Panverse Three

By Dario Ciriello

Five Original Novellas of Science Fiction and Fantasy, including Ken Liu's Hugo and Nebula Award nominated story, "The Man Who Ended History".

Since the publication of Panverse One in 2009, Panverse Publishing’s annual anthology series has received excellent critical reviews in Asimov's, Locus, and other venues. Stories from this series have won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, received Hugo and Nebula Award nominations, and been included on the Locus magazine and Tangent Online recommended reading lists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Panverse Publishing LLC
• Release date: Sep 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983731337

Dario Ciriello

Like most writers, Dario Ciriello has lived several lives in one and enjoyed an eccentric career trajectory. He’s worked in a warehouse, driven trucks, drag raced motorcycles, had a small import business, and enjoyed a twenty-five year career as a decorative painter.Today, Dario is a professional author and freelance editor, as well as the founder of Panverse Publishing.His first novel, "Sutherland's Rules", a crime caper/thriller with a shimmer of the fantastic, was published in 2013. "Free Verse and Other Stories", a collection of Dario's short Science Fiction work, was released in June 2014. His new novel, a supernatural suspense thriller titled "Black Easter", will be released on December 5, 2015.Dario has also edited and copyedited over a dozen novels, as well as three critically-acclaimed SF novella anthologies "(Panverse One", "Panverse Two", and "Panverse Three").Dario's nonfiction book, "Aegean Dream", the bittersweet memoir of a year spent on the small Greek island of Skópelos (the real "Mamma Mia!" island), was a UK travel bestseller in 2012 and has recently been published in Poland.He lives with his wife in the Los Angeles Area.

Book preview

Panverse Three

Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Edited by Dario Ciriello

Panverse Publishing

Concord, CA, USA

These stories are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in the stories contained in this anthology are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

Panverse Three copyright © 2011 by Dario Ciriello.

Orion Rising, copyright © 2011 by Jason Stoddard

Junction 5, copyright © 2011 by Gavin Salisbury

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary, copyright © 2011 by Ken Liu

Martyrs, copyright © 2011 by Don D’Ammassa

Dust to Dust, copyright © 2011 by Tochi Onyebuchi

All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form whatsoever.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Published by Panverse Publishing at Smashwords

Cover artwork by Aurelia Shaw

Cover layout by Janice Hardy

Visit Panverse Publishing online at www.panversepublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-9837313-3-7

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, my heartfelt gratitude to the contributing authors who took a chance on Panverse and cheerfully accommodated my often picky suggestions and edits; thanks also to Aurelia Shaw, our very talented cover artist, and to Janice Hardy, for her superb layout work.

I’d like also to acknowledge the many brilliant editors and anthologists our field has known over the last, oh, three generations or so, without whose inspiration and example any modern anthologist would be utterly lost.

Finally, my most special thanks to my wife Linda, whose constant support and encouragement against all odds helped make this volume, and the entire Panverse series, possible.

Contents

Introduction

Orion Rising by Jason Stoddard

Junction 5 by Gavin Salisbury

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary by Ken Liu

Martyrs by Don D’Ammassa

Dust to Dust by Tochi Onyebuchi

Biographical Notes

About Panverse Publishing

Introduction

When I first conceived the Panverse anthology series, I wanted to do three things.

The first was to provide a market for high-quality Science Fiction and Fantasy novellas. The novella, or short novel, is perfectly suited to Speculative Fiction, providing as it does sufficient space for the author to fully develop both setting and characters while at the same time remaining short enough to read at a single sitting.

My second goal was to even the playing fields so that newer authors, especially those whose work pushes the wordcount limits of short fiction, weren’t handicapped because of the very few slots available to novellas and the commercial need to have Big Names on the cover.

Third, I wanted to publish work that told a story. That entertained. That resonated. Work that concerned itself more with content than literary pretensions or political correctness.

I’m pleased to report that the Panverse anthology series has achieved all these goals, as well as reminding readers that an anthology of Speculative Fiction does not have to be themed to be good.

As with Panverse One and Two, I’m thrilled and delighted to bring you these five original novellas. At least some of the authors will undoubtedly be new to you, but I guarantee that the stories they tell are exciting, affecting, and memorable.

Welcome to Panverse Three.

Dario Ciriello

San Francisco, May, 2011

Orion Rising

Jason Stoddard

The moment Michael Hughes set foot on Earth, representatives of International Unity arrested him. They wore heavy white radiation suits with mirror-glass visors, dazzling against the Nevada Launch Center's sun-bleached expanses of concrete.

