and its
noxious odor. Past the chicken coop, with its
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
clacking, clamoring occupants and their
worse than noxious stench. Past the glasswalled
hydroponics conservatory and its
touches of terrestrial greenery. Past the
foundry in which he had fabricated, among
many things, parts for this tractor.
Past twelve headstones and twelve heartbreakingly
tiny graves.
Gravity’s effects on gestation? Local toxins?
Radiation damage from the long voyage? Li
couldn’t always tell, and that meant they
could expect to lose more children.
They drove in silence down to the silt
plains.
To the roar of the tractor engine, Blake began
tilling. The throbbing of the motor ran up
the steering column, out the steering wheel,
into sore hands, aching arms, and tense shoulders.
Despite gloves and bandages, he kept
popping blisters faster than med nanites could
heal them. He felt about a hundred years old.
The stiff morning breeze off the Darwin Sea
whipped across the Spencer River Delta, pelting
him with grit and roiling the dust plume
that trailed behind the tractor for a good fifty
meters. Should he plow the lifeless silt with or
across the prevailing wind? Follow the contours
of the landscape? He had no idea, and
Marvin’s databases, though rife with esoteric
botanical theory, offered little practical how-to
to enlighten him. Last year’s trials with silt and
fertilizer in a few pots and planters, as encouraging
as they had been, suggested nothing
about plowing techniques. So Blake changed
course every few rows, putting in furrows
every which way. When the crops came in—if
the crops came in—he would have a better
idea for next year.
Not that Marvin’s knowledge wasn’t useful:
it showed they had dodged a bullet. Their
seeds, all varieties gengineered for Mars, fixed
nitrogen directly from the atmosphere. Blake
hadn’t taken biology since high school, so
maybe he’d forgotten that unmodded crops often
depended upon nitrogen-fixing bacteria in
the soil. More likely, he had never known it in
the first place. Inner-city curricula didn’t
dwell much on farming.
Rikki plodded along behind the tractor,
hand-planting the field row by row and labeling
test plots. When she had tired of stooping
and he of the shuddering of the tractor, they
swapped places. The windborne silt by then
71

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had turned them both a dusky gray.
Except by shouting, they couldn’t make
themselves understood over the roar of the
tractor. He resented the noise and fumes, but
the ridiculous internal-combustion engine was
dependable and easy to maintain. There was
no use complaining about it.
As there was no use complaining that babies,
like wheat and corn and even slime
ponds, must be scheduled just so, the winter,
labor-intensive crop of newborns timed to arrive
after the harvest of the weather-dependent
crops. Or about the cookie-cutter
“parenting” largely outsourced to Marvin.
Only realism did nothing to ease the pain.
He had seen the hurt again that morning in
Rikki’s eyes. The yearning, the ache, the need
to bear her own child. Their child.
Weeks earlier, he had sought out Li to ask
about it. In private, because Li was the last
person with whom Rikki would share anything
personal. . . .
“Bad idea,” Li had told Blake.
“The gravity?” he had guessed.
“The gravity. It causes constant skeletal
strain, wear and tear on the joints, and constriction
of the blood vessels.
“Forty percent excess weight is nothing to
sneeze it. That’s for you and me. For Rikki it’s
almost four times the weight her body developed
to handle. Even with nanites and meds,
it’s a struggle to keep her blood pressure controlled.
Pregnancy would only exacerbate the
problem.”
“It would be uncomfortable?”
Li had shaken her head. “Quite possibly fatal.”
“Jesus! What about the girls who’ll be born
here? When they’re old enough?”
“I’m hopeful they’ll be able to carry babies
to term, but we’ll have to wait and see. By
then, maybe, I’ll have a better handle on the
situation, and better meds.”
All the sacrifice, everything that the six of
them had endured . . . it might still be all for
naught? That was too horrifying to face, too
cosmic. The personal tragedy was heartbreaking
enough.
With a lump in his throat, he had asked,
“What do I tell Rikki?”
“What I would tell her, if she’d been the one
to consult me. The truth.”
“I can’t. It would destroy her.”
Li had stood there, head tipped, lost in
thought. “There is another possibility. We may
need to go this way eventually, anyway.”
“Tell me,” he had demanded.
“IVF. In vitro fertilization. Afterward we
transfer the embryo to one of the wombs for
gestation.”
“Then I’ll say that.”
“Okay.” It had come out skeptically.
“Rikki wants a baby. We want a baby.”
“Uh-huh.”
Only Li had been right. When Blake
broached the IVF option, Rikki had stormed
from their home, slamming the door behind
her.
Suddenly glad for the engine’s roar, Blake
tried to lose himself in work.
Every selection of grain type, every depth of
planting, every concentration of chemical fertilizer
or chicken feces, was another experiment—performed
with irreplaceable seeds.
But trial and error was their only way to learn
if and how fertilized silt would grow crops.
He told himself that Dark had neither weeds
nor plant parasites. And, having once mentioned
those advantages to Rikki, he brooded
about her rejoinder: for now.
Evolution abhorred an ecological vacuum.
Late that morning Antonio arrived on the
opposite bank of the nearby river channel,
driving the colony’s other tractor, to scatter diaspores
from Carlos’s latest batch of designer
lichens. Even the most advanced terraforming
lichen varieties Endeavour had brought,
gene-tweaked to tolerate the ubiquitous arsenic,
would not produce useful depths of
true soil sooner than in decades. A glacial
pace, for an all but glacial planet . . .
But Carlos and Antonio kept at it, as Blake
and Rikki would on the silt plain, because the
only large-scale food-producing alternative
was the bacterial ponds. If nothing else, the
lichens brought welcome splashes of color to
the dreary countryside.
Blake hated farming, if he could so dignify
their as yet futile toiling in the dirt, but he
loathed working the slimy ponds. That festering
blanket of scum. That fetid, pungent
stench.
From the memory alone, he all but puked.
The tractor sputtered and stopped. From its
72 EDWARD M. LERNER

seat, Rikki called, “I’m ready to switch places
again.”
“I’m ready for lunch,” he countered, abusing
the meanings of both ready and lunch.
Antonio had abandoned his tractor to handpick
specimens from a nearby gravel deposit.
He had been gathering rocks, everywhere he
went, since the onset of spring.
Blake had not asked why, lacking the energy
for another of the esoteric circumlocutions
that with Antonio too often passed for an explanation.
An answer might start with the Big
Bang.
“Join us for lunch?” Blake shouted, gesturing
at the bobbing pontoon bridge that linked
the delta to the shore.
Antonio looked up, not quite in Blake’s direction.
“No thanks. I’ve got things to do.”
“What’s with the rocks?” Rikki called.
“You’ll be sorry you asked,” Blake said sotto
voce.
But all Antonio offered, with his attention
already returned to his collecting, was, “I
don’t have postage stamps. Or . . . blueberries.”
Through the colony’s array of safety cameras,
Li watched the peasants traipsing home
from their day’s toil. She never called them
peasants, not aloud, but how else did one describe
those bound to the land to feed and
serve their master?
She never called herself their master, either.
It sufficed that at a subconscious level they
knew. And anyway, she preferred Dark Empress.
It had a certain cachet.
Above the two-tractor caravan, the sky had
turned foreboding. Then the clouds opened
up and rain spoiled her view. She had to imagine
them wet, muddy, and miserable.
Well, the phosphate mines in the asteroid
belt were dry enough.
She could almost envy Carlos and Dana. Li
would kill for a change of scenery, not to mention
a break from this oppressive gravity. Appearing
indispensable had its price.
The caravan neared the edge of the settlement
proper, the garage’s overhead door
creeping upward at a radioed command. That
was Li’s cue that someone, if not all three,
would swing by soon to visit the children.
Li closed her office door behind her. Whoever
came would find her, brow furrowed,
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
shoulders slumped, expression sad, examining
one of the babies.
Chapter 28
Rikki lie bonelessly, eyes closed, head
tipped back against the rim of the whirlpool
tub, as the hot pulsing jets massaged away
knots in her back, arms, and legs. Water and
electricity, if little else, they had in abundance.
She let the fizzing water buoy her, let it persuade
her, that for a few minutes, anyway,
gravity’s cruel dominion had been overthrown.
After hard labor from dawn to dusk, it
wasn’t a bad way to end the day.
Blake said, “You look like you’re only sleeping.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m going to get out now.”
His voice rose in pitch, just a little, at the
end of the announcement. Asking, without
asking, “Unless you want to fool around?”
“I’ll be along in a while,” she said.
Eyes still closed, Rikki felt and heard the water
slosh as he climbed from the sunken tub.
Faint but brisk, she heard the whisper of fabric
against skin as he toweled off, and the slapslap
of bare feet on the concrete floor as he
padded from the bathroom.
Then she opened her eyes.
Part of her even wanted sex: for the closeness
to Blake. To know he still found her desirable,
no matter that this godforsaken rock
had turned her into a muscle-bound Amazon.
To exorcise some of her pent-up anger.
And that anger was why most of her didn’t.
Couldn’t. Because what she truly craved, the
ache more insistent with each passing day,
was the feel of a child growing inside her.
A host of med nanites would not allow that
to happen. And Li would not permit that to
change. “For your own good,” Rikki mimicked.
“What’s that?” Blake called from the bedroom.
“Sorry. Talking to myself again.”
“It’s about time we head out for dinner,” he
said.
“Thanks.” She permitted herself several seconds
more buoyant relief. “Okay, I’m getting
out.”
He stuck his head through the doorway
with a comically exaggerated leer.
“Maybe later,” she said.
73

ANALOG
* * *
Beneath diamond-bright stars, shivering in
the evening chill, Rikki and Blake scurried
down Main Street to the communal dining
hall. Celestial sparkles and the nip in the air
shared a cause. Dark’s thin, dry air didn’t
block much inbound starlight; it didn’t stop
much of the day’s heat from reradiating back
into space, either.
She searched overhead for any hint of
home. As always, the sky had nothing to offer
her but alien constellations, many still unnamed,
too-large moons, and the soul-sucking,
inchoate darkness that was the Coalsack.
“Make a wish,” Blake said.
Turning toward him, studying the western
horizon where he appeared to be looking,
Rikki saw the meteor. Or a different meteor,
because the sky was suddenly filled with faint
streaks.
“Done,” she said, trying to make her tone
light. Alas, no mere wishing star would fix
what ailed her.
The meteor shower ended in seconds, eminently
forgettable. Planets glimmered overhead,
too, the brightest of them so close that
with binoculars you could clearly see its Saturn-like
rings. Back home, Ayn Rand’s orbit
would not have encompassed the inner edge
of the Asteroid Belt; the local version of a Belt
was shoehorned in between the gas giant and
Dark. Nearby asteroids meant nearby resources.
And though they had been fortunate so far,
logically that made Dark a shooting gallery.
“I made a wish, too,” Blake said, waggling
an eyebrow at her.
She laughed. “It must be your lucky day.”
“I’m not admitting anything, or it won’t
come true.”
The dining hall smelled wonderful. Rikki
couldn’t place the aroma. Something different.
Something she had not encountered in a long
time. Carlos’s muttering, from inside the
kitchen, revealed nothing. It was his turn to
prepare dinner, and that somehow always entailed
guzzling the synthed swill that served as
cooking sherry.
Wallpaper to her left and right showed an
Earth forest; the wall straight ahead cycled
through scenes of something from Marvin’s
media library. She didn’t recognize the vid
from its previews, and that didn’t surprise her.
For those who stayed after dinner, the communal
movie was the cook’s choice.
Behind Rikki, a door opened with a squeak.
Li said, “I guess tonight’s treat won’t be a surprise.
Wow, that smells good.”
“Roast chicken?” Blake asked in wonder.
Because while they often had eggs, they
had yet to eat meat. The priority remained expansion
of the flock.
It pained Rikki to have learned the proper
name for a bunch of chickens. And that tomorrow
she would be up before dawn to collect
eggs, scatter bucketsful of feed
pellets—dried, chopped bacterial mat—and
muck out the coop.
Just as with cooking, they took turns caring
for the chickens. Except Li. She refused to do
anything so nonsterile lest one of the babies
should need immediate care.
Logical . . . and so convenient.
“Some chickens got into a fight today,” Li
said. “Marvin alerted me. Before I could get to
the coop, one chicken was severely pecked
and clawed. I had to put the bird down, and
saw no reason to let its meat go to waste.”
“Fair enough,” Blake said with enthusiasm.
Rikki sat at the dining-room table and Blake
sat next to her. Li took the seat straight across
from Blake.
Just to bug me, Rikki thought. And it works.
Even after she had finally satisfied herself that
while Blake respected Li, he did not much like
her.
The door opened again, admitting the stragglers.
“Sorry we’re late,” Antonio said. “Dana
asked to look in on the children.”
Did the little ones hate Dana, too? Did they
avert their eyes, burst into tears, even back
away, when Dana entered the nursery? Rikki
was too ashamed of her failings ever to have
asked.
“Not a problem,” Li said. “But it’s good that
you’re here.”
“Do I smell chicken?”Dana asked.
Li beamed. “You do.”
So Queen Li means to take credit for a
melee among the chickens? Despising the
woman, Rikki changed the subject. “How was
everyone’s day?”
Antonio shrugged. “Another day. Another
few calluses.”
“About that chicken?” Dana prompted.
As Li started to explain, Carlos emerged
74 EDWARD M. LERNER

from the kitchen pushing a serving cart. With
the grand flourish of a magician, he raised the
domed cover.
The roast chicken’s skin was a crackly, golden
brown. Clear juices oozed from punctures
where he must have tested the bird’s doneness
with a fork.
Rikki’s mouth started to water.
Nor did the feast end with the chicken. The
greenhouse had contributed everything for a
tossed salad: lettuce, tomatoes, peppers,
onions, and cucumbers. There were baked
potatoes, too, with synthed butter and dollops
of faux sour cream. There were bowls of what
looked like chocolate pudding.
When Carlos began carving the chicken, his
hands were steady. If nothing else, the man
could hold his liquor.
What were they celebrating, Rikki wondered,
beyond Li’s largesse with the bounty to
which everyone but she contributed?
“It’s a shame,” Rikki began, sadness and sudden
anger commingling.
Carlos stopped carving. Heads turned toward
Rikki.
“Tonight feels like a Sunday family dinner.
Only there’s no family.”
“We’re family,” Li said.
“Of course,” Rikki said. “But I’m thinking
bigger. I’m thinking of the children.”
I’m thinking of bonding with them, or,
rather, them bonding with us. Only Li doesn’t
see it. Li spends her days with the children,
and they love her just fine.
Silence. Beneath the table, Blake gave Rikki’s
knee a pat. Maybe he meant it as comfort.
It felt patronizing.
Forget your wish upon a star, fella.
Rikki plunged ahead. “We don’t treat those
kids—our kids—much different than the
chickens in that egg factory down the street.
We feed them and clean up after them like
they’re on some sort of production line. Apart
from regular baths, they might as well be
chickens.”
“Except that we don’t eat the children,”
Carlos said dryly, as he resumed carving.
Dana asked, “What do you have in mind,
Rikki?”
“Dinner is the only time we’re together,”
she answered. “We should eat with the kids.
We should let them hear genuine conversation
among adults, not abdicate to Marvin teaching
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
them to speak.” And so much else.
“That’s seventy children.” Li answered in
the slow, calm, reasoned manner that drove
Rikki up the wall, in the affected tone of voice
that reminded: I’m the professional here. That
reminded: they love me. “This year we’ll add
another sixty, more or less.”
“And we want all of them to be civilized,”
Rikki said. “Or they’ll be fighting like the
chickens, too.”
“Because during a sixteen-hour work day,
on a short day, I would never think to speak to
the children,” Li said.
Spoken calmly and reasonably, damn the
woman.
“We control the rate of births,” Rikki said,
“not the other way around. We shouldn’t”—
we mustn’t!—“let an arbitrary decision shape
how we bring up these kids.”
“It’s not arbitrary,” Antonio said. “If we
don’t . . . raise the children while we’re still
alive, with firsthand knowledge of technology,
culture, and civilization, they’ll be savages.
If that should happen, they . . . won’t long outlive
us.”
Carlos again stopped carving to offer, “And
we need genetic diversity.”
More variety within your future harem, Carlos?
Rikki bit her tongue. The children having
children, no matter with whom, would not
become an issue for years. She said, “They’ll
be savages if we don’t slow down the pace, if
we don’t invest the effort to make them something
better.”
If we don’t show them love.
“I agree with Rikki on this,” Blake said.
On this? What hadn’t made the cut?
“I’ve made a suggestion,” Rikki said. “Let’s
discuss it.”
“We have discussed it,” Carlos said. “You’ve
been told why it’s impractical to—”
Dana cleared her throat. “Let’s discuss options
first. We could bring a few kids every
evening. Rotate them through, making sure
each child sees something like a normal family
setting at least once a month. See how they
fare in a social setting. Learn how we have to
adapt.”
Blake’s pocket trilled; tonight was his turn
on call. He took out the folded datasheet,
glanced at it, and stood. “Sorry, people. Marvin
needs hands in the nursery.” He gazed
with longing at the feast, not yet even on the
75

