“I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Van Deesen had been saying this, again and again, under his breath, for the last twenty minutes, and Lopez was frankly tired of it. This was the problem with rich kids, she thought. One real problem, one real problem, and they all go to pot.

Unfortunately Van Deesen had now turned to her. “What are we going to do? We can’t do anything,” he bleated at her. “We’re going to lose our jobs! If we’re lucky!”

She waved idly behind her at the holographic readout – a flatscreen would have done, really, but the station funders wanted a three-dimensional representation of all weather in what they were supposed to call “the Idyll” but which she always pronounced, in her head, as “Idle.” It impressed stockholders when they came by on tours to see the climanipulation team dramatically gesturing across the “sky” like they were the Hand of God and then imaging the accelerated-time result. (The gestures, frankly, were a pain and everybody just preferred to use buttons instead.)

The readout showed exactly what it should show: sun-dappled clouds, not so many clouds as to be threatening but enough that they would provide contrast in the sky and cut down on glare. In the eastern half, where the sun was beginning to set, the clouds were gathering more intensely. It was Thursday, and Thursday meant the twice-weekly heavy shower (for five hours, from 1 AM to 6 AM) that meant nobody had to water their lawn. It all looked perfectly normal.

“This isn’t normal!” God, but Van Deesen was giving her a headache. And of course he was right. Those clouds were gathering three hours ahead of schedule – three hours before they were even scheduled to flip many switches and commence the evening’s electrostatic cloudseeding, creating rain-on-demand, the type of rain the network’s customers demanded: as much as needed and nothing that interfered with their day-to-day business. This wasn’t even the four-times-yearly scheduled daylight rain (“Jump In Puddles! Dash Between Those Drops!”). No, this was unscheduled rain. And probably someone was going to get fired for it. Ideally, Van Deesen.

“Look, Sheldon, it’s pretty straightforward.” She shrugged. “Do you remember studying feedback theory in your climanipulation classes?” She went on before he would have a chance to start improvising an explanation as to why he didn’t. “It’s your classic Dessikan feedback loop. You can’t completely control weather; it’s too expensive a proposition -”

“Yeah, I know, hence the Idyll, where we can control it, and hence it costing extra to live here.” Van Deesen snapped off the words like someone who had never been outside the Idyll. Probably he never had. “But this isn’t being forced from the exterior. The nullification zone is empty all around the Idyll – twenty kilometers every way of nothing but clear skies.” Van Deesen’s voice was growing accusatory. Not towards her – that would be stupid even for him – but towards the weather. It was odd to realize that, but Lopez knew it to be true.

She sighed. “I’m not saying it’s being forced from the exterior. It doesn’t have to be, you know.” She said “exterior” almost neutrally and was proud of it. Nobody would know, looking at her, that she was a gushtown brat who grew up under a metal roof – a roof that was so loud from the constant pounding of rain that she could sleep through damn near anything nowadays. When her uncle had smuggled her into the Idyll at the age of nine, he’d had to take her to the doctors to get a cochlear matrix implanted in each ear; she had been damn near deafened. Her mother hadn’t been able to afford the good earplugs. “Go back and read your Dessikan. It’s pretty straightforward: he predicted that the inevitable result of atmospheric static manipulation was stratospheric collection of water vapour, which would eventually descend and create a superstorm. It’s pretty basic math. We all read it.”

Van Deesen rubbed his temples. “But it wasn’t supposed to happen for years! We’re going to get blamed, Kace! It doesn’t matter if we say it’s math, all that matters is the suits all thought it wasn’t going to happen for another twenty-two years. Who do you think they take it out on?”

Lopez shrugged again. It was amazing to her that Van Deesen hadn’t figured out the full ramifications of what was happening. “I think they’ll have more to worry about, frankly. Have you looked at where that storm is coalescing?” She tapped her oplet gently and the holographic display zoomed in. “I’m pretty sure that storm is going to take out the static wall generators in 7B, and when that happens… well.”

