He allowed himself a smile. It was a small plan, no more than a vague, ill-formed intention, but it was the first time in six months that he had entertained a desire of his own rather than being led along by his friends. He had something to look forward to: a reason to hope that the doors would treat him kindly. Perhaps that was all that it had taken: to be jolted out of his routines, forced to see the miracle of his own existence afresh.
He made a quiet pledge with himself. The next time he went through a door he would raise the threshold a little, just to balance the odds a little more in his favour.
“Where is she?” Tristan said, returning.
Sakura had taken his eye off the tournament. Feeling a giddy sort of elation, he handed Tristan back his glass and began to sweep the clouds, looking for the telltale glints of the fast-moving fliers. “I don’t know. Maybe they finished that heat.”
“No, they still had fifteen circuits left when I went indoors. Something’s off—they aren’t competing.” Tristan gave him a warning look, as if to say that he had trusted him with one thing, to keep watching the race, and Sakura had not even accomplished that one task. “Maybe they’re gathered at the far marker.”
They crossed to the other side of the observation deck, something of Sakura’s good humour already dissipating. Most of their friends and associates were already there, a carnival of anatomies pressing against the railings. Centaurs, sphinxes, seahorses (in liquid-filled excursion bubbles), winged angels, a person like a baby elephant with six legs, another like a large crab or spider, two lime-green mantises with cocktail glasses, a trio of severely minimalist geometric forms who relied on force-effectors for traction and manipulation. All were peering—or directing batteries of sensors—into the underlying cloudscape.
“They’re regrouping,” Sakura said, spotting a cloud of bustling, gyring glints near the other marker.
“I see Malec, but not Gedda.”
One of the geometric forms swivelled around with a stonelike grinding sound. A human face pushed out from a flat facet. “Gedda clipped the marker, Tristan. She buckled a wing and dropped hard. That’s not Malec either.”
“Malec’s gone deep,” chirred one of the mantises. “He’s trying to reach Gedda. But it gets thick and hot quickly down there.”
Tristan swallowed. “She’ll be all right.”
Footsteps thundered behind them. Sakura and Tristan turned in time to see a phalanx of black-skinned fliers dash to the railing, pouring over it like a tide. They dropped like arrows, keeping their wings tight to their bodies. Sakura tracked them until they had dropped below the level of the tournament, into denser clouds.
“Malec will reach her,” Tristan said, very softly. “And if he doesn’t, the rescue fliers will.”
“Why weren’t they already at altitude, ready for this?”
“Tournament rules,” said the seahorse. “High purse, but high risk too. It was one of the stipulations.”
“We should rebody, go after her,” Sakura said.
Tristan shook his head. “Have you any idea how long it takes to knit a pair of wings? We have to trust in Malec and the rescuers. There’s no other way.”
They waited. The clouds boiled below. A few of the other competitors went in pursuit of Gedda, but before very long they had returned to the tournament level, exhausted by the descent. Their bodies were highly optimised for flight at a particular altitude, and to go much deeper was a strain on their muscles and cardiovascular systems. They had to land on the buoys to recuperate, draped over them like a mass of weary bats.
The black-skinned rescuers came up soon after. They had gone a few kilometres deeper than any of the competitors, but they had also hit their limits, wing movements growing sluggish and uncoordinated. Tristan proposed calling for an excursion bubble, so that one or both of them could venture after Gedda. Before any arrangements could be made, though, Malec was already signalling back from the depths. He had turned back at six kilometres beneath the tournament level, far further than anyone else had made it.
“I saw her,” he reported, breathless and dispirited. “She was dropping much too quickly, three or four kilometres under me. It looked like she’d torn a whole wing off. I couldn’t get to her. I had to turn around just to make it back to the shallows.”
Nothing more needed to be added. Given the limits of her physiology, Gedda would have been dead by the time Malec gave up on her rescue.
Somewhere below she was still falling, approaching some dark equilibrium. But she could not be saved; she could not be restored.
A WEEK AFTER her death, Sakura and Tristan were at a door in Europa. They had doored once since Jupiter, and only as far as this nearby moon and its lulling ocean. It had been at Sakura’s insistence. He could no longer tolerate the sight of those swallowing clouds.
There were many doors in Europa, but the majority were built into castles of spiralling ice, daggering down from the ocean crust. Sakura and Tristan had picked one of the more out-of-the-way doors for their farewell.
“You only have to stay another six months,” Tristan chirped, steadying himself with a flick of his tail. “Is that so hard? You don’t even have to go through another body. We can attend the memorial in excursion bubbles.”
In the event of her death, Gedda had stipulated a six-month delay between the time of her passing and any memorial service that her friends might care to arrange. It was a custom among competitive fliers, one that gave sufficient time for interested parties to converge from across the Adaptasporic Realm, as well as permitting the rescheduling of other tournaments. Such arrangements were not uncommon—no more so than death itself, at least—and Sakura knew that he had probably lodged a similar condition with his own executor at some point. But like so much else, the exact details had been lost in one of his winnowings.