ANALOG
table. “So very sorry.”
Faster than Rikki could offer, Li said, “We’ll
save some dinner for you.”
Rikki’s thoughts—and her gut—churned.
Hands. That’s all we are to these children.
What will they be like when they grow up?
Once again, Carlos returned his attention to
the chicken. Blake set off toward the kitchen,
perhaps for something he could eat while at
the childcare center. Antonio, taking a serving
bowl from the cart, managed to knock the salad
tongs to the floor. He headed to the
kitchen for, presumably, another set. Dana
studied the forest scene.
The sudden silence was deafening.
It was as though Rikki had never spoken. As
though she weren’t even here. “We’re running
the universe’s biggest, most impersonal orphanage,”
she said.
Leaning across the table, Li patted Rikki’s
hand. “This isn’t about ‘the children,’ you
know.”
Rikki yanked away her hand. “Enlighten me.
What is it about?”
“A particular child.”
A nonexistent child. Though Rikki hated to
admit it, even to herself, Li might be right.
There could be no denying the clanging of
Rikki’s biological clock, but she refused to accept
that she was a slave to it. She leaned back
in her chair, trying to be objective, to separate
motivations, to sort out her feelings. And ended
up worried: Do I crave pregnancy for a
sense of worth?
Li was responsible for everyone’s health,
from day-to-day bumps and bruises to reversing
the endless complications that cropped up
in the wombs, from everyone’s psychological
wellbeing to assuring that their agricultural
programs would satisfy the colony’s long-term
nutritional needs.
Dana had her ship to pilot, to keep them
supplied with phosphates and metals and
everything else not readily found or mined on
the ground. Blake had the ship to keep flying,
and a thousand other gadgets from tractors to
chicken-feed dryers to design, build, and
maintain. Carlos reprogrammed synth vats and
nanites, built specialty medical gear for Li, and
constructed and maintained the steadily growing
number of artificial wombs.
Whereas Antonio and I are manual labor.
Diaper changers and field hands.
Did Antonio ever feel insignificant, too? He
shouldn’t. But for him, they would never have
escaped the GRB. His rock collection might
serve no more purpose than his blueberry obsession,
but at least he had interests.
I don’t have laurels or interests to fall back
on. Just survivor’s guilt.
The colony would have much brighter
prospects if Hawthorne had sent a farmer or
miner in her stead. Of what use to anyone was
a science historian? Of what earthly use . . .
“Are you all right, dear?” Li asked.
“We’re bringing up the next generation like
strays and foundlings. I don’t like it.”
Li’s sad smile might have been intended to
convey no more than, “What choice do we
have?” but Rikki read it as, “Queen Li knows
best.”
I need purpose, Rikki decided. Something I
can contribute. Something of my own. Something
important.
In a flash of insight, she knew what that
something would be.
Chapter 29
The six of them had not discussed terraforming
since before landing. Why would
they? Dark was a terrestrial world.
But, Rikki decided, maybe they should.
Techniques that had been making Mars habitable
could also make a difference on Dark. It
was more than a matter of personal comfort:
the crops that struggled here might thrive in a
warmer climate. And she could give them that
warmer climate: designer perfluorocarbons
were incredibly effective as climate agents,
some thousands of times more potent as
greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.
Nor would they need to pump much PFC
into the atmosphere to begin altering the climate.
Twentieth-century industries had, in a
few short decades, without meaning to, almost
destroyed Earth’s ozone layer with chemically
similar chlorofluorocarbons.
She began making order of magnitude estimates
in her head—
And stopped. She was getting ahead of herself.
The first rule of terraforming was, don’t
meddle with what you don’t understand.
She didn’t understand Dark. None of them
did. They had experienced their share of
weather, but four local years was too brief a
time to reveal anything reliable about climate.
76 EDWARD M. LERNER

Continuous measurements covered only a
few square klicks around the settlement. Their
knowledge of anywhere else—spotty and haphazard,
anecdotes rather than systemic data—
was limited to whatever observations
Endeavour had serendipitously made in the
course of doing something else.
A remote-sensing satellite in synchronous
orbit for the past few years would have told
Rikki a great deal—but Dark had no synchronous
orbits. Its moons soon destabilized the
orbit of any artificial satellite placed at the
proper distance.
Then there was the matter of oceans . . .
Oceans stored heat from sunlight, releasing
that heat to moderate temperature swings
both diurnal and seasonal. An ocean current
like Earth’s Gulf Stream could alter the climate
of entire continents. Multiyear oceanic temperature
cycles, like El Niño and La Niña, had
global impact. Knowing what happened in
Dark’s ocean depths mattered.
The data that had been collected on this
world’s oceans and seas? Precisely zero.
She’d had the sense (or the lack of courage
of her convictions?) to follow her instincts.
She’d not spoken a word about any of this.
Luckily so, because had anyone known how
she’d been spending her time, she would only
have looked useless. More useless. Marvin
knew—she needed the AI’s help with data retrieval,
model building, and number crunching—but
she had ordered it to keep her secret
to itself.
Toiling in secrecy didn’t help. For a miracle,
the little ones mostly slept the latest night she
had spent at the childcare center. With a few
minutes here and a few there, she had shoehorned
in a couple hours of work. (For them,
she told herself, guilt-ridden at not playing
with everyone not asleep—and more guilt-ridden
at the relief that came of sparing herself
their rejection. For their future.) She got a bit
more research accomplished when Blake
spent the night in the nursery. Desperate for
progress, feigning insomnia, on consecutive
evenings she had squeezed in another few
hours of work. But she couldn’t keep up the
pace. Without a decent night’s sleep, and
soon, she would keel over or run someone
over with a tractor.
When the time came to commit serious astronomy,
Rikki knew she had to enlist Antonio.
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
* * *
Rikki threw off her side of the blankets. She
got up and began dressing for outdoors.
“What?” Blake murmured sleepily.
“Insomnia,” she told him. “Again. I’m going
for a walk.”
Blinking, he sat up. “Give me a minute. I’ll
walk with you.”
“Wrong,” she told him. “That I can’t sleep
doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”
“But I—”
“Gallantry noted. I’ll be fine.” This wasn’t a
campsite in some tropical jungle, surrounded
by lions and hostile natives. The settlement’s
few buildings were surrounded by nothing
and nobody. “Seriously, sleep.”
“Stay close.”
“I will.” She gave him a quick kiss. “Sleep.”
Antonio didn’t put all his free time into his
ever-expanding rock collection, at least not at
night. She found him where she had expected:
using the ship’s telescope. The main
bridge display showed Ayn Rand, with two of
its inner moons in transit. He seemed not to
have noticed her arrival.
“Do you see something interesting?” she
asked.
“I’m making a survey.”
A nonanswer answer, she noted. Well, she
had been on the taciturn side, too. He was in
the pilot’s acceleration couch, and she
plopped into the copilot’s seat. “I wondered if
you could help me with something. Discreetly.”
Because if she could harness his obsessivecompulsive
focus, and his sometimes encyclopedic
knowledge, he might do much to
advance her research.
Finally, he turned away from the bridge console,
if not to look directly at her. “If I can.
Help, I mean.”
“I’m trying to understand the climate here.
Back home there were astronomical effects on
climate.”
Without leaving his seat Antonio seemed to
strike a pose. Something in his voice changed.
“You are remembering Milankovitch cycles.”
Professorial mode. She wondered if he
missed the academic life.
“The tilt of Earth’s axis varies over . . . millennia.
And like a wobbling toy top the Earth
precesses about that axis, also over millennia.
And because planetary orbits are ellipses, not
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ANALOG
circles, the axis of the entire orbit slowly revolves
around the sun. In the case of Earth,
that last cycle takes more than a hundred millennia.
All three processes affect what sunlight
strikes the planet, where, and at what angle.
All three affect seasons and . . . climate.”
As she had more or less remembered. “And
those processes are independent, correct?
Every so often, they peak together.”
“Cycles peaking together have been implicated
in triggering ice ages.”
“And extrapolating to Dark? What does our
long-range forecast look like?”
He studied his feet. “I don’t know.”
“What would it take to find out?”
“A lot of observing time. And modeling
time, too.” He gestured at the image on the
big display. “Earth doesn’t have a big neighbor
planet like that to tug at it. Or three moons.
The cyclic variations here are apt to be more
complex.”
Farming and childrearing didn’t leave much
time for, well, anything else. Maybe those
were the only tasks she was good for.
Something she knew about the history of
science had to be useful. Didn’t it?
Maybe this was it.
From the deep shadow alongside the
reroofed phosphate storehouse, Carlos
watched Rikki. Out in the middle of the night,
slinking home from Endeavour. Having a bit
of after-hours fun, are we?
But kudos for Antonio! Carlos would not
have guessed the odd little guy had it in him.
Or, more precisely, that he got it into Rikki.
After she slipped past, Carlos continued to
his workshop. His extracurricular activities
also demanded discretion.
Yawning, exhausted after a full day’s work,
he nonetheless toiled in high spirits. For
months he had put his free nights into making
things for Li. If what she wanted wasn’t candy
and flowers, nonetheless each new batch of
the gadgets made her very appreciative.
He could appreciate that.
Discovery set down on a broad plain, between
soaring rock canyon walls.
“Touchdown,” Blake announced. “The
crowd goes wild.”
They had landed on a pebbly shore along
the Spencer River. A very damp shore, to
judge by the steam that billowed around
them, blocking Rikki’s view from the cockpit.
That fog would dissipate into the dry air long
before the ground cooled enough for them to
climb down.
“You do realize,” she said, “that I’ve never
seen a football game.” Or cared to. Martians
didn’t do football: the playing field would
have had to be ridiculously big.
“I know many things.” He popped his helmet,
unbuckled his safety harness, and twisted
around to see her behind his headrest.
“Such as that you’ve never asked to accompany
me on a routine checkout flight. Not once.
Today you announced you were coming and
proposed a destination. What gives?”
“Nothing.” Almost nothing, anyway: the
vague memory of terrain glimpsed from a fastmoving
shuttle, when the two of them had
first over-flown this region.
“Here in the canyon, we’re out of radio contact.
If you have secrets, this is the place to
spill them.”
His unhappy expression added, “Unless
you’re keeping secrets from me.”
“No secrets,” she dissembled. “I wanted to
see these rock faces up close.”
“Be that way.” He turned forward.
“Really, that’s why I came.” And if she saw
what she expected to see, she would explain.
She just didn’t want to look stupid.
The awkward, silent wait till he popped the
canopy release seemed interminable.
Rikki hung a ladder over the cockpit’s side,
swung herself up and over, and clambered
down the rungs. “I remember when doing
that was hard.”
“We’re getting used to the place. Home
sweet home.”
Home, sweet or otherwise. That was why
she had to get her head wrapped around the
climate here. “I’m going to stroll along the river
for a ways. Join me?”
“Sure.”
The river’s flow here was slow and placid.
When she walked up to the shore and dipped
in a fingertip, the water was icy. “No skinnydipping,”
she told him preemptively.
“So what is this about?”
Slowly, she pivoted, taking in the panoramic
view. “Isn’t this enough?”
The flat plain stretched for at least a hundred
meters behind them before rising to
78 EDWARD M. LERNER