The lander isn't nuclear, Michael said.

Two of them grabbed his arms. Michael resisted the urge to sag into them. His legs quivered. All the training in the New Phoenix's weight room had done nothing to prepare him for Earth’s gravity.

One of the white-suits stepped forward. Are you Michael Hughes?

Yes.

Who else is in the ship?

Nobody.

A wave. Search it. White-suits scurried up the ladder into the thin fuselage of the lander.

The lead-suit turned back to Michael. "You are under arrest for violating Statute One of the Paradise in Our Place Initiative. You have the right to counsel before you speak."

What is counsel?

For several moments, the white-suit said nothing. Michael's own distorted reflection bobbed and weaved in his mirrored visor. Michael wanted to reach out and tear the man's headpiece off. He wanted to see a human face. He glanced briefly at the blue sky, impossibly bright and clear, and the yellow sandstone cliffs of the Nevada desert beyond. Not so different from Mars. Except he was standing there, breathing, without a spacesuit. The air smelled strange and stony, like a new-minted cavern.

Finally: Counsel is provided for your defense.

Defense? I have no weapons.

Another pause. The lead white-suit turned to look back at the rest of the men.

What am I charged with? Michael asked.

"Violating Statute One of the Paradise in Our Place Initiative—"

What is that?

A sigh. There shall be no commerce between the International Unity of Earth and any space-based faction. This shall be enforced by—

More words. Michael felt light-headed. Images floated in front of him, almost real: rail-thin children volunteering for work in the salmon farms for the chance to grab a bite or two more of stunted, deformed fish.

The white-suits came out of the ship. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the ship, one of them said. He waved a tiny device, too small to be a Geiger counter. Radiation’s on the high side, but safe for short exposure.

Michael stifled a laugh. He knew all the counts. And the chemical-rocket lander was cold enough to be a luxury apartment on Mars.

I need to talk to someone, he told them. Someone in authority.

Front-suit laughed. Take me to your leader?

I need . . . to talk to someone in power.

And they’ll change everything, just like that. Front-suit held up his fingers and tried to snap them. They made no noise.

To listen, at least.

Crossed arms. You people had your chance.

Michael saw the Russian Marsbase, disappearing in a fireball hotter than the sun. He wondered if any fragments had reached escape velocity, to land on Earth.

Michael’s head swam. He lost his footing and stumbled against one of his captors, who forced him upright. Can I . . . can I sit down?

The lead white-suit made a disgusted noise, turned and walked away. The men dragged him to a white-painted van that carried the globe-and-dove crest of the International Unity. Farther off, dun-painted military vehicles sat. Dark shapes hid within, clutching long guns. The vehicles looked a little like Jeeps in the old movies they played in New San Diego, but wider and squatter. Updated for the brave new year 2000, he thought. Farther off were other vans, bearing bright-colored logos. People stood behind tripods on top of them. Michael saw the glint of sunlight on glass. They were filming him. He might be on television, right now. He resisted the urge to raise a hand and wave.

They put him in a van that was ridiculously clean and new. The paint was perfect and unmarred. He sank into the bench seat thankfully, sighing. The van even smelled new, a mixture of metal and clean plastic. Two of the white-suits sat down on either side of him, and four others took the bench opposite him.

Where are you taking me? Michael asked.

Las Vegas IU Base, one of them said. Michael recognized the voice as the lead white-suit. Look, you realize we're recording all of this? He pointed to a silver dome set in the middle of the van's roof.

Does it matter?

Anything you say, they can use against you.

I have nothing to hide.

A sigh and a head-shake. The van roared to life and accelerated quickly, bumping over the rutted concrete. Michael saw the slim delta-winged shape of his lander through the tinted windows of the van's doors, and felt a momentary pang of fear.

You'll never go back. They'll never let you go back.

No. They had to listen to him. If they had any shred of humanity in them, they had to. And, according to their broadcasts, International Unity prized humanity above all.

The former leader leaned forward and pulled off his headpiece. Long blonde hair tumbled out. He looked up at Michael, and Michael realized he was a girl. A very pretty one at that. She looked like someone from an old movie, impossibly healthy and well-fed. Michael suddenly knew what he must look like to her, scarecrow-thin from the low gravity, his legs bowed outward from malnutrition, his hands covered in scars from old radiation burns, his sunken eyes, his hollow cheeks. He had to hold his hands rigidly in his lap, to keep them from covering his face.

You came here by yourself?