Van Deesen started freaking out at that point, but Lopez was no longer paying attention. She turned to the window and looked out at the perfect horizon, at the sun setting on exactly enough cloud cover to create dazzling pinks and scarlets (this was color arrangement 479, and like all the others it was copyrighted). It was glorious and it was bought and it was paid for, and she imagined how beyond it, over the horizon a hundred miles away, she could see in her mind the permanent storm that the people here had forced on everybody else (because after all who was going to make them pay for your weather?), held at bay by a long row of poles and towers emitting targeted static and plasma discharges, and how each of those poles was interdependent on the others, and how the generators weren’t ready to handle the ravages of a proper superstorm. How it all depended on the universal consent to have every day be beautiful. She wondered if any of them had ever considered what might happened if someone didn’t consent.

She thought about her mother’s face, completely smooth even into her late forties when she died of the pneumo, smooth like everybody’s faces were in the gushtowns because wrinkles simply wore away in the day-to-day. She wondered how Van Deesen’s face would look after a few years of rain, and how the suits would look after they realized this storm wasn’t a one-off occurrence but that in fact their remaining twenty-two years of profits were gone, had never really existed in the first place.

And as she looked out onto the horizon, she realized that she was thinking how good it would be to have weather just like she had done when she was a kid.

M.M. (it’s short for “Mo’ Money,” which his friends called him – far better than his birth name of Marvin, anyway) sits back on his thin prison bed in the dark and looks up at the top bunk. He’s new fish here in Cordell Maximum Security Penitentiary, and though he thinks he could probably take Rich Clay – the big-ass biker doing a dime for trafficking heroin, currently farting in his sleep in the top bunk – if he had to, he figures it’s best not to bother. Rich looks tough enough, but in their first day he hasn’t been mean. No sense in looking for trouble. Clay (“call me Clay when you gotta call me anythin'”) laid it out, straight and respectful, when M.M. entered the cell with his week’s worth of blues and fresh sheets.

“You got your bunk, I got my bunk, I’m not one for conversatin’ with niggers much, but I ain’t got anythin’ against you people pers’nally, don’t get me wrong, not Klan or shit like that. I just wanna be left alone. If you can do that, we’ll get along fine. Dig?” M.M. dug. So he sits on the bottom bunk, telling himself eventually he’ll get used to Clay’s farts, and thinking ahead.

M.M. is doing fifteen to twenty for manslaughter. It’s fair enough, he figures. He shot Li’l Bobby in the head, after all. Li’l Bobby had called down the thunder on Peso’s boys some three months beforehand, and although M.M. didn’t have any personal stake in whether Peso lived or died (really, Peso was kind of an asshole), he was on payroll – and so were Coyote (who pronounced it “Cuh-yoat”) and Stevie G., who were like his brothers. He’d known them since he was maybe five, and they’d grown up together, gone to school together, dropped out together, and Li’l Bobby’s boys had shot them dead and didn’t even get five-oh on them for the trouble, much less Li’l Bobby. So M.M. took care of business, and his lawyer pled him down to manslaughter because the D.A. at the end of the day just figured one more banger off the street was all they wanted and they’d gotten two (counting Li’l Bobby), so make it easy. And that’s why M.M is looking at prison until he’s forty-one.

At least he doesn’t have kids, right?

He’s come in prepared, of course. Near a thousand dollars stuffed up his ass in a Baggie, plus a C to the search guards before he went in to make sure he wasn’t searched too close. So he has money. It’s not a twenty-year supply of money (fifteen, he reminds himself again silently, don’t make waves and you’ll be out in fifteen, you’ll only be thirty-six, maybe you can get out even a few years earlier, maybe), but it’s there for emergencies. He doesn’t do drugs or gamble, so he doesn’t have much to spend it on. When he was outside he mostly played XBox for fun, but it’s not like you can buy an XBox in prison. The thousand is his stay-alive fund.

Mostly M.M. is thinking about the next fifteen years. He’s never been much of a reader, but he’s never had any trouble reading, really. XBox was just more fun. But you got to make the time pass somehow, and people mostly don’t get stabbed in the library (so he hears – he’s not entirely correct on this point, but in the broad strokes he’s right to think that the library is generally safer than the exercise yard). Mostly he’s thinking about what could happen if he gets his GED while he’s in here. Maybe even take some correspondence courses – sure, maybe nobody hires him when he gets out, but maybe they do, and what else does he have but time? Thirty-six (forty-one) is too old to be banging anyway.