meet rugged cliffs. The river, gray with silt,
hugged the canyon’s other wall. Perhaps a half
klick downstream from where they stood, a
small but spectacular cascade burst from the
nearer rock face to crash into the waters far
below. Rikki dubbed the torrent Beagle Falls.
How long ago had this valley silted up? Had
the silt accumulated gradually, or had it settled
out in the aftermath of some terrible flood?
She didn’t know, but an answer to that mystery
could wait.
Craning her neck, peering up and up and
up, Rikki studied the nearer canyon wall. Two
hundred or so meters high. Sedimentary rock.
Barren of life, of course, without even a hint
of greenery. Great crags and brooding hollows
carved as water and wind had patiently eroded
the softest rock. Several dozen strata, of
varying depths, in countless shades of gray.
Subtle, subdued red tones here and there
among the grays.
She took out her camera. With its laser
rangefinder active to capture precise distances
and scales, she started panning.
“Magnificent,” Blake said. “It reminds me of
the Grand Canyon.”
“Then my suggestion was worthwhile?”
“You tell me.”
She couldn’t know without detailed analysis,
but yes, she was sure. “The layering of the
rock embodies sedimentation rates over time.
Those reflect the climate.” And cycles of the
climate, over perhaps millions of years.
“And that’s important?”
She couldn’t know that yet, either. “It might
be.”
The inevitable confrontation began after
dinner, in an impassioned and arcane outpouring
of verbiage from Rikki. Blake, Dana,
and Antonio, looking on approvingly, were
clearly in on it. And the four had waited till
Carlos, Li’s dependable ally (when sober, anyway),
had left for his shift at the childcare center.
Climate. Growing season. Terraform. Blah,
blah, blah.
Rikki finally wound down.
“I don’t know,” Li told the assembled peasants.
The more candid answer would have been I
don’t care. Candor did not suit her purpose.
Nor did the topic matter. It mattered only
that they found something over which to
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
rebel. Something other than the manner of
childrearing.
“It’s important,” Rikki insisted. She spoke
too loud and stood too close. Her chin jutted
out and she had crossed her arms across her
chest.
Classic belligerence, Li thought. Excellent.
“Maybe someday.”
“Respectfully,” Blake began, “I disagree. We
shouldn’t wait.”
“Of course you disagree,” Li said. Goading
him by criticizing his woman. Because, as Li
made a point of reinforcing from time to time,
she was never subtle.
“Damn it, Li,” Rikki said, “be reasonable.
We need to understand the climate. Climate
affects our food supply. You must care about
that.”
Li smiled condescendingly: another goad.
“We settled almost inside the tropics. Can you
find us someplace suitable anywhere
warmer?”
“That’s the point,” Antonio said. “If the climate
fails us . . . here, the colony is in trouble.
Let’s find out sooner rather than later. While
maybe there’s still the opportunity to change
things.”
Blake’s turn. “Or we may find we’ve lucked
out. This one set of observations, from this
one canyon, suggests the trend might be to
warmer weather. It would be nice to have an
idea when and how far we can expand into
higher latitudes.”
Li said, “Planning for the long run.”
“Exactly,” Dana said.
In the long run, we’re all dead. Li couldn’t
remember who, other than someone long
dead, had first said that. The provenance
didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to
quote it. She wanted the four of them to prevail.
Convince me, people. Convince yourselves
you convinced me.
“We need to eat,” Rikki said. “The children
need to eat.”
They had an entire world to farm. How
could they ever lack for food? But if she were
wrong, if on occasion they wound up supplementing
crops with a bit of bacterial sludge,
so be it. What mattered was raising obedient,
subservient children to do the colony’s bidding.
To do her bidding.
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ANALOG
And to that end, she needed the others too
busy to interfere with her affairs.
Li permitted her shoulders to sag. She lowered
her head, nibbled on her lower lip. Read:
doubt. Read: you’re winning me over. She
said, “Can you fit in these studies without impact
to our other work?”
“Well . . .” Dana conceded.
“Because,” Li said, “I could take on longer
shifts in the childcare center. If that would
help.”
“It would help,” Antonio managed.
“Tell me again,” Li said. “What will you do?”
Blake and Dana swapped glances. They’d
caught her verb choice: will, not would.
“We need a more global data set,” Rikki
said. “There are other ancient canyons to read.
Ice-core samples to collect from glaciers and
the polar icecaps. Bore holes to drill in the
sediments of lake and sea bottoms. All should
tell us useful things about climate patterns and
trends.”
“It sounds major,” Li said.
“It is major,” Rikki said.
Li resumed chewing on her lip: sincere, accessible
leader here, open to everyone’s inputs.
“Okay,” she conceded. To grins all
around, she added, “We’ll have to figure out a
revised work schedule first. We still have children
to feed.”
“Of course,” Antonio said.
“Thanks, Li,” Rikki said, at last letting her
arms fall to her sides.
Li smiled. “You’re welcome, and I thank you
for bringing this matter to my attention.”
Because while you’re gadding about, the
children will continue in my sole care.When
you’re here, you’ll be crunching the data or
laboring in the fields or in bed, exhausted,
and the children will remain, under Marvin’s
watchful and carefully programmed
eye.
Learning obedience. Discipline. Self-denial.
Conformity. When (ever less frequently) the
peasants questioned her methods, the analogy
with which they struggled was an orphanage.
If any of her companions had read Dickens,
they would still be on the wrong track.
Her true model—updated and improved, of
course—was a Spartan barracks. The children
would grow up to serve the State. The State
she would define.
This, Mother, is how one wields power.
Before a single peasant ever suspected Li
wanted them distracted by another project, it
would be too late.
By then, all the children will be mine.
Chapter 30
“Oh-two?” Dana asked.
“Two fresh tanks,” Antonio answered.
“Oh-two pressure?”
“Nominal.”
“Cee-oh-two?”
“Barely registering.”
“Suit heater?”
Antonio had checked and rechecked everything
on the long list, but he wouldn’t dream
of interrupting Dana’s methodical runthrough.
Who better than he to respect obsessive
behavior?
And she was being obsessive. Because she
cared. She got him, not just better than anyone
else alive—not a high hurdle—but better,
almost, than anyone who had ever lived. As
well, almost, as had Tabitha.
And knowing him, knowing how thoroughly
he would have checked everything, Dana
still made it her job to watch out for him.
After Tabitha died, he had never expected
anyone again to care.
At last they left Endeavour, stepping from
the forward air lock onto the sun-baked surface
of Aristophanes. The terrain, what little
could be seen before the freakishly close horizon,
was less cratered than he expected.
A world at half phase hung—loomed—
overhead. Enormous. Thirty-five times the size
of the Moon seen from Earth. Icecaps and
cloud tops sparkled, but could not overcome
an overall gloominess.
Dark was aptly named.
“When you’re done gawking,” Dana said,
with a hint of fond amusement in her voice.
They offloaded from cargo hold one the
first of the remote-sensing stations. Though
massive and bulky, here the unit weighed almost
nothing. They set down the apparatus
on a flat expanse and he stepped away. She
would unfold the stabilizing legs, deploy the
delicate solar panels, align the dish antennas,
and run the final instrument calibrations. His
job was to answer technical questions, should
any arise, while keeping his ten left thumbs at
a safe distance.
Duties that left him free to look around: the
80 EDWARD M. LERNER

other, if unofficial, reason he was here. As often
as he had championed exploration, the
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, something—typically
farm chores and colicky babies—had
come first.
How much harder would Dana have it on
this excursion for having him along, not
Blake?
Antonio loved her all the more for bringing
him, regardless.
The remote-sensing station was a kludge,
the first among a whole constellation of
kludges. Once Dana had it checked out, they
would hop Endeavour a third of the way
around this little moon and deploy a second
station. Then take another hop, to deliver a
third.
It wasn’t bad enough that Aristophanes, orbiting
so near Dark, precluded siting their sensor
suites where above any rational planet
they belonged: aboard synchronous satellites.
Aristophanes also had an unhelpful rate of rotation;
it didn’t present a constant face to the
world below, as the Moon presented to Earth.
Only with three well-separated stations would
some one of them at all times have the planet
under observation. Each station had to store
its readings until Dark’s rotation, the moon’s
rotation, and the moon’s orbit combined to
provide a line-of-site downlink opportunity to
the settlement.
After finishing on Aristophanes they would
get to reprise the triple deployment on
Aeschylus and again on Euripides. And on occasion,
parts of Dark would still go unmonitored.
Three fascinating little worlds, Antonio
thought, sad that no one shared his fascination.
While Dana, with a multimeter in hand,
fussed over some calibration, Antonio wandered
about gathering rocks for his collection.
As feeble as was Aristophanes’ gravity, not
even a klutz like him could trip off or leap free
of it. He could, if he lost focus, bound high
enough to spend a long while drifting back to
the surface. And so he shuffled, sweeping
aside ancient regolith with his boots, leaving
sloppy troughs in his wake. His tracks shone
paler than the undisturbed surface.
“Almost done here,” Dana called. “How
about you?”
Done scuffing up the surface? Done collect-
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
ing rocks? “Ready when you are.”
They remained suited up for the jaunt to
their next landing site, sparing themselves another
round of checkouts. Here they were on
the moon’s night side, with the planet half below
the horizon. Antonio could still see clearly
by—the word tickled him—Darklight.
He helped Dana carry their second station
to an area clear of stony rubble. While she
configured the unit, he resumed pebble collecting.
Here, too, the ruts left by his plodding
gait were paler than the undisturbed surface.
When, with an abrupt sneeze, Dana let fly
the removable clasp of an access panel, he
helped her search for it. When they gave up
the fastener for lost, swallowed by the thick
dust, or hiding in the inky shadow of some
boulder, he scavenged nuts and bolts for her
from ship’s stores. He found a spare thermocouple
when an instrument failed diagnostics;
without accurate temperature readings here,
they could not calibrate long-range readings
they made of Dark. Then, having bagged and
labeled every interesting-looking pebble in the
vicinity, he tried to entertain himself by tracing
geometric shapes in the dust with his boot
tip.
“Ready to move on?” Dana called.
“Sure.”
Their third landing returned them to sunlight
and gave them a line of sight to the settlement.
Dana called down.
“How’s it going, Endeavour?” Blake answered,
yawning. He had gray bags beneath
his bloodshot eyes, and his beard looked overdue
for a trim. Maybe a shearing.
“Everything seems fine on this end,” Dana
said.
“With you, too, Antonio?”
“Indeed. Apart from the inefficiency of it all.”
“Don’t blame me. I didn’t put the moons
there.” Arching an eyebrow, Blake leaned toward
the camera. “What do you two crazy kids
have planned, all unchaperoned?”
Dana and Antonio exchanged glances.
“Looking around a bit,” he said. That sounded
frivolous, even to him. “Survey the . . . area
for useful minerals.”
“Getting finished,” Dana said firmly, “as fast
as we can. Maybe a quick nap before the flight
to Aeschylus.”
“What is this nap thing of which you
speak?” Blake yawned again. “Before you de-
81

ANALOG
part lovely Aristophanes, let’s run an end-toend
system test of at least one station.”
“Copy that,” Dana said. “We’re at station
three. From my end, everything is a go.”
“Power . . . check,” Blake said. “Comm . . .
ditto. Primary control . . . check. Moving on to
the instruments. Radiometer . . . check. Scatterometer
. . . check. High-res multispectral imager
. . . looking good. Nice sharp image.
Doppler radar . . .”
As the recitation droned on, as motes glinted
in the furrows of his aimless shuffling, Antonio’s
thoughts wandered. Many instruments.
Much data to come. And one Big Question.
Rock strata and ice cores: each sample told
a tale, and no two stories ever quite agreed.
Dark was a living world, on which storms and
weathering, quakes and floods, volcanoes and
even meteor strikes had all left their marks.
Read enough stories, though, and for all
their idiosyncratic plot twists they confirmed
what astrophysics predicted: that Dark experienced
Milankovitch cycles. That the global climate
had warmed and cooled, warmed and
cooled, warmed and cooled, like clockwork,
for as long—half a million years!—as the
record could be reconstructed. That by its ancient
rhythm, Dark was due, indeed, well into,
a new warming era.
How pronounced were the historical climate
swings? Antonio refused to guess. To infer
anything about past average global
temperatures from such paleogeological proxies
as ice cores, he would first need to calibrate
modern ice cores against years, at the
least, of direct temperature measurements.
“Atmospheric sounder . . . check,” Blake
continued. “Wideband, ground-penetrating
radar . . .”
Many, many instruments.
And yet Antonio had his doubts whether,
even working together, the sensors they deployed
could resolve the anomaly in the geological
record of the past few centuries. That
the sensors could explain why the climate had
been steadily cooling. Or that sensors would
answer the Big Question.
Just how frigid would Dark get?
Chapter 31
At the soft scrape of approaching footsteps
Carlos took a swig of vodka, then screwed
shut the flask and stashed it inside a cabinet.
He popped a breath mint into his mouth. The
vodka was inferior, despite his best efforts.
The mint tasted worse but smelled better.
He was in no mood to be lectured about his
drinking. If and when he chose to, he’d stop.
Rikki loped through the lab door. Something
about her (the berry-dark tan? the pouty
lips? the long, high ponytail? the long legs in
taut slacks?) reminded Carlos of a grad student
he had had. And had and had and had. Very
lithe and bendy, Helena was—and the more
she fretted about her dissertation, the more
imaginatively she strove to keep him happy.
And so he, with a sigh or well-timed frown . . .
Blake followed his wife into the room, spoiling
Carlos’s fantasies. Then Antonio entered,
more grizzled than ever. He and Dana were
getting old.
Face it, Carlos told himself. We all are.
“Are you busy?” Blake asked.
Carlos sat in an arc of active displays, of
nanite memory readouts, program listings,
electron-microscope scans, and design documents.
Props, all of them. He said nothing.
Blake grimaced. “Sorry, dumb question.
Can you spare us a couple of minutes before
we head to work?”
Carlos gestured at nearby stools. “What’s
up?”
Rikki said, “I think Li is up to something.”
To the best of Carlos’s knowledge, Li was always
up to something. The challenge was ferreting
out what and why. If he could
accomplish either with any regularity, she
would be in his power, not the other way
around.
“Up to what?” Carlos asked.
“I don’t know.” Rikki frowned. “She’s been
too agreeable.”
I wish, Carlos thought. The thrashing Li had
given him on the ship had been no fluke. He
had not required a third lesson.
He asked, “Agreeable about what?”
“About support for possible terraforming.”
Rikki finally dragged over a stool and sat. The
other two stayed standing. “Yeah, I know how
that sounds. The research program was my
idea. But the weird thing, to me, anyway, is
that Li hasn’t tried to limit the effort.”
“Here’s a thought,” Carlos said. “Ignore
whatever contributions, if any, the off-world
sensors make to our understanding of the climate.
They’ve already improved our weather
82 EDWARD M. LERNER

forecasting. That will help our crops, and
that’s something I’m sure Li cares about.” And
because she let you plead for the deployment,
you end up feeling indebted to her.
And don’t suppose for an instant she won’t
find a way to call in that debt.
“Could be.” Blake pulled a scrap of thin
wire from the jumble on a workbench, and
began tying knots. “Or she imagines we’ll rein
ourselves in. Fatigue has a wonderful ability to
clarify priorities.”
Rikki gave her husband a dirty look.
Trouble in paradise? Carlos wondered. Hubby
isn’t supportive enough of your science
project? “What does this have to do with me?”
“You know Li pretty well,” Rikki said delicately.
You live together, she meant. You side with
Li on the issues. You must understand her.
Carlos thought, if you only knew.
What he had with Li was a marriage of inconvenience.
Hers was a cold beauty: look but
don’t touch. And yet he stayed. He was the
last available man in the universe—and the
last available woman couldn’t care less. What
did that say about him?
She had him by the pride as much as by the
balls. When he got into her pants, all too seldom,
it was because she wanted his backing.
Get inside Li’s head? That had yet to happen.
“Do you plan on ever coming to the point?”
Carlos asked.
Rikki grimaced. “We want to know what
else Li isn’t telling us.”
Carlos countered, “Is she under some obligation
to tell you what she’s thinking?”
“No,” Blake said, still torturing his piece of
wire. “But also yes.”
“Pretend you broke it already.” Carlos
plucked the much-knotted wire from Blake’s
hands. “Yes or no. Which is it?”
Rikki said, “As an individual, whatever Li
thinks is her business. But in practice, she’s
our leader. We all defer to her.”
I could be convinced to defer to you, Carlos
thought. Motivate me. Let’s see how bendy
you can be.
He said, “On our trek, to survive, we needed
one sort of expertise. We deferred to Dana
and properly so. I doubt Dana shared everything
she was thinking, and I’ll bet we were
happier for that. Rearing children and building
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
a civilization? Those call for a different sort of
expert. That’s Li.”
“That’s Li,” Blake agreed. “However . . .”
Antonio, who had been looking all around
the lab, finally spoke. “I’ve been studying.”
With Antonio’s eclectic interests, those
studies might involve anything. Carlos gestured
to his workbench. “Guys, your couple
minutes are more than up.”
“Aristophanes I had heard of,” Antonio said.
“I didn’t know who Aeschylus and Euripides
were.”
“I don’t know if your interest is in moons or
ancient Greek theater,” Carlos said. “Either
way it can wait till tonight at dinner.” When I
also won’t pay attention. “Isn’t there a crop
somewhere that needs your attention?”
“I became interested in ancient Greece,”
Antonio went on. “And branched out from
there. Are you familiar with . . .”
“At dinner,” Carlos repeated.
“Speaking of crops, why are you settled, all
comfy, here in the lab?” Blake asked. “We
could use a hand.”
At transplanting a couple hundred potted
apple, cherry, and pear seedlings from the
greenhouse to the river delta. No thanks. “I’m
doing something more critical.”
“Figuring out how to mass-produce PFCs?”
Rikki asked.
Right. As if what the climate might be like a
hundred years hence was time sensitive.
“Nutrition related.” Carlos pointed to a
nearby cage, in which mice sniffed curiously.
“They don’t take up trace nutrients from diet
as well as they should. I’m trying to tweak
their nanites to compensate.”
“Mouse nanites,” Rikki said. “That sounds
urgent. I vote you save those for a rainy day.”
Had the short-term forecast shown rain,
Carlos would have waited to tamper with the
tissue samples he’d shown to Li that morning.
He half suspected from Li’s sly smile that
she knew. That by agreeing he should investigate
his anomaly, she was doing him a favor.
Throwing him a bone.
His other half guessed that she had planted
the idea in the first place. That would explain
the sly smile, too.
Pissing him off yet further. It was Li he was
angry at, but Li wasn’t here. And it was Li who
had what he wanted.
“Look,” Carlos said. “What affects the mice
83