Yes.

From Mars?

Yes.

Nobody up there in orbit, nobody up there in that whole ship?

Michael shook his head. Nothing lived in orbit. The International Unity had pulled down the grand spinning space stations of the 1960s and 1970s, and the New Phoenix was as dead as a radioactive hunk of cooling metal could be.

Silence for a time, as the van bumped along.

How old are you? she asked.

Twenty-two.

She looked at him a long time. Jesus in a sidecar, she said, softly.

Ted Taylor walked through the warm, sticky hydroponics farms of Trinity-Under-Mars, thinking, We should have built this around Saturn.

He remembered seeing Saturn's rings, impossibly clear and crisp, through Orion 1's largest viewport. June of 1969. His daughter's birthday. He remembered a few awkward sentences, exchanged between hours of silence, with his wife. He remembered running back to the viewport, to press his face against the glass once again. The rings were a sight that couldn't be explained with fuzzy telescopic images, or even with the large-format perfection of a Hasselblad. It was something he had to see with his own eyes. While everyone on Orion 1 was talking about the third Soyuz launch, with a crew of twelve hundred riding its pillar of atomic explosions into the sky, Ted knew it didn't matter. He couldn't obsess about how many men the United States and Russia had in space, or who was losing at the moment. What mattered was they were farther out than anyone had gone. Orion 1 was defining the frontier, even if their crew was only 120 strong.

We should've gone farther out.

They could have built cities around Saturn, villages around Uranus. They could have touched the edge of the solar system, where cold Pluto twisted in the emptiness. But now, 31 years later, all they had was Mars.

We should have kept going, until we couldn't go anymore.

Ted reached out to touch the plants. Hairy-sticky tomatoes, still too young to bear fruit. Spindly things, yellow-green, reaching feebly towards the wan light that was reflected down through the leaded glass from the surface. Mars was the friendliest of the extraterrestrial planets, but they still had to huddle below the ground. If it had a magnetic field, or even a thicker atmosphere . . .

Good afternoon, Mr. Taylor, Aaron Fuchs said, behind him.

Ted jumped and turned. Aaron Fuchs was a squat, compact man, an oddity in a world where children grew past six feet before their twelfth birthday, spindly and fragile as sunflowers. His white hair, impossibly thick, was combed to perfection. Ted imagined a hidden stock of Brylcreem, hoarded for all these years. And perhaps a lead blanket, for wrapping himself in at night.

Mr. Fuchs. Enjoying a stroll in our gardens?

Some garden.

What we have is what we make of it.

Aaron looked away, down the long rows of plants. He turned back to Ted and licked his lips. Your boy is on Earth.

He's not my boy. And we don't know that.

We know they didn't shoot the New Phoenix out of the sky.

That doesn't mean he's on Earth.

From the transmissions, I'm willing to bet he is.

Ted frowned. Earth's transmissions had been getting stranger and stranger of late. Moving up the scale in frequency. Sometimes seeming like nothing more than noise. He wondered how far their technology had progressed.

They'll never let him go, Aaron said.

Our ambassador in exile. Ted smiled.

Aaron said nothing, but his hands clenched.

At least he can dream, Ted thought.

We could use this to our advantage, Aaron said.

How so?

Do you know how many atomic bombs are aboard New Phoenix?

Ted looked at him. He couldn’t be thinking—

We could send a stealth ship to Earth, Aaron continued. No pulse drive, no boost. Just coast up to the New Phoenix, power it up, and do some real negotiating.

No! Absolutely not! Ted walked away. He needed to get back to his office. He needed to see his photos.

Why not? Aaron said, running behind him.

I won't use nuclear power as a weapon.

We may not have to use it. Think of it as leverage.

No!

Ted emerged from the hydroponics labs into the main cavern of Trinity-Under-Mars. Great housing blocks built from rough native brick rose from the vitrified floor. Windows opened onto darkness, or were covered with slate shutters. Small gun-loops framed most of the doorways. Above, more brick sealed the roof of the cavern, except in the places where milky glass allowed sunlight to penetrate, casting razor-sharp beams down through the haze of dust and smoke. Someone had grown their own tomato vines. They twined down from a second-story window, clinging to the brick. It was a charming and homey sight.

This could be a medieval village, seven hundred years ago, Ted thought. Thirty years ago we had Saturn. Now we have this.

We have to, Aaron said.

Ted stopped and whirled. People in Trinity-Under turned to look. Not here.