“I have to go,” he said, repeating the elements of a conversation they had been through a dozen times in that week. “I don’t trust myself, Tristan. If I stay here, with you—with our other friends—I’ll lose the nerve.”
“You really mean to go through with this?”
“I’m settled in my choice.”
Tristan cast a dispirited look at the door. “We were better off not interfering. If Gedda and I hadn’t tried to shake you out of that rut... damn it all, Sakura. I thought one in a thousand was bad enough. How far have you taken it now?”
“One in ten. The lowest threshold the door will accept.”
“I’ll knit you a pistol with a revolving chamber and a bullet. At least you’d be honest about what you’re doing to yourself.”
“I am honest. But don’t blame yourselves. If it’s any consolation, you had begun to change my mind.”
Tristan chirped a mirthless laugh. “Begun.”
“But then Gedda changed it back. She didn’t mean to, of course, but there’s nothing like a stupid, accidental death to remind you of the supreme futility of everything.”
Tristan extended a flipper, touching the limit of Sakura’s own. “I’ve lost one good friend this week. Don’t leave me all on my own. I’m begging you, Sakura. For me, if not for yourself. Leave that threshold at one in a thousand if you must, but not this low.”
“I’ll door twice between now and the ceremony. Odds are that I’ll still be around.”
Sakura flicked his tail, preparing to swim into the door.
“No,” Tristan said, with a sudden forcefulness. “No. Not this time. You’ll hate me for this, but I have to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Naomi Cheng.”
Sakura was silent. They were words that connected together to make a name, a human name, and they struck within him like some huge, soundless submarine gong.
Memories loosened, unspooled. Things that he had forgotten—things he had forgotten he had ever known—were uncoiling into daylight.
“What have you done to me?” Sakura asked.
“A terrible thing,” Tristan said. “Something a friend would never do to another
friend. But you’ve pushed me to it, Sakura. If it was the only way to save you, it needed to be done. You’d never run an audit on yourself, and I could never do it for you. But Indigo could. It’s why I took you to the Luminal Minds—that ambassadorial stuff was just a ruse. So that Indigo could crack you open like an egg, and sift through the memories you don’t even know are still in your head. That’s how winnowing works, you know. It severs the connections to memories, but the structures are still in place. And sometimes all it takes is a name, a single name, to unlock them.”
Sakura was still awestruck. Awestruck, gong-struck, horror-struck. “Who was she?”
“You know, my friend. You’ve known all along. She’s the one in your paintings. The watcher.”
“That doesn’t answer...”
“There were two of you,” Tristan answered, with a desperate calm, as if Sakura had a knife to his throat. “On a ship. A very primitive ship, sent out only a couple of hundred years into the spacefaring era. It crashed on Mercury.”
Some faint thing prickled his nose. Flashes of memory. A buckled hull, the feeling of life support modules under his hand, the prickle of sweat on his skin.
“The smell of my brushes. The solvent I had to use on Titan.”
“Liquid ammonia,” Tristan said. “Leaking out of the refrigeration circuit of your crashed ship.”
Sakura closed his eyes, permitting himself a moment of introspection. He thought of the smell, the charge of sadness it had carried with it. Sadness and something else he now understood. The burden of a solemn promise, carried across centuries, but which he had allowed himself to neglect.
“What did I do?”
“You lived. It’s that simple. Only one of you stood any sort of chance of surviving long enough for rescue, and you drew straws. Naomi administered an overdose from the medical rations, killing herself so that you might survive. You’d have done exactly the same thing, but that doesn’t alter the fact that you were the one who got to live, and that you made a commitment to Naomi. Do you remember it?”
The ship, the smells, the memory of her body, welled back into him. Naomi Cheng, lying on her side, black hair sprayed out around the base of her neck, her face to the fogged oval of a window, the blaze of Mercury beyond.
“I said I’d live for the two of us,” Sakura answered. “I said I’d carry her life within my own, that I’d see and do all the things she couldn’t. That I’d never stop living, never stop remembering, never stop being grateful for the gift she gave.”
“And yet you let it slip.”
“I never meant to. There were just too many centuries, too many memories. Somewhere along the way I dropped the thread. I forgot Naomi.”
“You didn’t,” Tristan said, moving to drift him away from the door. “Not really. You carried her inside you, and you lived up to that vow. Now all you have to do is hold to it.” He paused. “I shouldn’t have done it, Sakura. Violating the sanctity of another person’s memories goes beyond any bond of friendship. I expect you to hate me for it, and in truth I don’t blame you. But if that’s what it takes for you to reconsider, I consider it a price worth paying.”
Sakura freed himself from Tristan’s gentle embrace. “You’d lose a friendship rather than lose me?”
“If I’d thought there was any other way.” Tristan averted his eyes. “I’m going now. I’ll let you go through that door on your own, and I won’t wait to see if you change the threshold. But in six months I’ll be back to honour our friend, and if her life meant anything to you—and I know it did—then I expect to see you there.” He dipped his beak. “Hope, I should say. I hope to see you there.”