ANALOG
might well affect us. Or the children, or their
children, some years hence. I propose to see
what I can accomplish by tweaking nanites in
the mice. Unless you prefer to make the children
our guinea pigs.”
Rikki flinched, as he had known she would.
By the time they finally left, Carlos needed
another drink.
Li’s grandma used to claim that one caught
more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Li eased herself out from under Carlos’s outflung
arm and leg, thinking he was more spider
than fly, and more octopus than spider.
And she had no interest in catching any of
them, far less this arrested-development adolescent.
With a snort, Carlos flopped onto her side
of the bed. The thick, coarse hair on his back
disgusted her. He disgusted her.
She stood for a long time, her eyes closed,
beneath the hot, pulsating spray of the shower.
The water carried away Carlos’s sweat and
stench, but it couldn’t touch her nausea. Sex
with Carlos was for the greater good, and only
for the greater good, because from time to
time he proved useful.
As he had been today, bringing her a preview
of the likely ambush that night at dinner.
You couldn’t dignify the society here as an
economy. They had no use for money. Whatever
material goods they had were as readily
produced for six people as for one. Carlos was
too shallow and transparent to handle power,
not that she would ever consider sharing power.
The lone currency that remained was . . . favors.
She didn’t feel dirty, exactly, nor degraded,
but something. At an intellectual level, she
even felt a touch of nobility, of self-sacrifice.
Carlos had her body—when she permitted
it—but never her. And he never would.
So what was it she felt? Out of joint. Out of
sorts. Decoupled from reality.
How old would the girls need to be before
they caught his eye?
Long ago and far away, in a municipal campaign
that had been Li’s to lose—and she
had—Li learned a hard lesson. Never let the
other side choose the issue.
So: while the peasants still dug into synthed
meatloaf with real mashed potatoes and mush-
room gravy, or glanced sidelong at the strawberry
shortcake that waited on the serving
cart, she brought up childrearing. Indirectly,
to be sure. She had guessed Antonio’s digging
into ancient Greece would lead him to Sparta
and the education of its young, and Marvin
had confirmed it. Antonio never bothered to
conceal what he did with the AI.
Whereas the more . . . informative of her interactions
with Marvin were as secure as possible.
Not in any conventional sense, because
access controls and personal firewalls would
have screamed of something to hide, but subtly
veiled. Too bad such computing legerdemain
far exceeded her skills.
But not Carlos’s. Li fought down a shudder.
The important thing was, she was prepared,
if necessary, to discuss childrearing,
and the relative virtues of Athens versus Sparta.
She knew Antonio well enough, if it came
to it, to sidetrack Antonio in a pointless meander
through Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian
War.
She saw no reason to let matters come to
that.
Li blotted her lips, folded and set down her
napkin, and began. “With this spring’s planting
almost complete, in the comparative lull
before we begin harvesting, I propose that we
expand the childcare center.”
“So that we can crank out more children?”
Rikki blurted out.
“Interesting,” Li said. “I was going to say
that as the children get older we’ll want separate
dormitories for the boys and the girls.
And I thought it would be nice to add an atrium,
a little indoor park. But you’re quite right,
Rikki. The same expansion will allow us to
raise more. Thank you.”
Rikki blinked. She had not foreseen her sarcasm
getting deflected into a proposal. “That’s
not what—”
“About that . . .” Antonio interrupted.
Antonio wasn’t the type to interrupt. Not
unless he had something on his mind he was
bound and determined to get out.
It seemed Carlos had earned his pre-dinner
favor.
“If we could finish one topic before we
move on to the next?” Li chided.
“Of course,” Antonio said.
“Marvin, my sketch, please.” Li slid back her
chair to stand alongside the wall become 3D
84 EDWARD M. LERNER

architectural rendering. “You see the enclosed
area that I thought might serve as a garden or
park. But maybe it’s too large an expanse for
that.”
She studied the wall display, pensive, giving
the peasants time to make the idea their own.
And maybe to set aside their nitpicking, since
she had just proposed this touchy-feely expansion
of the facility.
“We could make a portion of that space an
indoor playground,” Rikki offered.
“Or maybe we should enclose only part of
the area,” Dana said. “At some point the children
have to get used to the outdoors.”
Li let them natter on, with each suggestion
making the project more grandiose and laborintensive.
A screened-in solarium into which
even the youngest children could be brought
on nice days for fresh air. A rock garden. A
flower garden. An ever more extensive playground.
The evening was unfolding better than Li
had dared to hope.
While the peasants bulldoze and landscape
and build with concrete, she thought, the children
remained hers. As Rikki had observed—
and as quickly let drop—the enlarged
childcare center about which they now all
waxed eloquent, would give Li the capacity to
speed up decanting of the embryos. With,
alas, some encouragement to Carlos to speed
up womb production.
Li said, “Once the children have acclimated,
they’ll be closer to ready to meet the real
world. Suppose we put up a fence, enclosed
the area around the center and its neighboring
buildings. If we put locks on the doors, the
oldest children could roam around.” In answer
to Rikki’s raised eyebrow, Li explained, “I
don’t believe they’re old enough to play
among the explosives and chemical stocks.”
The eyebrow went back down.
But as Blake and Dana grew giddy about the
prospect of passing along the fine art of snowman
construction, and with Antonio sidetracked
into planning for a rock garden,
Rikki’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Too much, too fast, Li thought. The woman
wasn’t entirely gullible.
Li said, “I’m gratified by such enthusiasm,
but we can’t do everything at once. We also
have a PFC factory, or refinery, or whatever I
should call it, to build.”
DARK SECRET
And Rikki relaxed.
Fool, Li thought.
JUNE 2013
Chapter 32
In swooping arcs and soaring leaps, up and
down through the clouds like a bucking bronco,
Endeavour gyrated its way around the
globe. The meandering course on its intricately
constructed timeline did more than challenge
Dana’s reflexes. By the time she
returned home, the ship and the moons’ observatories
together would have compiled a
thorough and precise global atmospheric survey,
captured at more or less the same local
time everywhere.
Too bad the prescribed local time was midnight,
because she would have enjoyed the
view. She wasn’t enjoying the company.
Blake had accomplished the impossible:
making Antonio look chatty. He was making
the rocks from Antonio’s collection look chatty.
Dana sighed. Antonio had asked to come
along, looking so kicked-puppy disappointed
when she’d said no. And though she hadn’t
lied about there being no time between collection
points to gather southern-hemisphere
rocks, and that this was fancy enough flying
that she should have a proficient copilot to
spell her, neither had she been entirely honest
with him.
On her console, a timer ticked down the
seconds to the next atmospheric sampling. A
real-time holo showed her displacement in
three dimensions from the target collection
point. As the high-altitude winds buffeted the
ship, her hands danced over the controls to
make endless course corrections.
A single moon above the horizon—everywhere—could
have captured the data they
sought. The moons did not cooperate like
that, and so here she was. As for precision,
computer-controlled navigation, forget it.
Only all three moons in sight would have
served to triangulate the ship’s position. And
so, as one moon or another sank below the
horizon, as clouds turned her course into a
game of peek-a-boo with the stars, as the buffeting
of the jet stream befuddled the autopilot
and played havoc with the short-range projections
from inertial navigation, she fell back,
time and again, upon the most basic navigational
system of all: seat of the pants.
85

ANALOG
If the outing had been a summer evening’s
stroll through Kensington Gardens, she still
would have left Antonio back in the settlement.
She needed some one-on-one time with
Blake.
“Collection on my mark,” she announced.
“Three. Two. One. Mark.”
“Mark,” Blake repeated. As he had for the
past twenty or so collections.
“Throw me a bone,” Dana said. “Are you
satisfied? Dissatisfied? How does the data look
so far?”
“Fine,” Blake allowed.
“And the data is telling us . . . what?”
“Nighttime temperature and PFC trace concentration
profiles—”
“By altitude on a grid of closely-spaced
points surrounding the planet.” Dana sighed
again. “I know what we’re collecting, and
why. Is the data revealing anything useful? Is it
what you expect?”
“I don’t know. Rikki doubted the raw measurements
themselves would reveal much; especially
not point by point. It’s all input to a
global circulation model. Ask me after Antonio
and Marvin have taken a crack at the full
dataset, when we know how well the PFCs
have dispersed.”
The nav holo updated to show the way to
the next collection point; Dana put her ship
into another steep climb. “You’re not very
talkative these days.”
“Well, you know.”
“No!” Dana snapped, surprising herself. “I
don’t know, because you’ve locked me out. I
thought we were friends.”
“We are.” After a long while, he said, “I’m
not a deep thinker, you know.”
Deeper than you credit yourself. “What’s
your point?”
“Except for Rikki, we’re introverts, if not
loners and misfits. Have you noticed that?”
“Uh-uh.” Hawthorne had, though, in
dossiers the existence of which Dana still kept
to herself. More than once she had almost
deleted the files. Other than the occasional piloting
gig, her job was farming. She had no
reason to keep the personnel data—and less
inclination to share any of it with Li. “Not
deep, you say?”
“I couldn’t make a puddle jealous.”
On Dana’s console, a timer initialized and
began counting down, showing when she
should aim to reach the next collection point.
She slowed the ship. “So, introverts and loners.
What of it?”
Blake busied himself checking something
on his console. With not answering. “My mom
and dad were like oil and water. My sister, the
raging extrovert, and I were more like oil and
matches. The neighbors didn’t offer many
shining examples of stability, either. As for the
broader community where I grew up, it was a
mess. One-parent households were the norm.
The schools sucked. To belong to something
the choices were high-school sports, if you
had talent, which I didn’t, or the gangs.”
“So you stuck to yourself.”
“More like, I kept my head down. Then the
oddest thing happened. I was either ten or
eleven. Standard years, I mean. It was late
summer, and I was getting the mandatory
preschool physical from the family doctor.
Doc Sullivan was this upbeat guy with a
friendly, booming voice. Jovial, yet managing
not to be obnoxious. He asked me some questions
about school.
“Whatever he asked and I answered, he decided,
and I couldn’t tell you why, that I had
potential. Then and there, he zapped two old
college texts from his datasheet to my little-kid
pocket comp. Both books were decades out
of date and of no use to him, but I didn’t
know that.”
“And that’s why you became an engineer,”
Dana guessed. She had no idea what this had
to do with, well, anything. “Nice.”
Blake laughed. “Who gives a college text on
biochemistry to a ten-year-old? It was Greek to
me. No, less. At least I’d heard of Greece.
“And yet that is how I ended up an engineer.
You’d like to believe it was because this
engaging, successful professional saw potential
in me. Did the gesture inspire me? Yeah,
for the couple of weeks before the cops
hauled Doc Sullivan away. My last, best hope
of a role model had defrauded Federal Health
Service of millions.
“So he set my career course, all right. He decided
for me that, whatever I did when I grew
up, it would involve machines, not people.
Not that I understood engineering then, beyond
that machines, maybe, could be fixed.”
“I’m not buying you as a loner,” Dana said,
still at a loss where this might be going. “You
can charm the pants off people.”
86 EDWARD M. LERNER

“Off young women, anyway. That doesn’t
make me a people person. It makes—made—
me a calculating, cynical, manipulative jerk. I
want to believe I’ve grown since then.”
The pieces fell into place. “So this is about
Rikki.”
“Of course”—his voice cracked—“it’s about
Rikki. Pretty much the first thing I knew about
her, back on the cruise where we met, was
how eager she was to get home. How much
she had missed her family while she’d been
away at grad school. It was real closeness, too,
not part of some sitcom. And yet more amazing,
soon enough they weren’t her family, but
our family.
“So here you and I are: loners. Carlos, it embarrasses
me to admit, is much as I once was,
if not as smooth. Antonio is, well, you know.”
“I know,” Dana said. And a dear, regardless,
in his own way.
“Li, though . . . I can’t read her.”
“Me, either.” At the end, Hawthorne had
had only hours to round out the crew for this
mission. Li’s file, and Carlos’s for that matter,
was a short dump from the public record, little
more than a résumé. “I’d bet that shrinks
learn to mask their feelings.” And politicians,
too, only Li had never, to Dana’s knowledge,
volunteered to anyone here that facet of her
past.
“Heads up.” Blake’s voice changed tone.
“Radar shows a high mountain range.”
“Yeah, I see it, but thanks. We’ll have almost
a klick of clearance. You left out Rikki.”
“She’s not like you or me or any of the rest
of us. She is a people person. I remember
what happened back home. I do think occasionally
about everyone we left behind. When
it happens, I’m sad, but then I get over it.
“But Rikki? She grieves, still. For her family
most of all.
“That she can’t continue her family? And
the rejection by the kids here? It’s killing her,
Dana.”
At the catch in Blake’s voice, Dana glanced
away from the console. He was trembling.
In an anguished tone, not much above a
whisper, he said, “I don’t know how to fix
this.”
Dana didn’t know how to fix him. “It’s
been years since you learned Rikki can’t safely
get pregnant. She still hasn’t come to terms
with it?”
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
“Worse.” Blake hesitated. “If Li gave her
blessing today, I think Rikki would be afraid to
try. I think she’s lost faith in herself as a parent.”
“That’s . . . ridiculous.” Only Dana felt that
inadequacy, too. More and more, whenever
she swung by the childcare center. With sixtyfour
more children almost to term.
She hadn’t admitted those feelings—failings—to
anyone, either. She didn’t know that
she could.
For the remainder of the flight, she and
Blake were both quiet.
Wearing a big, welcoming smile, Dana
closed the distance to the children’s white
picket fence. From afar you couldn’t tell that
the pickets were poured concrete, not fashioned
from wood. From afar, you didn’t see
that the pickets stood two meters tall.
Drawing near, seeing the children through
the pickets, the fence looked like a stockade.
“Kids grow,” Li had said. “We don’t want to
rebuild the fence every couple years.” It
sounded reasonable. Most everything she said
sounded reasonable.
The day was sunny and crisp. Perfect football
weather Blake had declared it when they
landed. But this being Dark, the few hints of
fall colors came from inside the greenhouse
and on saplings in clay planters glimpsed
through the fence.
Dana flashed a hand signal. On a pole just
inside the gate, a camera bobbed: Marvin acknowledging
that he had seen her. As she approached
the gate, at which the handprint-reader
lamp flashed READY, Li opened the
gate from inside.
“Hi,” Li said. “Did you have a good flight?”
“It had its ups and downs.”
Dana slipped inside; the gate falling locked
and shut behind her with a loud click. It must
have rained while she and Blake were off flying,
because the green carpet squished beneath
her boots. Kids should play on grass,
she thought sadly, although no one could
spare the time to keep such a large expanse
mowed, or to haul and spread the truckloads
of river-delta silt a lawn would have required.
Had there been time, no one would have permitted
children around the quantities of fertilizer
the lifeless silt would have needed applied
several times each year.
87