Aaron nodded and followed Ted to his office, set at the top of one of the town's oldest buildings. The sound of a baby's wails echoed up from the stone stairwell.

We have to, Aaron said again.

The scientists say—

The scientists are terrified of you! Aaron hissed. Look at the numbers. Crop yields, hog growth, fish harvest, all down in a straight line. Mutations are getting unmanageable.

I can't believe you.

Aaron smirked. No. Of course not. I'm just a beancounter, after all. But, you know what? I know numbers. And the numbers say we're slipping out of the self-sufficiency envelope.

Numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Have you looked at the condition of the machine shops lately? Aaron said.

Ted sighed, sat down behind his desk, and looked up at his photos.

Two of them, set in original wood frames on the unfinished brick wall. On one side, his daughter. The photo from his last trip to Earth in 1973. She grinned at him, forever preadolescent, forever trusting. On the other side, an aerial photo of downtown Moscow. The city he'd been working to destroy. He remembered coming into work the day after she was born, and thinking, How many people here have children they care about? And deciding, in that moment, I will not build nuclear weapons for war.

Have you looked at our people? Aaron said. Have you looked at your son?

He's not my son.

A frown, flash-quick, from Aaron. You still believe that?

Ted looked down at his desk, thinking, It's what I have to believe.

They took Michael Hughes to a huge flat expanse of concrete, where stubby planes huddled next to a row of low buildings. In the distance, a cluster of squat towers rose, silver-bright, sparkling in the orange light of the setting sun.

He stopped to look at them. They were all different shapes. One like a futuristic rocket, one like a presidential palace, one like a giant Frank Lloyd Wright house, one in the shape of a gigantic hat. It was like something the old fiction-writers dreamed of finding on Mars—a lost civilization, bizarre and unknowable.

Michael felt a sudden sense of unreality, as if the ground had shifted under his feet. He was the alien. This was just another city to someone from Earth.

Someone prodded his back. Move it.

Leave him alone. Another voice, behind him. This one he recognized. The girl with the blonde hair. She'd changed out of the baggy radiation-suit into a crisp International Unity defense uniform, done in sober gray. A cluster of stripes covered one side of her chest. Michael wished he knew what they meant.

Is this the first time you've seen a city? she asked him

I've seen them on film.

What do you think?

I think . . . I don't know what to think. Which was true. He felt detached, numb. He knew he should be on fire with passion to save his world, but now that he was here, all emotion had fled. Of course, he'd been awake the past 36 hours, and his weight was immense, impossible.

Las Vegas just gets stranger as you get closer. Soft, wistful. Almost like Ted, when he was in one of his retrospective moods.

How so?

Well, I'm not a gambler.

What's a gambler?

She stood back to look at him, as if he was a lab rat that had just learned long division.

Michael cleared his throat. What's your name?

Sasha Chislenko.

Russian?

She smiled. My parents. I grew up here. Kansas. Not that it matters in International Unity anymore.

In International Unity, I'm the only outsider, Michael thought.

They put him on the plane. It looked nothing like the jets they showed in the movies. It was empty and unfinished, a cylinder of aluminum and rivets and clean white paint. It had flat, utilitarian seats that faced the interior, and only a few windows to look down at the ground. Five other men, also dressed in gray uniforms, followed him in. They put him in a seat far away from a window. He looked longingly at it.

Sasha noticed. Put him somewhere he can see.

Is he your pet, team leader? somebody said. But they put him in a seat by the window. Sasha sat next to him.

You're a team leader?

Yes. She looked straight ahead.

Michael tried to think of something to say, but his mind felt fuzzy, soft. He wanted to lay back and sleep. Just sleep.

The plane gathered speed, jolting him awake. It lumbered into the atmosphere and the desert fell away beneath him. Earth desert, where plants still grew everywhere. Where you could walk around outside in nothing more than a shirt and pants. Naked, if you wanted to. He wondered suddenly what Sasha looked like, under her crisp gray uniform. He pushed that thought away.

The plane banked, revealing Las Vegas. Mirrored glass threw back highlights, sending shards of light out into the darkening desert. He saw people walking on the streets, and the ebb and flow of traffic, like blood-cells in a capillary. There were thousands of cars, tens of thousands of people. He'd never seen so many people in his life.

If Baikonur had lived, he would have seen that many people. Or they'd all be dead, because they wouldn't have its resources to harvest.

One of the men in the defense team pulled a plastic rectangle from a perfect and unscuffed gray duffel-bag. It was about the size of a large book. Michael watched, groggily, as he opened it. Blue light lit the man's face.