Tristan swung around and began to swim off into the blue murk of the Europan ocean. His tail left a backwash that quickly faded into stillness. Stillness and silence. Sakura waited a decent interval, alone in his palace of ice, and then turned back to the door, his mind made up.
SWEAR NOT BY THE MOON
SEANAN MCGUIRE
IN THE LAST decades of the Terrestrial Age, when humanity had figured out how to leave the planet of their birth but not quite why they’d want to bother, the majority of the world’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of very few. This was not, in and of itself, remarkable: this pattern had repeated, over and over again, throughout human history. Whenever a civilization stood upon the verge of transformation, its riches about to be transformed through the alchemy of achievement into something casual and commonplace, there were always those who reacted to the uncertainty of the times by grabbing for everything they could hold, and then some. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the newest incarnation of robber barons and oligarchs stood tall, believing they had finally found a legacy on which the sun would never set.
In time, of course, they died, many with their fortunes still intact, thrusting their descendants into boardrooms and onto committees, startled shareholders who had, in many cases, bought into the fiction that told them they would never inherit, for theirs were the parents who would find a way to live forever, who would learn the secret routing numbers and hidden bank accounts that would allow them to buy themselves free of death. Fearing insurrection from within—for those who would be eternal kings observed the ways of succession—many of their dearly departed parents had refused to do anything to prepare their children for the world outside their carefully guarded gates. Those children had been allowed the protracted adolescence so many of their contemporaries had never been able to afford, and so found themselves in their twenties, thirties, forties, with more money than the mind could comprehend and less experience than the average eighteen-year-old.
Some of them were brutish and cruel, emulating the only role models they had ever had available to them. They spent their money on making more money, and because they had so much to begin with, even failure too frequently bore fruit. They perched like ticks atop the shuddering corpse of the Earth, contributing nothing, amplifying pain.
Some of them were idealistic and hopeful, so shielded from the pain of the world that when they had the chance to choose kindness, they chose it with both hands, opening and emptying their purses for as long as their accountants would allow. They built roads and hospitals and schools; they purchased and reclaimed land for wildlife conservation. They still saw promise in the planet of their birth, and they pursued it, spoiled sweet instead of rotten.
And some were the eternal children their parents had wanted them to be, looking for bigger, better toys, bigger, better entertainments. They bought movie studios and fashion houses, publishers and toy companies and a thousand other ways to distract themselves.
One of them, a woman-child named Wendy May, looked to the sky, and imagined she could see the twinkling beacon of the biggest, best, brightest toy of all.
Her father had been one of the best robber barons of his age, had gathered and hoarded his money with the fervor of a modern Midas, an unrepentant Scrooge. He had filled accounts and ledgers with his riches, and upon his death at the age of sixty-five—unexpected, unavoidable; had there been any warning of the massive aneurysm which claimed him, he would have found a way to push it aside—he had left them all to his only child. Wendy had been raised in a shell of perfect indulgence, catered to by nannies, personal assistants, and paid companions who were distinguished in her mind from “normal” friends only in that they could make a living out of traveling with her, following her to parties, and living their lives as an adventure. She wanted adventures. She wanted adventures for everyone.
When Miss Wendy May, age thirty-seven, decided that what she wanted most of all, more than anything else in the known galaxy, was one of Saturn’s moons, she set her army of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to acquiring it for her. She didn’t know what most of those people did, only that they did their jobs efficiently and well and got her the results she asked for, as long as she worded her requests clearly and with little room for interpretation. They were her personal djinn, and she allowed them the freedom they needed to do what she wan
ted done.
They secured air rights and mineral rights and land rights and a dozen other rights from a dozen governments, until one day the world blinked its collective eyes and discovered that somehow, without concealing her intentions in the slightest, a private citizen had secured sole ownership of Titan, largest of Saturn’s moons.
How could this happen? the public demanded; the sky was meant to belong to everyone. Corporations, thinking of mineral rights and mining and the virtues of being the sole owners of a planetary body, threw their support behind Miss May. Governments, trying to conceal their involvement with what may well have been an illegal sale—there had been so many moving parts that no one really knew for sure, and that had been part of the plan all along—stated that the paperwork was good.
Miss May, in the single surviving interview from her post-purchase, pre-orbit period, smiled when asked about her intentions for Titan. It was a large piece of real estate, after all, considerably larger than Earth’s single natural satellite, but it lacked certain amenities, like an atmosphere. It was the ultimate in useless accessories, too large to be ornamental, too ostentatious to be concealed.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”
“COME ON, DAD, come on come on come on.” Each plea was accompanied by another tug on Michael’s hand, his daughter pulling hard enough that it felt like she was trying to remove his fingers completely.
Naturally, he slowed down, allowing the artificial gravity of the parking structure—almost Earth-standard, for the comfort of the widest possible range of patrons—to anchor his heels to the ferroglass floor. Isla squawked and pulled harder on his hand, bouncing on her heels, trying to force him to follow.
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