ANALOG
Children clambered over the playground
equipment. Younger kids with shovels and
pails dug in sandboxes. Dark lacked soil, but it
had plenty of sand. As she had sensed from
the distance, several of the bigger kids were in
the tiny garden plot. Picking tomatoes, apparently.
All the boys and girls wore pants and
sweaters, dressed alike except for color. Red
for the oldest, blue for the cohort a year
younger, green for those a year younger still.
Like uniforms. Why had she never noticed
that?
The yard, for all the dozens of little ones,
was quiet and orderly; the expressions on so
many of the young faces seemed purposeful
rather than playful. But on what basis could
she form expectations? Only ancient memories
of her own childhood.
Dana walked to the garden. She leaned forward,
hand outstretched to tousle Eve’s hair.
Eve scuttled away, circling behind a row of
potted tomato plants, to shelter behind Li.
“Excuse me, Eve,” Dana said. “I didn’t mean
to startle you.”
“Tell Ms. Dana you’re sorry,” Li directed.
“No need,” Dana said hastily. “Honey, how
are you doing? Are you enjoying the nice
weather?”
Eve buried her face in Li’s back. “I’m sorry,
Ms. Dana,” she mumbled.
Her brothers (for lack of a more fitting
term) had sidled close together.
“How are you big boys today?” Dana asked.
“Fine, Ms. Dana,” Castor said. Pollux, his
lower lip trembling, held out a tomato.
“Run along,” Li told them. “Take inside
what you’ve picked, and then see if Mr. Carlos
could use your help.”
Pails swinging at their sides, the three scampered
toward the childcare center.
“What was that about?” Dana asked Li.
“What do you mean?”
Around the sandboxes, most of the children
had stopped their play. Several stared, wideeyed,
at Dana. She said, “Look at them.”
“Kids watch adults. That’s part of how they
learn. They don’t see you often, is all.”
Only to Dana these children looked wary,
not curious. “And Eve? I would swear she was
afraid of me. Pollux, too.”
Li sighed exasperatedly. “Shy. Eve was shy,
Dana. Pollux, too. Kids sometimes are. Now
look what he gave you, and what you did with
it.”
Dana looked. Her hand was wet and sticky.
She had squeezed the tomato into goo; juice
and pulp dribbled between her fingers.
“I guess I’m tense,” she admitted. No,
scared shitless that Rikki was right. That apart
from Li, none of them knew what they were
doing. “Maybe the kids picked up on that.”
“They did,” Li said flatly.
“Sorry about that.” More sorry than you
can imagine.
“Go home,” Li said. “Take the afternoon off.
There’s something important I’ll be bringing
up after dinner.”
“We’ve reached a major milestone,” Li said.
Around the dinner table, the peasants studied
her with curiosity. Carlos wore a relaxed
grin, from a beer or three too many rather
than from foreknowledge.
“Every day is a new challenge,” Li continued.
“Every day has its chores. But look what
we’ve accomplished. Wheat, corn, and barley
crops ripening for the upcoming harvest, and
enough freeze-dried bacterial mat to see us
through bad weather. Remote-sensing instruments
placed on the moons. Our very own climate-improvement
program.”
“And ever more thriving children,” Carlos
added. Giving Li credit, predictably. With
hopes, no doubt, of . . . reward later.
“And thriving children,” Li repeated.
She had set the dining-room walls to a
peaceful seascape, a gentle froth of combers
rushing up and swirling back down a
sparkling white sand beach. In a cerulean sky,
behind pink wisps of cloud, a tomato-red sun
kissed the sea. Waves whispered, and tropical
breezes sighed through palm trees, and sandpipers
piped. Restful. Hopefully lulling. Even
Carlos and Rikki, neither of whom had ever
visited Earth or experienced such a sunset,
must feel it.
The common experiences of thousands of
generations embedded themselves in the genetic
code. Not as simple as memory, genetic
programming recorded the common heritage
of the species. Genetic programming instilled
fear of the dark, when predators hunted and
proto-humans were wise to hide, and of
predators yet unseen. Genetic programming
suggested, too, what was not a threat and
when—as in this case—it was safe to relax.
88 EDWARD M. LERNER

That basic neural hardwiring would not be
denied. So be at peace, my peasants. Be at
peace.
“Many accomplishments,” Dana agreed.
“But Li, what is this milestone you mentioned?”
“Specialization. I eat by the sweat of your
brows. We stay healthy in large measure by
Carlos’s steady tweaking of our nanites. And if
I may say so, the children continue to benefit
from my attention.”
“You may say so,” Antonio said.
“The milestone,” Li continued, “is this. That
we’re ready to recognize and make formal the
patterns that are already working so well for
us.”
“What patterns?” Blake asked.
“Job specialization.” Li counted silently to
three. “Including those of us who will interact
with the children.”
Raw emotions scrabbled and jostled behind
Rikki’s eyes. For several long seconds Li
thought relief would win, but guilt chased it
away. Maternal instincts were hardwired, too.
Rikki swallowed hard. “We all help with the
children.”
“Perhaps that should change,” Li said. “Not
everyone is as . . . well-suited.”
Not everyone is successful at it.The children
don’t recoil from everyone.You know
who you are.
There was pain now in Rikki’s eyes. In
Dana’s, too. Because Li was good at what she
did. And when the two women conceded,
their men would go along.
“Is it even possible?” Rikki asked. (Hoping
for which answer? Li couldn’t tell.) “Even with
six of us, sometimes watching the children is
draining. How could you alone handle it?”
“Yes, it’s possible,” Li asserted. “But it won’t
be just me. The children are comfortable
around Carlos, too.” And, you are free to infer,
with no one else. “And Marvin, of course,
who never sleeps. And Eve and the twins are
old enough to help. They want to help.”
“Children raising children,” Blake said dubiously.
“You’re a youngest child, correct?” Li said. It
doesn’t matter that you’ve never told me
you’re the baby of the family, because you’re
their freaking poster child: uncomplicated, attention-seeking,
and transparently manipulative.
“I can’t believe your older—well, I’ll say,
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
sister—never baby-sat you.”
Blake blinked. “Oh, Lynette did, and the experience
does nothing to bolster your argument.”
“Marvin,” Li called, “how many diapers has
Eve changed this evening since I left the center
for dinner?”
“Six, Li.”
“How many babies have Castor and Pollux
fed?”
“Eighteen, so far. They gave bottles to fourteen
and fed four directly.”
“While you supervised. Thank you.” To the
peasants, Li added, “A dozen in the next cohort
are eager to do like the big kids.”
“And . . . us?” Antonio asked.
“You will contribute more in the ways you
already do,” Li said. “How much more
progress will you make studying local geology”—you
and your stupid rocks—“when
you’re not changing diapers every few nights?
How much sooner, Rikki, will you understand
the climate trends?”
How much more farming and chicken tending
will you four get done? How many more
cattle can you raise because you won’t be
with the children, and how many more cows
can you milk? How much more mining of
phosphates, and raising of barns, and a thousand
other menial chores? But chores weren’t
selling points.
“And as . . . the colony . . . grows?”
Li said, “As children become old enough of
course you’ll teach them the many skills with
which to maintain the colony.” After I’ve
made them dependably mine.
She could feel the others wavering. “Then
we’re in agreement?”
Dana’s chair scraped back as she stood.
“No.”
“Excuse me?” Li said.
“No,” Dana repeated. “No way. Uh-uh. Forget
it. If I lack some skill, teach me. If I am a
stranger to the children, I’ll spend more time
with them. The mission is to raise a family, a
culture, a civilization—and I do not abandon
my mission.”
“No . . . nor I,” Rikki squeaked. “Nor I,” she
repeated, the second time firmly.
Blake and Antonio nodded.
“We get more involved,” Rikki said. “Once
the harvest is in, we’ll have more time. And
any child old enough to baby-sit is old enough
89

ANALOG
to start school. I’ll help with that. I’d like that.”
“Me, too,” Antonio said.
“This is how you want it?” Li asked.
“Yes!” they chorused.
“Remember that I offered,” Li said. Remember
who made me do things the hard way.
Chapter 33
“A needle in a haystack,” Blake grumbled.
“I wish.” Antonio didn’t take his eyes off the
sensor console. “Give me an electromagnet
and I’ll have your needle in no time.”
“Heh,” Blake said. “I bow to your superior
physics.”
“Don’t forget it.”
Blake shut his eyes. “Wake me when you
find something.”
He lolled bonelessly in the loose grasp of a
seat harness. Deep inside the asteroid belt,
sans Marvin, they wanted a human pilot on
the bridge at all times. Dana was bunking in,
which left him. Antonio, no matter the superiority
of his physics, had terrible reflexes and a
disturbing tendency to confuse left with right.
At least the dumb-as-a-stump computer still
aboard after moving Marvin to the bunker
could spot incoming rocks on its own.
Rikki could have handled a shift. Especially
after the arduous harvest, she would have welcomed
a change of scenery. Not to mention
the spells in zero gee, while Antonio surveyed
all the nearby rocks.
But Rikki was suffering from, well, Li had
yet to figure that out. Nothing serious, Li assured
them. Whatever it was, Rikki wasn’t
keeping down much of what she ate. Might be
some intestinal flora gone bad in a way her
nanites had yet to learn to handle. Might be,
though Li had insisted that the possibility was
remote, a Dark-native bacterium that had
jumped to humans. Might be food poisoning.
Might be a nutritional deficiency. Ironic, that
last scenario: that a need for some trace element
might have kept Rikki from prospecting
for a trace element.
“And we’re back,” Blake declared, opening
his eyes. “Have you found any big nuggets?”
“Not yet.” Antonio squirmed in his couch,
readjusting the straps. “Vanadium isn’t common,
you know.”
He knew—or, rather, Marvin had told them.
A couple hundred parts per million in Earth’s
crust. Undetected to date anywhere in the
Dark system. But in Sol system, vanadium was
common, comparatively speaking, in meteoroids
and asteroids.
Why else would they be out here, probing
rock after rock?
Blake studied his console. “Looks like another
two are coming into range.”
“Yes. Do you want . . . to do the honors?”
“Sure.” Because it was something to do.
Blake tagged the closer of the radar blips and
dragged its trajectory data to the comm controls.
(As he did, he checked for messages
pending. Rikki hadn’t answered his last few
emails. He hoped that meant she was getting
some sleep.) The long-range comm laser
reached out, invisible, for empty space provided
nothing to scatter the light. Within seconds,
as the spectrometer examined the
miniscule bit of glowing vapor boiled off the
rock’s surface, they would know a little about
the rock’s composition.
“No vanadium,” Antonio said. And a minute
later, after the laser hit the second target, he
reported, “None there, either.”
Logically speaking, they would end up surveying
hundreds, maybe thousands, of rocks
before encountering one with vanadium compounds
on its surface. They would have flown
around much of the belt to find it. That Li
hadn’t balked at four of them being gone, possibly,
for weeks spoke volumes. Though slow
to develop, this dietary deficiency must be serious.
Radar showed they had a while until more
asteroids came within probing range. “Feel
like a game of chess?” Blake asked.
“No thanks.” Antonio waved vaguely at the
datasheet draped across his lap. “Aristophanes
data. This is fascinating. On the ground . . . I
never had the time to look at it. The surface
temperature readings . . .”
Evidently, definitions of fascination varied.
“Do you see signs there of vanadium?”
“None. But—”
“Enjoy,” Blake said. He began a new email
to Rikki. WISH YOU WERE HERE.
“Another shift,” Blake announced, yawning.
“Much nothing accomplished.”
“I recommend a snack and sleep,” Dana
said. “For you, too, Antonio. Whatever there is
to be seen will be in the comp when you
come back.”
90 EDWARD M. LERNER

“In a while,” Antonio said absently. Scatter
plots and bar charts cluttered his datasheet.
Much ado about asteroids.
Rikki had yet to answer emails, which Blake
took to mean she’d gotten a decent night’s
sleep. Back at the settlement it was almost
time for breakfast. He would rest easier once
he heard how she was feeling.
Only, as he dawdled in the galley over a
sandwich and salad, no emails came to him.
He went back to the bridge. “Do we have
contact with home?”
“Euripides is in position to relay,” Antonio
mumbled. “Before it sets in an hour, Aeschylus
will serve.”
“You know moonrise and set times?” Blake
asked.
The corners of Antonio’s mouth, one at a
time, twitched upward. “You don’t?”
“More useful than old Paris subway schedules,”
Dana said. “But as for contact with
home, here’s a simpler demonstration. An
email came in from Carlos a few minutes ago,
inquiring about our progress.”
Blake asked, “Anything in the message
about Rikki?”
“No, sorry. But it was a short note. A oneliner.”
No news means only no news, Blake told
himself.
“This is very . . . interesting.”
On Antonio’s lap, the datasheet’s graphics
were denser than Blake remembered. Orbital
parameters. Sizes. Rotation rates. One scatter
plot bore the cryptic label Albedo Variability.
Blake asked, “What’s albedo?”
“The fraction of the incident . . . light reflected.”
Antonio had collected plenty of rocks on
Dark. He’d collected rocks from Dark’s moons
when the opportunity had presented itself. It
wasn’t a big surprise that he would collect
stats about these rocks now.
“And Li?” Blake asked. “What does she have
to say?”
“No word,” Dana said, “but that doesn’t surprise
me. We left them shorthanded.”
“Especially if she’s got a sick patient to deal
with.”
“Go,” Dana said. “Sleep. I’ll email Li and ask
what’s going on.”
“Rikki’s fine,” Dana greeted Blake on his
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
reappearance eight hours later.
He saw she had the bridge to herself. On
the radar display, the only nearby objects were
receding. An aux display cycled through an album
of kid holos.
“Freshly synthed.” He had three drink bulbs
of coffee; he handed her one. “And I’m glad to
hear it, because Rikki has yet to answer me.
What did Li say?”
“Not much. Rikki’s better, and keeping
down light meals. She’s home, resting. Li and
Carlos are busy with the kids, but one of them
checks on Rikki every few hours.”
“Any diagnosis yet?”
“Li’s leaning toward a nutritional deficiency.
Vanadium, in fact.”
“Leaning.”
“Here.” Dana pulled up the message. “You
now know what I know.”
It wasn’t much. Blake sent Li a reply asking
her to have Rikki contact him.
Dana, reading over his shoulder, said, “You
worry too much. And confident that you
won’t listen, here’s my free advice. Let the
poor woman sleep. And leave Li and Carlos
alone.”
“We’ll see.” Which they both knew meant
“No.”
“Between you and Antonio, I will go nuts.”
Blake dropped into the copilot’s seat, content
to change the subject. “Asteroid albedo?”
“In part. They’re too splotchy for his taste,
and he wants to drop down and visit a few.
Mostly he’s worked up that too few asteroids
dip within Dark’s orbit.”
Blake stiffened. “This isn’t a science project.
I hope you told him he can collect rocks
where we find vanadium.”
“I told him I loved him dearly, but that the
absence of threatening asteroids is a good
thing. I said the fewer rocks we landed on, the
fewer we risked nudging the wrong way.”
“Good answer.”
“And after that rare vote of approval, I hand
over the bridge to you. Vaporize wisely.”
“Will do,” Blake said. “Sleep tight. I’ll wake
you if I find anything.”
She stopped in the hatchway. “Back home
they’re busier than we are. When they have
news, they’ll let us know.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Blake said.
That didn’t keep him, as soon as Dana had
vacated the bridge, from emailing Marvin for
91