Michael leaned forward. Is that a television?

The man laughed and turned it around. It's a computer.

A computer? He looked at Sasha.

She nodded. Go ahead. Take a look.

Michael went over to the man. The screen showed blocky pictures of something that looked like spaceships. The man used keys to move a gun around, shooting at them.

What is this?

It's a game, the man said. Space War 2000.

A game? On a computer?

It does other stuff. The man showed him words on the page, displayed like a book, and a grid with endless series of numbers in it.

Michael felt dizzy, thinking about the slide-rule calculations he'd labored over when coming into orbit, and the one surviving magnetic-core computer on Mars. This was so far beyond their technology . . . what did Mars have to offer Earth, except some photographs and a few fossils? What was he thinking when he came here?

How do you get one of these? Michael asked.

What do you mean?

Who gives this to you? International Unity? IBM? Who manages the time shares?

The man laughed. You go to a computer store and buy one.

Buy one?

Sure. Lots of people have them. I mean, like, everybody has a computer these days, they just aren't all laptops.

Everybody? Michael felt his stomach lurch again. Tears threatened.

He stood up. His leg muscles screamed in pain. He lurched back to his seat. Sasha looked up at him.

Are you all right? she said.

Michael couldn't say anything. There's nothing they can possibly want, he thought. He was a prisoner. Nothing more. Not even a particularly valuable one. They'd put him away and forget about him, just like the men who nuked Mars' New Moscow. And maybe that was what he deserved.

After a time, he smelled something like food. Like the chickens they cooked at Christmas, actually. He'd tasted them once or twice, when his mother won the lottery to be at the head table.

A man came from the front of the plane, bearing plastic trays. He gave one each of them. Michael recognized green beans, chicken, and something that looked like bread. There was something else that was orange that he didn't recognize, and something that was crusty on the outside and red in the middle. It was the biggest meal he’d seen in his entire life.

Sorry about the food, Sasha said. It isn't much more than field rations.

Michael's anger flared. He clenched his fists. Apologizing for this feast. Apologizing for what anyone would kill for, back in New San Diego, or Phoenix-Under-Mars.

Michael stood, scattering the food. You monsters! Sons of bitches! We could live off your table-scraps, but you won't help us at all! Do you know how we live?

Sasha grabbed his arm. He twisted it out of her grasp. Do you know how we live? Do you know what I went through? To come here? Do you even care at all?

Michael, she said."

No! Shut up! You and your technology and your food! Fuel me up, send me back. I can't talk to you.

Michael . . .

But you won't do that. You'll just take me to your International Unity base and lock me away and give me a computer and feed me this food and forget about me. Because you're so perfect. You can't let anything interrupt that!

Michael felt light-headed. His heart hammered. He felt like he could rip the steel plates off the walls. He wanted to make the plane crash. He wanted it to end.

Sasha put a hand on his arm.

Don't touch me!

She gripped his wrists. He tried to pull them away. He wanted to claw her face.

There was a soggy snap, and pain shot up his right arm. Michael wailed and fell to the floor, his tortured leg muscles quivering. He tried to cover his face with his hands, and fresh pain seared his arm. Tears flowed freely.

Sasha knelt near him, and he felt her warm breath. Shit, she said. Get a medical kit. I broke his arm.

Michael held up his right hand. It dangled. He looked at it, not believing.

They helped him back to his seat. His anger was gone. He'd returned to that place where everything was at a distance. Nothing mattered. He watched, silent, as they splinted his wrist and wrapped it with clean fresh gauze. Everything was perfection. They had achieved Paradise in Their Place.

Take this, Sasha said, handing him a pill and a glass of water. For the pain.

They brought him another tray of food. He ate it all. It was better than any Christmas that he remembered. Fatigue collapsed on him, and he sat back in the seat. It was like a dream.

I'm sorry, Sasha said.

It's all right. Lock me away. Forget about me.

She shook her head. In his heavy-lidded gaze, she was more beautiful than any movie star.

You don't understand, she said.

Understand what?

But she just shook her head.

They had a new exhibit of Paradise-Themed Multimodals at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so of course Geoff Warburton had to attend. It was important to be seen. Especially when Ted Kennedy was there, mugging for the cameras and mumbling about their ambassador from the Red Planet. He'd never really forgiven Geoff for the 1996 elections. Will you make us a colony again? he'd asked, softly, after the results were in. As if an American was the only rightful President of the International Unity. As if the Revolutionary War wasn't two hundred years in the past.