Mostly he’s thinking about what happens if somebody tries to rape him. He’s not so much scared of the actual rape (he’s lying to himself, he’s terrified about it) but dealing with it, that’s the thing. He could shiv somebody if they tried it, but then say goodbye to fifteen and hello to twenty (or much more, even, if they tack assault or homicide onto his sentence, if he gets caught, and he assumes it’s more than likely he would). Is it better to just lie back and take it and look in the mirror the next morning? He’s not sure. He just doesn’t want to be in the position coming from one cell over, where somebody is whimpering “no, please” over and over again, under their breath. Clay doesn’t seem like a candidate to go that route, but you never know.

Much later than he would like, he closes his eyes.

—

The next morning, after breakfast, he sees his first prison murder. Exercise yard, of course. A pair of bangers (nobody he knows) walk up to this skinny-looking Italian and just do him quick – two stabs and walk on. Very clean, very quick. He’s impressed and horrified by them walking away like it was nothing. When he was done with Li’l Bobby he had to throw up after, he was so angry and scared. Maybe the bangers are vets at this sort of thing. He starts doing mental math in his head about social dynamics – are these bangers potential allies, and if so, does he benefit more by joining up or keeping his distance? He knows how gangs work in prison and he knows lone wolves get picked off, but gangs are also targets.

He wishes he knew more when he notices something – the Italian’s pinky ring. Mafioso, then? Or a wannabe? And then he sees something else – a silver cross on a chain. It was ripped off the guy’s neck when they killed him. He can see from here it’s real silver – he’s always had a good eye for jewelry and the like – and does a little more mental math. All of this goes through his head in maybe five seconds.

Then he’s walking, very quickly, over to the already-dead Italian, acting concerned and calling for a guard – and he sweeps the cross and chain up into his hand and then his pocket.

—

“Why would you do this? We don’t take in niggers.”

The man saying that is Donnie “Noose” Nucci. Old-school gangster, in for first-degree murder, probably did at least two dozen they could never pin on him. He’s in his fifties, hair and pencil-thin moustache going grey, not an ounce of fat on him. He’s in charge of the Mob inside Cordell, and he’s reading – or at least pretending to read – Of Mice and Men. M.M. saw the movie of it with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich and wonders if the book is any good. He liked the movie. In the Noose’s spare hand is the silver cross and chain. It’s taken M.M. a week to find out the lay of the land, find out how to approach him (and more importantly, find out all of this without anybody finding out he was finding out).

M.M. is quite sure the Noose could kill him twice over before M.M. could make a move, despite the three decades’ difference in age.

“Not looking to be taken in. I saw that it was real silver. That’s worth something. Coulda sold it, maybe, but figured it was worth more giving it back to you. Maybe he got family who want it.” Playing it humble. Best chance for a positive outcome.

The Noose snorts. “You want money or something for this?”

“No.” He has already decided that, although he wants the Noose to think M.M. respects him – which he does – he is not calling this man sir. Any chance of that ended the first time Noose called him a nigger. “I’m not looking to be owed anything for this, if you follow. I just wanna be sure in advance that you know where I stand.”

The Noose was looking at him keenly through that sentence, and continues the look silently for some time after. M.M. knows the gangster is trying to make him feel uncomfortable. It’s not working, and he looks back at Nucci – not insolently, just even and calm like an ocean (he has never seen an ocean). He knows he’s being sized up, and that’s fine by him. He already pled guilty. He has very little to hide.

Finally the Noose tosses him the cross back. “Tell you what. You can keep it. Probably shouldn’t wear it during the day, though. They’re kind of a calling card.” M.M. at that moment identifies the brief flash of light he saw when he first approached Nucci as a silver chain, mostly hidden beneath the mobster’s prison blues. “Call it a thank-you, if you like. A reward, even. It’s valuable.”

M.M. figures it at maybe a hundred, hundred-fifty tops, but he’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “If you’re sure you wanna do that, then I’ll thank you in return.” A pause. “Can I ask why your friend got done?”

Noose shrugs. “We have a lot of enemies here. Everybody does, you included. Keep frosty.” He turns back to his book. The conversation is over. Nucci has not even once asked for his name. M.M. strongly suspects that Nucci thinks knowing his name is a waste of time, and that bothers him – not so much for the blow to his ego, but rather because it implies that Nucci thinks he’s not around for the long haul.

He sighs to himself. He’s going to need a weapon, looks like. And soon.