ANALOG
an update.
Blake was beginning to smell a rat.
Chapter 34
The measure of just how lousy Rikki felt
was that, lifting her head at the sudden tapping
on her window, she felt relief at seeing
Li.
“Door’s open,” Rikki croaked. She let her
head flop back onto the sofa arm.
“I see you’re better,” Li chirped, coming
into the house. “I expected to find you in
bed.”
“I was going for some dry crackers. Halfway
to the kitchen I reconsidered.” When I remembered
they were made from sea slime.
Li set down her med kit. “I’d like to take a
scan.” Whatever Rikki’s nanites had to report
or the scanner found on its own must not
have merited specific comment. “You’ll live,
though from the looks of you, at the moment
that isn’t a selling point.”
The woman had no bedside manner.
“When will I be over this? Whatever this is?”
Rikki hesitated—fearful, almost superstitiously
so—of evoking a nightmare from an era before
med nanites. “Am I contagious?”
“Don’t know, don’t know, and do you see
me wearing a mask?”
Then came the repeat lecture about keeping
hydrated and foods that might stay down,
followed by megadoses of vitamins and antinausea
meds. It all wore Rikki out. “What have
you heard from Endeavour?” she asked as Li
helped her back to bed.
“Only that they’re still searching.”
“And Blake?”
“He’s busy. Now get some rest.”
Fitfully, disappointed that Blake hadn’t written,
or even acknowledged any of her brief
notes, Rikki drifted in and out of sleep.
A few more seconds, Li told herself. And,
don’t look bored.
Finally, it stopped.
Wearing his customary smug and oblivious
smile, Carlos rolled off her onto his side of the
bed. He pulled up the sheet. His breathing
slowed. In a minute or two, he would be snoring.
They needed to talk, and the best time for
that was after sex. When he was relaxed.
When even more than usual, the little head
did most of his thinking.
Propping herself up on an elbow, resting
her hand lightly on his chest, Li said, “You
awake?”
“Mmm?”
“The sun’s still high and there’s just us. We
can’t sleep now.”
“Watch me.”
“I’m serious,” Li said. “And this is important.”
“Marvin is watching the kids.”
“Eyes-open important. And sit up.”
Carlos sat. Li spoke. And he, once she had
finished, as she had known he must, had
agreed to everything. She had Carlos well conditioned.
Like Pavlov’s salivating dog. If only
just saliva were involved . . .
On the verge of triumph, she felt pangs of
disappointment. The grandeur of her vision
was wasted on Carlos. The meticulous beauty
of her planning—as much of it as she had
shared—interested him only as it assured their
success. All that he responded to was the expectation
of future coupling.
She could live with that. She needed his
help, and what mattered to her was the outcome.
As for the other four, she had given them
their chance.
Shuffling more often than walking, but feeling
human for the first time in days, Rikki
made her way down Main Street. She tried to
forget the uphill trip that she faced to return
home. As she passed the garage, its door began
to rise. Carlos had hitched a trailer to the
back of their dump truck; he sat on the backhoe-loader,
revving the motor, evidently about
to drive the contraption up the ramp onto the
trailer.
Her voice was as feeble as a kitten’s; he
must not have heard her over the growl of the
engine, asking what he was doing. Whatever,
she could find out later. Or not—curiosity
seemed too much like work. She waved, he
waved back, and she shuffled on.
Between fence slats, Rikki watched children
ramming around, climbing, swinging. Marvin
had unlocked the gate at her approach, but
she could hardly make it budge. “Marvin,” she
called. With a squeal of grit-clogged hinges,
the gates swung inward.
Activity in the yard all but ceased.
92 EDWARD M. LERNER

Children fell silent, some staring, others
sidling away. A few of the littlest took shelter
behind Eve and the twins. Despite assurances
that she wasn’t contagious, Rikki was just as
happy this one time that the kids were shy
around her.
“Hi!” she called. “Who can tell me where I
can find Ms. Li?”
It fell to Marvin to answer. “At her office in
the childcare center.”
Inside the center, Rikki paused at the glass
wall that opened into the toddlers’ room. All
those little ones, unhugged. Untouched.
Alone for most of the day, every day, apart
from the insubstantial company of an AI. It
broke her heart. She reached for the door, and
hesitated.
“You’re not contagious,” Li said. “Go
ahead.”
Rikki jumped. “I didn’t hear you coming.”
“I heard you. I’m glad you’re up and strong
enough for an outing. As it happens, there
was something I wanted to talk about with
you. We can talk inside.”
“Is it Endeavour?”
“Nothing like that.” Li gestured at the door.
“Inside.”
At Rikki’s entrance, several of the children
froze. More shied away. Chubby-cheeked Carla
(with the mass of black curls that so reminded
Rikki of her sister Janna at that age)
began to whimper.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Rikki said, reaching to
brush a tear from Carla’s cheek.
Carla lurched, screaming, to cower behind
a crib.
“Why do they hate me?” Rikki whispered.
And why do they adore you?
“Let’s go next door,” Li said.
Next door meant the newborn unit. Li gestured
Rikki ahead through this door, too. Empty
cribs waited, row upon row, facing the
one-way glass wall. In a few weeks, all the
cribs would be occupied.
Li said, “You’re a beautiful woman.”
Well, I did wash my face and change into
clothes without puke spatters. “Is that your
big problem with me? That Blake finds me attractive?”
“Just an observation. You are more than
welcome to Blake.” Li changed tone. “Marvin,
play kid-vid zero.”
On the display integral with the low-end
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
panel of every crib, pastels morphed into the
image of an old oak tree. From crib speakers
came a soothing rustle of leaves. Let the vid
play long enough, and it would cycle through
clear skies, both sunny and starry, toddlers
gleefully splashing in a wading pool, a timelapse
view of roses flowering, and other delights.
“I hadn’t realized the vid had a name,” Rikki
said. “It’s just what we play.”
“It’s what you and your friends play. There
are others, vids that Marvin hasn’t been at liberty
to divulge.”
“I don’t understand,” Rikki said.
“Perhaps a demonstration. Marvin, kid-vid
one, please.” The oak tree vanished, replaced
by a close-up of Li’s smiling face. The aural accompaniment
was a deep rhythmic throb: the
same heartbeat recording that pulsed in the artificial
wombs. “Marvin is only permitted to
play that at my direction, or when no adult is
present.”
Unctuous, smiling Li faces everywhere, and
Rikki wanted to smash them—the flesh-andblood
face most of all. “You programmed the
children to love you?”
Li smirked. “The proper term is imprinting.
And yes, I did.”
“No, the proper term is child abuse.”
“You’re such a drama queen. Marvin, show
our guest kid-vid-two.”
The crib-panel displays went dark. The low,
steady heartbeat became . . . something else.
Primitive. Dissonant. On the crib-panel displays,
lightning flashed. Beneath the music,
thunder rumbled.
Rikki shivered. “What the hell is—”
“Watch,” Li commanded. “Listen. Learn.”
From the lightning-torn night sky slowly
emerged . . . a face. Rikki’s face. The music
swelled, grew more urgent and . . . scarier.
“The Rite of Spring,” Li said. “The children
will never appreciate Stravinsky, I’m sad to
say, but that’s a sacrifice worth making.”
And Rikki’s face morphed into—
A hooded . . . thing. Coiled. Scaly. Black
with, as it reared its head, a fish-white underbelly.
Hissing, swaying. It studied her dispassionately
through little beady eyes. A forked
tongue flickered in and out, in and out between
its jaws.
Rikki’s skin crawled. She felt her eyes go
round. On the back of her neck, hairs prick-
93

ANALOG
led. Before she could find her voice, the thing
lunged. In full 3-D.
She yelped.
“The effect is even more impressive with
the room night-dim,” Li said. After a brief return
to a stormy night sky, Blake’s face began
to emerge. “Stop vid.”
This was . . . hateful. Psychological torture.
Madness. Whether from shock or her lingering
illness, Rikki’s knees threatened to buckle.
Groping behind her, she edged backward to
lean against a wall.
“The vid goes on to Dana and Antonio, too,
if you wondered.”
“Why?” Rikki managed to get out.
“You can figure out why,” Li said cheerily. “I
doubt you can figure out how. Had you ever
seen a king cobra?”
“N-no.”
“Nor have I. I’ve seen snakes, of course. On
Earth. I don’t recall ever seeing a snake on
Mars. A good choice on someone’s part, not
to import any.” Li laughed. “Or maybe Saint
Patrick was involved.
“But I digress. King cobras are nasty things.
Very poisonous. And without ever having
seen one, at some level you knew to fear it. As
the children do, instinctively.
“Dread and loathing of reptiles lives deep in
our hindbrains. No one knows how early in
mammalian evolution that wiring emerged. It
could date to the twilight of the dinosaurs,
when the reflex to flee reptiles would have
served our earliest progenitors well. I merely
associated your faces with that reflex. All in
the children’s first months, before they even
began to speak. They can’t conceptualize the
fear, much less articulate it. They just have it.
And when a child is loud or disobedient, a
flashed image of a king cobra—or of you—
sobers him up quickly.”
Rikki shuddered. “You’re a monster.”
“Name-calling, really? That’s the best you’ve
got?” Li smiled. “Take comfort in knowing the
children won’t miss you.”
“I don’t understand,” Rikki said.
“Perhaps this will make it clearer.” Li
reached behind her back, pulling something
from her waistband. Something Rikki had not
seen since helping to unload cargo from Endeavour
soon after Landing Day.
A handgun.
* * *
Chapter 35
“Something’s wrong,” Blake decided.
“Something often is,” Dana agreed, eyes
fixed on her nav console. “Might I trouble you
to be more specific?”
“In a sec.” The latest asteroid to be overtaken
was almost within laser range. “Firing . . .
now. Another dud. How many is that?”
“I leave the big numbers to Antonio. So tell
me, what’s wrong?”
“The latest one-line note from Rikki. They
all say she’s fine, but if she were she’d have
more to say. Or she’d answer a question or
two of mine. Or she’d record a vid, or at least a
voice message.”
“Or she’s fine and very busy. As we are.”
Dana coaxed Endeavour onto a new course.
“Call it fifteen minutes till the next rock
comes into range.”
“I’m not too busy to contact her.”
“Well good for you. You’re not the one dealing
with more sick kids every day. I don’t
know what to tell you other than do your job.
We need vanadium. We’ll stay out here till we
find it or Li says we’re needed more back
home. And just so you know, it would be a bit
less creepy if you didn’t spy on your wife
through Marvin.”
Blake wasn’t proud of that, either. He had
just wanted to see Rikki looking other than
green around the gills. And when he saw her
in the yard, keeping an eye on the healthy kids
at play, he’d told Marvin he had all he needed.
Ignoring Dana’s disapproving glance, Blake
replayed the short vid clip. When it stopped,
he left the final image open on an aux display.
They handled the next asteroid encounter
with minimal words, and the all too familiar
failure. And the asteroid after that. And the
two co-orbiting rocks after that. Blake began
counting the minutes until Antonio would relieve
him.
“Will you please take down that vid?” Dana
asked. “Rikki is fine. You have a problem.”
“I can’t put my finger on it, but I know. I’m
certain. Something is wrong. We need to go
back.”
“When we have what we came—”
“An interesting thing,” Antonio said from
the hatchway. Blake hadn’t heard him coming.
“Did you—”
“Not now,” Blake and Dana snapped in unison.
94 EDWARD M. LERNER

“Yes . . . now.”
Something in Antonio’s voice made Blake
turn and look. Antonio was craning his neck,
staring past Blake at the playground scene.
“See the . . . two moons?”
Two moons, daylight pale, glimmered
above the childcare center. The larger body
was at half phase; the smaller was only a crescent.
By their sizes, Aristophanes and Aeschylus.
“Uh-huh,” Blake said. “What about them?”
Antonio reached over Blake’s shoulder, extending
a fingertip into the holo. “The timestamp
shows today’s date. The positions and
phases of the moons are from twelve days
ago.”
Before Rikki fell ill! Before they left! Blake
said, “We have to head back. ASAP. Li and Carlos
are lying.”
“It could be an honest discrepancy,” Dana
said hesitantly.
Blake shook his head. “AIs don’t make mistakes
like that. Not on their own. Li or Carlos
is using Marvin to hide something.”
“I see another possibility.” Dana took a deep
breath. “Blake, you won’t like this. Maybe the
medical situation is more serious than they’ve
admitted to us.”
“And Rikki is . . .” Blake couldn’t finish the
thought aloud. “You think they’re keeping it
secret lest we come charging home without
what they need.”
“It’s possible. Sorry, Blake.”
“You think they’d lie, compel Marvin to lie,
all because they don’t trust us to do the right
thing?”
Dana shrugged.
“They’d have told you, wouldn’t they? Made
sure you knew the urgency?” And to Antonio,
who had jammed himself between pilot and
copilot seats to poke at a console, Blake
snarled, “Can’t that wait?”
Dana said, “But they didn’t. I’d have told
you.”
And she would have. Blake was certain. “Li
and Carlos are hiding something.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I can’t prove it, but—”
“But I can,” Antonio said. “Look.”
The playground was gone, vanquished by a
long-range surveillance image of Dark. On the
shore of the Darwin Sea, the settlement was
little more than a dot.
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
“From station beta on Aristophanes.” Antonio
reached into the holo to indicate a faint
oval smudge, darkest around the settlement.
“See that? It’s most visible in infrared wavelengths.”
Smoke? Precious little on Dark could burn,
apart from the ethanol they produced. Blake
banished insane notions of medieval plagues,
of criers calling to bring out the dead, of mass
funerary bonfires.
Dana must have had the same thoughts. “A
dietary deficiency can’t be contagious. What
are they burning?”
Antonio shook his head. “That’s not smoke.
Area temperature readings are normal. We
must be seeing dust. From major construction
or . . . destruction.”
“Amid a health crisis?” Blake said. “They are
lying to us, and they’re not letting Rikki communicate.
Dana, we have to go back.”
“You’re right,” she said. “Buckle up, guys.”
They were deep within the local asteroid
belt and almost a quarter of the way around
the sun from Dark. Over the course of their
search, they had built up considerable speed.
Blake reached for his datasheet to do the
math.
“Three and a half days,” Antonio said.
“More or less. That’s with the DED running
wide open.”
Two gees all the way.
Blake said, “Let’s get going.”
Chapter 36
As jails went, Rikki’s accommodations
weren’t bad. She had windows (too small and
high to wriggle through, even if she had had
the strength), a padded bench on which to
rest, a toilet and sink, even a shower. The
room was clean. At night, the ceiling glow
panel gave more than ample light. Prisoners in
stories paced out the dimensions of their cells,
so she had. Call it four meters by five.
When the nausea and vomiting returned
she saw the silver lining to being locked inside
a bathroom.
After the nausea passed and she could stop
hugging the toilet, she attacked the exterior
wall with a spoon, the only utensil provided
with her—untouched—food tray. She scraped
long enough to confirm she’d need geological
time to dig through the concrete. The shallow
scratch, if anyone asked, was to mark Day
95