Geoff shook his head. He didn't understand Americans. The International Unity was their idea, but they still groaned and sighed as if they were the only true state that mattered. They'd never vote for a Russian President, and the Russians would never vote for an American President. The last election, he was the safe choice, a Brit who wasn't too capitalist or too socialist, who was a believable figurehead for the world government.

Kennedy was across the room, looking at a piece that fused optical fibers and flickering displays with a soaring fiberglass sculpture. It glowed and flickered in shades of sky-blue and teal. He saw Geoff looking and gave a little wave, his white and perfect American teeth flashing.

You'll get your chance in 2002, Geoff thought.

When can we go? Natalie Warburton said. She was beautiful in a silver slip of a dress, still slim and elegant at forty-five. Her lips turned up in a faint smile, but her eyes were like glass, emotionless and unmoving.

Soon, Geoff said.

This is terrible, she said, talking to a painting of roses done in computer-controlled pigments that cascaded through a rainbow of colors. Blue, red, violet, white.

That's interesting. Geoff pointed at the sculpture by Ted Kennedy. If you squinted, you could almost imagine the shape of a man, reaching for the sky.

A little subversive.

How so?

I thought the message was, 'Perfect Ourselves First. Only Then Move On.'

Geoff frowned. She was right. A figure reaching for the sky, the color of the sky, suggested something . . . not quite right. He'd have to speak to the museum director. It wouldn't do for the art they were subsidizing to go off-message.

Still, there were some interesting pieces. Mechanical sunflowers that grew and reached towards a bright globe that represented the sun. A clockwork of 17th-century figures, spouting Victorian verse, symbolizing the juxtaposition of the human will and human nature. A bare white room that responded when someone entered, playing the sound of a happy brook through hidden speakers, while the walls hosted projections of clouds.

We have lost nothing of our genius, he thought. It has simply been transformed.

He led her past other pieces. Screen art showing perfect rainforests, pixel-count so high that it could have been a window. Three-dimensional projections that floated in a cloud in midair, where human forms so sleek and wonderful danced to unheard music. Rooms of nothing but aural sculptures, where you could close your eyes and be transported to an imaginary city where everyone spoke a different language, but no voices were raised in anger. A static sculpture of a London cab, lit from below by the video projection of a road. The driver was green-skinned. He had three eyes. He smiled back at his passengers, one of which was a dark-skinned man wearing a turban. The other was a pale-skinned woman with elven ears.

Natalie's purse chimed softly. She extracted a translucent blue pill and placed it in her mouth. Geoff smiled. That explained her outburst. She was just at the ragged edge of the Peacekeeper meds. She would relax now.

Yes. Natalie said.

Yes what?

Yes I'll stop irritating you soon.

If the medication bothers you, why do you take it? She could see the world as it was, just like him.

Silence. They walked to another exhibit. This one was a simple piece of video art showing an animation of a smiling face.

Then: It's better than the alternative.

There are other formulations.

Natalie chuckled. Geoff wished for the drugs to work.

Are you worried about the savage?

The savage?

The man from Mars.

Geoff frowned, hoping nobody had a directional mic pointed at him. He looked around. Everyone seemed to be engrossed with the art. Kennedy had disappeared. His security staff hovered, just within sight, pretending to ignore them.

I have to meet with him.

What will you tell him?

We've chosen our course. What can I say, other than that?

Natalie nodded. Better to kill him.

What?

Like an accident.

Natalie!

You could do it. Whoops, sorry, someone got in the hospital, plane went down—

I won't hear this!

Or you could shoot his ship out of orbit. No, wait . . . a long, slow smile.

Geoff grimaced. Decommissioning the last of the geosynchronous-orbit-capable rockets had been part of his platform. The message to the whole of Unity: we will concentrate on our problems here, nothing more. With Mars quiet for two decades, it had seemed like the right decision.

Geoff took her hand. We're leaving.

She smiled up at him, a dreamy perfect smile. I'm already gone, she said.

Michael slept for two days. Or at least that's what they told him when he awoke. The windows of his apartment showed massive skyscrapers. New people in severe gray suits said he was in New York. Sasha was not there.

I thought you were going to put me in a cell and forget me, Michael told them.

Get ready, they said, and gave him a blue-gray suit to wear.

Ready for what? he asked. But the people in gray would only repeat the order. They watched, wincing, as he dressed. The suit hung on him as if on a hanger.

He thought of asking about Sasha. But she'd probably asked to leave.

They took him down