—

When he heads back to his cell when free time’s over, he sees that the cell next door is half-empty. When he went in yesterday he saw a big, burly black man and a small Latino who looked like a weasel. Now, there’s only the Latino, a nervous-looking motherfucker named Javier. Javier’s eyes bulge a bit as they chat (which means Javier talks a streak and M.M. occasionally asks a question). He’s pale for a Latino, M.M. thinks. Maybe he doesn’t get enough sun.

“Yeah, man, heart attack, it was a fuckin’ heart attack, that’s what it was, poor Cal. We weren’t fags for each other or nothin’, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t going fag for nobody (well, maybe Channing Tatum, but that motherfucker’s pretty like a girl, know what I mean, and you better believe if I had to go fag I’d be pitching, right?) but Cal was a good enough dude to bunk with. He just up and died, you know? Heart attack. He was only thirty-eight! Blessed be but there I go, know what I mean? Fuck, at least he went in his sleep. Maybe we can hope he was dreamin’ of pussy, right? Pussy out in the great wide open, yeah.”

But the noises M.M. wants to say, and then stops. If it had been Cal buttfucking Javier, that would make sense. But Javier’s denials aside, he’s not giving a vibe that speaks consensual partnership to M.M, and although the idea of this five-nothing squirt of Latino Peat raping big Cal is ludicrous to M.M., even if he thought it was possible (and he doesn’t – Javier’s too fucking tense) Javier’s not giving that vibe either.

Maybe Cal was talking in his sleep while he had the heart attack. Maybe he was trying to call for help and he couldn’t. M.M. doesn’t know a lot about heart attacks, but in movies when someone has a heart attack they always get real quiet and try to call out but they can’t. Maybe that’s what happened to Cal? It’s as good a theory as any, and it makes sense. He’s satisfied with it. He goes into his cell. Before he forgets, he cuts a small hole in his mattress at the head of his bed and stuffs the silver cross in it. It should be safe there, and if it isn’t with his money (stuffed into a fresh baggie and stuck to the underside of the sink, safely out of sight, with chewing gum), it’ll be an extra cash reserve if he needs it.

—

Later that night, trying to relearn being used to Clay’s sleep-farts (and starting to recognize that he will never, ever entirely get used to them), M.M. nearly sits bolt upright when he hears the scream. It’s Javier. That’s obvious to him. Javier is screaming bloody murder.

“YOU KEEP AWAY FROM ME! YOU KEEP AWAY! OH YOU -” and that’s the last intelligible words Javier screams. This isn’t to say that he stops screaming. He just keeps screaming, again and again, and he’s clearly in pain. At least M.M. thinks he is.

After a few seconds other voices come from down the cell block. Nothing terribly sympathetic. “SHUT THE FUCK UP, SPIC, WE’RE TRYNNA SLEEP” is about as sympathetic as it gets. “TELL YOUR MOM NOT TO BITE DOWN WHEN SHE SUCKS YOUR COCK, I BET THAT’S THE PROBLEM” is more elaborate. “GRIN AND BEAR IT, FUCK” is a fairly common sentiment. “OOOH IDDUMS HAVIN A NIGHTMARE” is screamed by one high-pitched voice who seems gleeful to be screaming it. And then they all start calling for the guards because they all want to sleep.

Most of these cons don’t know that Javier was in there alone. M.M. does; they dragged Cal’s body out this morning and Javier has no new bunkmate yet, not the same day – even prisons aren’t that crowded. Which means the guards must’ve gotten bribed to let somebody in there. He’s sure he heard the sounds of a fight in there while Javier was screaming. Bad scene, and it just reinforces the need for a weapon.

Eventually Javier’s screams dwindle down to nothing, and he’s silent. Either beaten unconscious or dead. Either way, there’s nothing more M.M. can do. Clay’s already snoring again, having only woken up briefly to yell for a guard to come like everyone else. M.M. settles down into bed and eventually drifts off, but as he does he thinks to himself, while he’s almost falling asleep – I’m not hearing any guards coming.

—

The next morning, M.M. wakes up early. He wants to know what’s happened to Javier before he has breakfast and goes on work detail. Partially it’s concern for Javier, who is one of the few people so far in Cordell that he knows by name. Partially it’s because he wants to know what happened, if it affects him. And of course, partially it’s because he’s been here a week now and prison routine is boring as fuck and anything that stimulates your mind is welcome, particularly if it’s something happening to other people rather than you.