ANALOG
One. In stories, prisoners also kept calendars.
From afar, every so often, she heard engine
roars, and rasping, and deep whooshing rumbles.
She remembered Carlos on the backhoeloader—could
it have been only that
morning?—and wondered how it could have
anything to do with Li’s . . . insurrection.
When Rikki called at a window (oddly
dusty) for help, the children ran.
Damn that horrible video! Damn Li!
Do I instinctively fear snakes? Rikki wondered.
Does everyone? Maybe I only learned
the fear growing up.
But none of that mattered. The morphing
faces and jarring music were surely terrifying
enough.
Just as the children’s dread of her was
enough.
Out of sight, around a corner of the childcare
center, the sounds of play soon resumed.
Every happy shriek was like a knife twisting in
Rikki’s gut.
There was nothing left to do but remember,
and that was the most painful of all.
Her datasheet! Straight from her pocket,
still folded, she whispered into it, “Marvin, unlock
the bathroom door.”
Silence.
She pushed on the door and it would not
budge. Maybe the lock’s wireless interface had
been disabled. She tapped out an email warning
to Blake. LI’S GONE NUTS.COME BACK AT ONCE!
Rather than an acknowledgment when she
tapped SEND the pop-up read, I’M SORRY,RIKKI.
I’M AFRAID I CAN’T DO THAT.
Nor, she found, could she access the safety
cameras to monitor what transpired outside. It
dawned on her: Marvin had been blocking her
messages to Blake all along. Carlos’s doing,
she supposed. The man knew computers.
Weary, defeated, Rikki lay down and closed
her eyes. And opened them almost at once, to
banish the image of Li brandishing her gun.
If Rikki had even remembered Endeavour
had weapons in its cargo, she’d have thought
them packed away forever. Anachronisms.
Useless. Not as much as a gnat existed on Dark
to harm them. To take up arms after billions—
whole worlds—had perished? It was more
than horrendous, beyond obscene.
And she was hopelessly naïve. An end to violence
would only come when human nature
changed.
The lock clicked.
“Stand back,” Li called. “I’m armed.”
Rikki, who had been pacing, sat on the
bench.
Li entered cautiously, looking around the
room. With gun in hand, she indicated the
food tray. “You should eat.”
“You expect me to believe this meal isn’t
poisoned?”
“That’s your theory?” Li laughed.
“You obviously poisoned me. To keep me
behind as your hostage?”
“Not exactly. In fact, at first I was annoyed
at how the timing worked out, that you’d be
staying behind. Tying up loose ends would
have been easier without you underfoot. But
you know what? I’m glad you’re here. You’ll
be more convincing when the others return.”
“What do you mean, ‘Not exactly?’”
“I did do something to you,” Li said. “Someday,
maybe you’ll thank me. Till then I trust it
will make you cautious.”
“I’m your goddamned prisoner! I can’t do a
thing. So stop being coy and tell me. What did
you do?”
“Carlos and me. Do you remember the immune-system
booster shot at your last routine
physical? That was actually software updates
for your nanites.” Li smiled. “All that’s wrong
with you is a major case of morning sickness.”
“I’m . . . pregnant?”
Pacing, sleeping, and staring out the window.
It passed the time but provided no answers.
Nothing Li had done made sense. Why reveal
having warped the children? Just to brag?
Why hold Rikki as a prisoner? Did Li think she
and her gun could hold everyone at bay once
Blake, Dana, and Antonio returned? She had
to sleep sometime!
And above all: why had Li enabled her to get
pregnant?
Staring out the window, Rikki screamed, at
everyone and no one, “Are you crazy?”
Children scattered. In seconds they had
abandoned all of the play area visible from her
window.
Not once in two days had Rikki seen an
adult in the yard to supervise the kids. Was
that the shape of things to come?
“Come,” Li ordered. “And bring your coat.
96 EDWARD M. LERNER

We’re going outside.”
Rikki didn’t budge from her seat. “Why? Do
you have more abuse to boast about?”
“I’m not the one yelling at the children.”
Holding open the bathroom door, Li backed
into the corridor. Her other hand held a gun.
“I assume you’d like to know what this is
about. And before you try anything stupid, remember:
you’re pregnant.”
“As an elaborate, especially cruel, slow-motion
way to kill me?” Because you’re that sick.
“Oh, never mind what I told your doting
husband. ‘Could be fatal’ leaves a great deal of
wiggle room. I’d give you four-to-one odds
you’ll be fine.” Li gestured. “Out. I have things
to show you. Things that, once you’re free,
you’ll want to tell your friends.”
Free? Without a hostage, how did Li expect—whatever
she was up to—to outlast Endeavour’s
return? She had to sleep sometime.
“You’re adorable when you’re confused.
Come. Your questions will all be answered.”
Seething, Rikki followed.
Just inside the open gate at the north end of
Main Street, she saw Carlos. And a bulldozer,
parked. And a dozen or more of the older children
with rakes and shovels. Only you
couldn’t dig in the rock-hard ground.
“What are they doing?” Rikki asked.
“All in good time.”
Their first stop was the settlement’s primary,
deeply buried bunker. A tornado shelter, at
Antonio’s insistence, not that they had ever
had a tornado. Li motioned Rikki away from
the double steel doors to palm the handprint
reader, then backed away.
“You first,” Li said.
Rikki raised one of the heavy doors. It fell to
the side with a crash. The late afternoon sun
touched only the first few steps, and she
tapped the light-switch sensor. Her heart
pounding, she scanned their most precious
possessions: the embryo banks, still almost
full. Bags of seed. Marvin’s servers. Everything
appeared untouched—but she knew Marvin
had been altered.
What else, unseen, had Li and Carlos tainted?
“We don’t have all day. Down.”
“So you can shut me inside?”
Li sighed. “I could have locked you here in
the first place, couldn’t I? Just go down. Trust
me, it’ll be worth it.”
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
Hugging the railing, Rikki started down the
concrete stairs. A tall stepladder she had last
seen in the greenhouse, where she had used it
to replace a cracked roof panel, leaned against
the opposite wall. Everything else in the
bunker was as Rikki remembered it—even the
sturdy steel hook of the chain hoist on which,
as usual, she cracked her head.
She reached the bottom and had circled half
the bunker floor before her captor descended
the first few steps. Li said, “Look up. Higher.”
Well beyond Rikki’s reach, strapped to the
two steel beams that braced the concrete ceiling,
packages . . . blinked.
Li took something from her pocket. “The
trigger.”
Rikki did not want to believe. “Those are explosives?”
“More than enough to bring the roof of the
bunker crashing down.”
And thereby end . . . everything. As from a
great distance, Rikki heard herself ask, “Why?”
“Here’s some old Earth history you might
never have learned. Two great-power archenemies.
Each side had enough nukes to obliterate
its rival many times over. And neither side
ever launched its missiles. Neither side dared,
knowing the other would retaliate. Even an
overwhelming first strike without warning
might leave intact enough weapons for a devastating
counterstrike. Strategists called the
policy MAD. Mutual assured destruction.”
It was mad, all right. “What can you possibly
hope to accomplish?”
“Our history lesson isn’t quite done.” Li
poked at her remote. Overhead, alongside
both blinking lamps, bright red numerals appeared.
25:14:06. A standard Dark day.
The counters began ticking down.
“I must reset the devices daily. That’s my
failsafe. If anything were to prevent me . . .”
Rikki shivered. “What if something comes
up? What if you can’t do the daily reset?”
“Après moi, le déluge.”
“What?”
Li sneered. “Didn’t they teach history on
Mars? You all deserve to be extinct. It’s
French. Louis XV. ‘After me, the flood.’ And,
as prophecies go, close enough. His son lost
his head.”
“Meaning?” Rikki asked despairingly.
“Meaning you’d best see to it that nothing
‘comes up’ before I’m prepared to disarm. As
97

ANALOG
to my purpose until then, you shouldn’t be
surprised. A free hand with raising the children.
You and your friends wouldn’t allow
that when I offered you all the choice.”
“Poisoning the children’s minds against us
didn’t give you enough leverage?”
“Sadly, no.”
“Then why warp them?”
“I’m molding them,” Li said. “Dana’s job
was to find a refuge, a haven, like Dark. Now
it’s my turn. To mold the children. To mold a
civilization. The rest of you don’t have what
that takes.”
“Now that we know how important this is
to—”
Li snickered. “Little Miss Sunday dinner? I’m
supposed to believe you’ll change your mind?
Come back up. I have more to show you.”
The heavy bunker door slipped from Rikki’s
grasp when she closed it, too. This time,
aware of the explosives, she cringed.
Li gestured up Main Street with her handgun.
“Good. They’ve finished.”
Carlos was ushering children—their
clothes, faces, and hands inexplicably filthy—
away from the gate. One by one, they
dropped gardening tools on a pile. Once the
last child started down the street, Carlos did
something with a gadget from his pocket.
Most of the children gave Rikki a wide
berth. Some stared as they passed.
Rikki burst into tears. “I love you children.”
If they heard her, if they cared, none
showed it.
Behind Rikki, from one of the playground
speakers, Marvin announced, “Discovery’s
radar shows Endeavour is inbound. It will be
on the ground within ten minutes.”
Li motioned Rikki forward. “I’m almost impressed.
They got suspicious faster than I expected.”
The barren rock near the fence was . . .
changed. Textured. Dug up, somehow, by the
bulldozer? By the children, too, Rikki guessed
from all those begrimed faces and hands.
Two paces closer and Rikki saw that something
covered that strip of ground. A wavy
gravel bed, all tiny hummocks, hollows, and
shoeprints, extended about five meters inside
the fence. The broad gravel band paralleled
the fence until both, curving around buildings,
were lost to sight.
“Stop!” Li picked up one of the rocks that
little feet had kicked and dragged into the
compound. “Do not approach the gate.”
“Why not?”
Li lobbed her pebble toward the middle of
the gravel strip, about ten meters to the left of
the gate. Nothing happened.
“That was anticlimactic.” Li took a rake
from the tool pile. She tossed it after the pebble.
Blam!
Rikki ducked, hands clapped to her ears, as
gravel rained down and something stung her
cheek. Stones pinged off the fence and concrete
chips flew from it. Children screamed.
When the smoke and dust had cleared, a meter-wide
crater remained. Of the rake itself,
only scattered twisted shards could be seen.
“Pressure activated. That’s why you should
stay off the gravel.”
Rikki wiped grit and tears from her face.
“Why, Li?”
“The fence and gate suffice to keep the children
in. The land mines are to keep you and
your friends out. Except, of course, when I
have need of you inside. The mines are radio
controlled. I can turn them on and off.”
“Six minutes,” Marvin called.
“You see,” Li went on, “we on the inside—
and our numbers will grow—require food,
water, and clothing. Every year or so we’ll
want a fresh bottle of deuterium. So rejoice.
The four of you can still serve the new order.”
“And if we aren’t able to produce enough?
If, say, the weather doesn’t cooperate? You
would blow the bunker?”
“You want to know, can you starve us out?
You could try. But there is plenty of food and
water in the pantry for just Carlos and me.”
“You would take food from the mouths of
babies?”
Li shrugged. “If you withhold food, what
happens is on your heads. And when you
come to your senses and resume deliveries,
we can replace any children you starved.”
Rikki just stared, dumbfounded.
“For lesser infractions, if you should be so
foolish, I’m sure I can find other ways to get
your attention. I might cut off power to your
homes for a while. Have any other bright
ideas?”
Did she?
Rikki pointed at the fence. “That encloses
98 EDWARD M. LERNER

what, maybe a square klick? You can’t mean
to stay inside for long. You can’t fit many more
children inside.”
“The secure compound is just about half
that area, but you’re correct. We won’t stay
forever. A few years will suffice. By then, hundreds
of children, the cadre of a new civilization,
will have been thoroughly shaped.”
Bright, fanatical eyes proclaimed, “They’ll be
thoroughly mine.”
“How about this?” Rikki said desperately.
“We construct a second settlement elsewhere.
Far down the coast of Darwin Sea. Or on the
coast of a different sea, if you prefer. You live
there. You build your”—insane, twisted, tragic—“society
there.”
“Or you could move. Except no one will be
going anywhere, because I need workers here
to farm. Or I may find I need resources only
Endeavour can fetch. And even if those
weren’t possibilities, I would still refuse.
Know this: restored humanity will be a single
society. One perfect society.”
With Mad Queen Li to rule it.
The children, terrified by the explosion,
had crowded around Carlos. Eve, taller than
DARK SECRET
JUNE 2013
the rest, very blond, was unmistakable—and
Carlos’s hand rested on her shoulder.
Amid cosmic disaster: a tragedy of human
scale.
Rikki said, “To feed so many, we’ll need Carlos’s
help, too.” Whether or not that was true,
she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him
inside the fence, with the little girls.
“Carlos outside?” Li hesitated. “No, I need
him.”
“Three minutes,” Marvin advised.
Li took the controller from her pocket. “You
have thirty seconds to cross the gravel.”
“But I—”
“Twenty-five seconds. Twenty-four.”
Rikki dashed, gravel scattering beneath her
shoes. She didn’t slow down until she was at
least twenty meters outside the gate.
Li called, “Your friends will be on the
ground soon. Tell them what you’ve seen. Tell
them what I expect.
“And tell them the consequences if any of
you fail to cooperate.” ■
to be concluded. . . .
99

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY Don Sakers
Much of the excitement in today’s publishing
world is happening in the field
of young adult fiction, also known as
teen fiction or simply YA. We have J.
K. Rowling to thank for this; the enormous
success of the Harry Potter books showed
publishers that YA represented a vast untapped
market, especially for fantasy and science
fiction.
Of course, science fiction for younger readers
is nothing new. The Tom Swift series, published
by the Stratemeyer Syndicate beginning
in 1910, were arguably the first science fiction
books aimed at younger readers. (In those
days, there was no real consciousness of
“teenager” as a separate developmental phase;
in general society, people were either children
or adults. According to most sources, it wasn’t
until after World War II that we began to think
of teens as different than children.)
In the prewar period, outside SF fandom, all
of science fiction was considered literature for
the young. Fans and writers who were adults
in that period often spoke of being belittled for
reading “that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.” The
Campbell revolution was the real beginning of
science fiction for adults, and it was nearly another
two decades before book publishers
took SF seriously as an adult market.
Throughout the late 1940s and into the early
1960s, many well-known SF authors wrote
what we now recognize as young adult SF (although
at the time they were called “juveniles.”)
The best known and most beloved are
Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton, but
there were numerous other examples. By then
the distinction between YA and adult SF was
well-established, and longtime readers have
endless fun arguing whether Podkayne of
Mars or Witch World fit into one category or
the other. (Not to keep you in suspense, the
answer is “both.”)
During the 1980s and most of the 1990s, YA
fiction was essentially undifferentiated by
genre; instead, it was dominated by temporary
100
fads. There would be a bestseller about, say,
wilderness survival or death in the family, and
for a year or so every other book would be similar
. . . until the readers lost interest and moved
on to the next fad.
That changed in 1997 with the arrival of
Harry Potter. At first, Harry looked like just another
fad—the cry among booksellers and librarians
alike was “more books like Harry Potter.”
Yet soon, the realization dawned that what
many teens really wanted was imaginative,
speculative novels: fantasy and science fiction.
So what makes a novel a YA book? As a publishing
category, YA books are aimed at an audience
roughly 12-18 years old. However, recent
surveys estimate that more than half the
YA books published are read by older (sometimes
much older) readers.
It doesn’t have to do with sex or violence, either.
YA literature deals with all sorts of topics
once considered taboo.
YA books most often have protagonists under
21—but so do a lot of unquestionably adult
books. No one considers Alexei Panshin’s Rite
of Passage to be a YA book, for example, even
though its protagonist is under 15.
Putting on my librarian hat here, true YA literature
embodies the concerns of teenagers.
That covers everything from bedwetting and
complexion problems to questions of life,
death, and the meaning of the Universe. Yet it
also leaves out a lot. You’re unlikely to see a YA
book focusing on career anxiety, for instance.
In the typical YA novel, adult characters
tend to be ineffectual, villains, or missing altogether.
If there were competent adults around,
how could the teenage protagonists have an
active role in solving major problems? If the
staff of Hogwarts were fully responsible adults,
Harry and his young friends would never be
confronting the dangers they do—not without
the adults going to trial for criminal negligence.
Nowadays, though, there are two categories
of YA books being published. First are traditional
YA books with all the characteristics list-

ed above. Second are books that would have
been published as adult titles ten years ago, but
with a few tweaks can be marketed as YA. In
the field of science fiction, where the adult
market is perceived to be in the doldrums,
publishing as YA can make a significant difference
in sales. In essence, these are adult books
masquerading as YA.
As with all classification schemes, these
aren’t hard-and-fast categories but rather a continuum.
My favorite example is the Hunger
Games books. These are sophisticated SF
books; if the protagonists were in their twenties
rather than their teens, the books would almost
surely be considered adult fiction. (As it
is, parents of younger teens will want to think
seriously about how to expose their young
readers to the books.)
Sure, adults can read both types of YA. But if
a steady diet of books addressing the concerns
of teenagers makes you feel a bit limited, don’t
write off YA books altogether. Just look for the
adult books that are wearing disguises.
For example:
Rootless
Chris Howard
Scholastic, 330 pages, $17.99 (hardcover)
Kindle: $9.99, Nook: $10.39 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-545-38789-7
Series: Rootless 1
Genres: Ecological/Environmental SF, Postapocalyptic,
Teen SF
A century ago, the Darkness came. In the
Darkness, people burned everything and anything:
houses, furniture, books, trees . . . little
by little, the old civilization was reduced to
ashes.
With the Darkness came the locusts: fierce
swarms who fed equally on forests or flesh.
And then there were no more forests, no more
trees at all.
In some places, new civilization rose from
the ashes, islands in a bleak worldwide wasteland.
The rich—those who work for corporations
like GenTech, or who make fortunes by
salvaging the ruins of the past—live good lives
in the cities. The poor eke out meager lives
tending GenTech’s locust-proof crops, working
on salvage crews, or as nomads who wander
the wastes in search of work.
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
JUNE 2013
Seventeen-year-old Banyan is a tree builder:
an artist who turns junk and scrap metal into
replica groves and forests. The rich pay handsomely
for his creations, for having one’s own
trees is not only the ultimate status symbol, it’s
a touch of beauty, a reminder of the mythical
past.
When Banyan takes on the biggest job he’s
ever had, he meets a woman with a beautiful
tattoo of a gorgeous living tree. And he learns
that there just might be a place where real
trees still survive.
Banyan’s subsequent quest, in search of a fabled
orchard that may or may not exist, takes
us across a magnificently detailed world, a
world full of dangers and wonders, pirates and
scavengers, friends and enemies, and always
the threat of the locusts. This is one of those
books in which the landscape becomes as
much a fascinating character as the people in
the story.
Yes, Rootless is a post-apocalyptic novel, as
is the rage today; but the book transcends that
genre. Banyan is a compelling, fun character,
and the folks he meets on his journey are
equally captivating. The language is fresh and
sparkling.
Fair warning: Rootless is the first of a series.
The immediate story comes to a satisfactory
ending, but as with all great future worlds and
grand epics, there’s much more to come.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
Karen Lord
Del Rey, 320 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-345-53405-7
Genres: Psychological/Sociological SF, Romantic
SF
There’s a strain of science fiction that imagines
an interstellar society composed of many
varieties of humanoid races. Ursula K. LeGuin’s
Hainish Cycle books do this, as do Sharon Lee
and Steve Miller’s Liaden Universe stories. Now
we can add Karen Lord to the list.
In Lord’s future, humanoids exist on many
worlds and take many forms. Among them are
the Sadiri, a telepathic people who pride themselves
on their self-discipline. Ascetic and unemotional,
the Sadiri hold themselves apart
from other races.
101

ANALOG
Perhaps inevitably, the Sadiri also have their
enemies. And one of those enemy races unleashes
disaster, destroying the Sadiri homeworld
and killing most of the Sadiri. The survivors,
mostly Sadiri who were offworld at the
time, are left as homeless refugees.
Enter Cygnus Beta, a world built by
refugees, a welcoming home to all of the
galaxy’s displaced peoples. Successive waves
of exiles and survivors have settled on Cygnus
Beta; the resulting Cygnian race is as genetically
and socially diverse as they come.
Linguist Delarua works for the Cygnian government
department that settles disputes between
ethic groups. Clear-headed and practical,
Delarua likes her job and is happy with her
life. When the first Sadiri refugees arrive, she’s
made chief liaison to their settlement.
Chief among the Sadiri is Dllenankh, a diplomat,
who bears with dignity both his survivor’s
guilt, and the responsibility for finding a way
for his people and their culture to survive. In
order to broaden the gene pool as much as
possible, the next generation of Sadiri will
have to come from interbreeding with other
races; Cygnus Beta offers the best hope, for
some of the people who settled there in the
past spring from the same stock as the Sadiri.
Dllenankh’s group is a test case to see if such
interbreeding can be successful.
In brilliant harmony, the larger problem of
the Sadiri is mirrored in the very personal relationship
between Delarua and Dllenankh—for
these two, thrown together in their work, begin
to fall in love.
The Best of All Possible Worlds is a slow,
stately waltz in which personal and societal
stories progress toward an ultimate and satisfying
conclusion. Resonances with today’s world
are inevitable: Cygnus Beta is, in its own way,
as much a melting pot as the United States, and
today’s world certainly has its share of displaced
peoples. All in all, this deliciously understated
book is a delight.
Red Planet Blues
Robert J. Sawyer
Viking, 460 pages, $30.00 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-670-06577-6
Genres: Mars, SF Mystery
A new Robert J. Sawyer book is always
cause for celebration. Even more so when the
book is something completely different than
he’s been doing for the last few years.
Red Planet Blues is a tour de force: a hardboiled
detective thriller set in a Martian settlement
fifty to a hundred years from now. It all
started with Sawyer’s 2004 Hugo—and Nebula-nominated
novella “Identity Theft,” which
is included as part of the current book.
Four decades before the time of the story,
Martian explorers Simon Weingarten and Danny
O’Reilly found fossil evidence of past life.
This spawned the Great Martian Fossil Rush,
as thousands moved to Mars in hopes of unearthing
more fossils and striking it rich.
That was the genesis of New Klondike, a
domed city on the newest frontier. It’s a raw,
rough place where the burned-out hulks of
failed prospectors share the streets with the
glitterati and so-called transfers—androids animated
by the uploaded consciousnesses of
Earth’s wealthy and influential.
In the chaos of New Klondike there’s sure
to be crime. Enter Alex Lomax, a private investigator
who makes his living tracking
down thieves and murderers. Alex is the classic
rough detective with a soft heart, struggling
to pay his bills and keep his head above
water while still bringing some justice to the
world.
Then Alex gets an unexpected case, one
that could make his reputation and ensure his
fortune. It’s the most famous unsolved case on
the books: Decades ago, someone murdered
Weingartner and O’Reilly. And it’s up to Alex
to find out who . . . no matter where the investigation
leads.
Well, this is Robert J. Sawyer, so you know
it’s a well-written, intelligent story with some
unexpected twists. Alex Lomax is one of the
good guys, easy to identify with—and Sawyer
makes New Klondike as real as the street in
front of your house. Red Planet Blues isn’t
just a mystery story with science fiction trappings,
it’s a fusion of the two genres in which
the mystery depends on the SF elements.
To top it off, Sawyer obviously had fun writing
this book, and that sense of fun comes
through on every page. Definitely worth reading.
* * *
102 DON SAKERS

Farside
Ben Bova
Tor, 400 pages, $24.99 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $11.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2387-3
Series: Grand Tour
Genres: Hard SF, High Frontier
The Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton
“juveniles” of the 1950s and 1960s played a big
part in inspiring an entire generation of young
people to enter the fields of science and engineering.
You don’t have to ask very many astrophysicists
or astronauts to uncover someone’s
happy memories of Have Space Suit,Will
Travel or Starman’s Son.
Currently, the inspirational torch is carried
by Ben Bova. Most of Bova’s books aren’t actually
YA, either in intent or in marketing—but
they’re easily accessible to bright teenagers,
and they’ve opened the wonder of science and
engineering to many a young mind.
A typical Bova book is set anywhere from
twenty to two hundred years from the present,
involves the exploration and industrialization
of some piece of real estate in the solar system,
has a varied multicultural cast, and is built
around an exciting thriller plot. The book’s informed
by accurate science and rigorous extrapolation,
and imparts the joy of learning.
Scientists, technologists, and explorers are the
heroes of most Bova books, rational and intelligent
people all.
Farside, Bova’s latest, is no exception. It’s set
against the background of constructing the
first large observatory on the Moon’s farside,
where Luna’s bulk shields the instruments
from the electromagnetic and political interference
of Earth.
Trudy Yost, astronomer, travels to the Lunar
nation of Selene to become assistant to Professor
Jason Uhlrich. Uhlrich is the driving force
behind Farside Observatory, and a leading expert
in the observatory’s target: the Earth-size
planet Sirius C. The planet shows hopeful
signs, but critical data is tantalizingly out of
reach until Farside’s delicate instruments are
online. But first, they have to build those instruments.
It’s an unforgiving environment for construction
work. Airless, bathed in hard radiation,
subject to micrometeorite bombardment,
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
JUNE 2013
everything covered in the irritating Lunar dust.
Construction crews rely on robots and
nanomachines for much of the work. Accidents
are frequent, some of them fatal.
And some of the fatal ones aren’t accidents
at all. Slowly, Trudy learns that there’s a saboteur
at work—one, perhaps, with a good reason
to want the project stopped.
In the midst of all this, Uhlrich’s spectroanalysis
of Sirius C finds traces of oxygen and
water vapor, sure signs of life. And suddenly,
the stakes are much higher ....
Bova is a master storyteller, and Farside is a
delightful read.
A Legacy of Stars
Danielle Ackley-McPhail
DTF Publications, 230 pages, $14.95 (trade paperback)
Kindle, Nook: $2.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-937051-95-2
Genre: Short Stories
Danielle Ackley-McPhail is one of the upand-coming
storytellers and editors in SF/fantasy.
She’s best known for her series of humorous
fantasy anthologies, the Bad-Ass Faeries.
Here she serves up a baker’s dozen science fiction
short stories, ranging from military SF to
SF horror to one of the cleverest first contact
stories to come along in a long time. Each story
is introduced by an editor or SF writer, and
there are five of Ackley-McPhail’s poems as
well.
If you’re in the mood for a smorgasbord of
enjoyable tales from a fresh new voice, at an ebook
price that won’t break the bank, give A
Legacy of Stars a try.
Finally, I call your attention to Unidentified
Funny Objects, edited by Alex Shvartsman, a
collection of funny SF stories. One of the stories
is mine, so obviously I can’t give the book
a regular review, but it seems like something
Analog readers would want to know about.
That’s it for this time around; see you next issue!
Don Sakers is the author of A Voice in Every
Wind and A Rose From Old Terra.For more information,
visit www.scatteredworlds.com. ■
103

BRASS TACKS
Mr. Walsh,
On page 37 of the print edition of
Analog [March 2013, “Spoof Worlds”
by Kevin Walsh] you state that
“. . . small amounts of carbon dioxide are
needed by human beings to maintain the respiration
process.” This is true but might be
construed to imply that atmospheric carbon
dioxide (CO ) is needed. As a matter of fact,
2
in closed environments (submarines, closed
circuit diving, space craft, anesthesia circuits)
great efforts are expended to assure
that inspired CO levels are close to zero. Ele-
2
vated levels of CO can result in sedation,
2
loss of consciousness and death. Atmospheric
carbon dioxide (while global levels are increasing)
is essentially nil (hundreds of parts
per million, I believe) with regard to breathing.
CO , as a product of metabolism, dis-
2
solves in the blood and is carried to the
brain’s respiratory center where it serves to
stimulate respiration. The normal partial
pressure of arterial CO is approximately
2
35–45 mmHg (this corresponds to approximately
5 volumes per cent at sea level). Elimination
of CO is in part diffusion dependent:
2
it is driven by the concentration gradient between
lung and atmospheric concentration
(the other part is minute ventilation).
I apologize if you already possess this
(simplified) information. I simply wished to
point out this point of potential misunderstanding.
Thank you for your contribution to Analog
and please accept my wishes for a happy and
healthy New Year.
Sincerely,
Shepard Stone
The author responds . . .
Good point. Thanks for clearing up a
source of potential confusion.
104
Dear Analog,
I just finished reading the March 2013 editorial
and wanted to convey my heart-felt
“thank you” and best wishes for a long, happy
and prosperous retirement to Dr. Schmidt.
Dr. Schmidt, I think you have done an absolutely
spectacular job of making and keeping
Analog the excellent and entertaining
publication it is. I definitely look forward to
reading/hearing your future work.
I also welcome Mr. Quachri and Ms. Hockaday
and look forward to a continued long
and happy relationship with you through
Analog.
Best regards to all,
John Harcinske
Mitchell, SD
Dr. Schmidt,
Thank you for all you have done during
your years at Analog. And Mr. Quachri, congratulations
on your appointment.
I have been a regular reader for almost fifty
years, and a subscriber for over forty years. I
am retired from the NYS Department of Environmental
Conservation and the NY Army
National Guard. Environmental and military
issues have long been my interest, and I have
read many good stories on these subjects in
Analog. Obviously, I would like to see more
stories on these issues in the future, and am
surprised at how few I have seen that address
what we humans have been doing to this
planet.
I cheered when I read the editorials that
address population issues, Dr. Schmidt is a
rare voice on the subject that does not focus
on the incredibly short sighted view that we
need more population growth so we have
enough young people to support us oldsters.
More people, demanding a rising standard of
living, will use more resources, and the plan-

et just cannot take too much more of this.
Habitat destruction, especially deforestation,
continues at an alarming rate. Commercial
fishing is headed the way of whale hunting.
Biodiversity is shrinking, species are being
driven to extinction by the actions of humans.
Last but not least, we are performing
an uncontrolled experiment on how much
coal and other fossil fuels we can burn for
short term gain with virtually no consideration
for the long term effects of these actions.
Many science fiction stories start from the
premise of “if this trend continues, then . . .”
I would certainly like to see a lot more stories
speculating what will happen if the trends
mentioned above continue, as it seems they
will. It certainly appears that we will not get
to exploit the resources of the solar system
(such as mining the asteroids) before these
trends cause some kind of collapse of our
current society. Recovery from this could be
very difficult, as many of the resources we
are currently exploiting are difficult to get at,
(the Deepwater Horizon well was over a mile
below sea level, etc). So how about this for
the premise of a SF story—current trends
continue, and climate change causes not only
ice melting which raises sea levels, but the
permafrost melts, and releases an unknown
but huge quantity of currently frozen
methane, which could lead to a runaway
greenhouse effect? Is this science fiction or
future science fact?
I understand that not everyone thinks this
is likely, the climate change deniers are well
funded (Koch brothers, etc. seem to have no
concern for what kind of planet their grand-
BRASS TACKS
JUNE 2013
children will inherit). Anyway, I submit for
your consideration that the items I have mentioned
should get more ink, both science fiction
and science fact, than we have seen so
far.
On another subject, I have a suggestion for
the Reference Library section. There are
many great SF authors that I was first introduced
to by Analog. I own a ton of David
Drake, Bujold’s Vorkosigan stories, McCaffrey’s
dragonriders, and other authors who I
first read in Analog. Many of the characters
and story lines first published in Analog are
later published in books, so I would suggest
that this Analog feature tell us specifically
when this happens. It doesn’t have to be big,
just a statement such as author X, who wrote
about Y, in the Z issue of Analog, now has a
book published in this setting.
Keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
Paul W. McCarthy
Thanks for your letter (and the kind
wishes). I think you make a good case for
the relevance and importance of environmental
science fiction. I’ve always been a
bit surprised it’s not a larger part of the
field, but perhaps that will change as
awareness of the issues continues to grow.
Your suggestion for “The Reference Library”
is also sound, but we actually already
do it—aside from Don regularly mentioning
any Analog connection in the body
of a review, he sometimes calls out books by
Analog authors that he doesn’t have room
to fully cover, purely because they might be
of interest to our readers. ■
You may never know what results come from your action. But if you
do nothing, there will be no result.
—Mahatma Gandhi
105

UPCOMING EVENTS Anthony Lewis
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