He’s already got a peeking-mirror built so he can look out of his cell, and that is how he comes to see Javier being wheeled out of there on a stretcher. The little man is paler, even, than he was. And not breathing. And – and this is most curious – not marked. There is not so much as a scratch on the man who, last night, screamed like he was being set on fire.

Nobody else is paying attention to this, M.M. realizes as he looks around the cells opposite – they’re shooting the shit, paying up owed smokes and Honey Buns from late-night gambling (competitive Twenty Questions is a popular way to kill time after lights out, although you have to write down your answer first so there’s no disagreement about lying). This is prison. You watch your own ass and Javier dying is Javier’s problem, not anybody else’s. M.M. knows he should adopt that philosophy already – and in truth he mostly has, because his concern about Javier’s death is more, if he was being honest, sort of a case study than any interest in Javier’s welfare. This little Latino dude is dead and he died badly. How do I prevent that from happening to me? Because that’s the real bottom line here. M.M. doesn’t wish anybody bad – he used all that up on Li’l Bobby – but this is prison, and you don’t get by in prison by playing nice.

He’s weighing options in his mind now. (Although M.M. would not recognize this without being told, he was always far and away the most intelligent of his boys, and in a few years probably would have been able to replace Peso and do the job better than Peso ever did.) No marks on Javier that he could easily see, but he can think of a few ways they could kill him. Strangling, maybe. He didn’t get a good look at Javier’s neck. Or maybe they broke his neck, and then twisted it back into place? Is that possible? He thinks he saw it on TV once, but that’s TV, that doesn’t count nohow.

And he’s also wondering if cons did it, or guards. Guards would have to let cons in anyway, so guards were involved somehow. But why would guards want to kill Javier? Cons make more sense, but it’s also more complicated – he figures guards gotta let the cons out, escort them there, and then wait around in the cell for the cons to kill Javier? The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks it had to be a guards-only job. Cons might have arranged it, sure – he can’t think of a single reason offhand, but he didn’t know Javier that well except that the man would run his mouth like fucking crazy, and that can get a man in trouble real easy.

But there’s still too many questions, and worse, questions he can’t easily answer without raising questions.

—

A couple weeks later, on work detail, he’s hefting laundry into the industrial washing machine when the Noose, flanked by two big Italians, walks up to him. Nucci is important enough and connected enough that he doesn’t ever really have to do work detail, so the fact that he’s here is not good. M.M. immediately stuffs his last handful of sheets into the washer and turns to face them.

“Hey. How can I help you?”

“What makes you think I want your help?” The Noose’s voice is cool. It’s obviously a test.

“You ain’t down here for no ambience, I don’t think.”

“Good one.” Nucci doesn’t smile. “I actually wanted to pick your brain for a bit. About that thing with Espina.”

“Who?”

“The little Spic who fucking keeled over in the cell next to you. I know you knew him, Ace. Don’t bullshit me.”

“Ain’t bullshitting.” M.M. lifts another load of sheets into the washer so guards don’t give him shit for slacking. “Didn’t know his last name offhand. His first name was Javier. If in full he’s Javier Espina, sure thing.”

The response earns a noncommittal shrug. “Fair enough. What did you know about our boy Javier and what happened to him?”

“Not much. He didn’t give no sign that he was in the shit, if that’s what you’re asking. Last conversation we had was about his bunkmate havin’ a heart attack. In terms of him going down? I think guards did it. Dunno why or who paid ’em.” That earns a glittering stare from the Noose and a request for a brief explanation, which M.M. provides. At the end of it, the mobster nods, satisfied, and without a further word he turns away and leaves.

M.M. knows when he’s been pumped for information, but Nucci didn’t ask follow-up questions – that means he got everything he needed in the brief talk. Which means, probably, that Nucci knew it already. This wasn’t a trying-to-find-shit-out talk. This was a tell-me-my-suspicions-are-correct talk. Which is probably more dangerous, because if Nucci knows something and M.M. is on the radar in some way, that means he can be set up.

He needs to know what’s going on, and quickly. It takes a great deal of self-control not to reach down to the shiv in his pocket (a spoon with a sharpened handle, which cost him fifty dollars) and touch it just for the sake of comfort.

—

Two nights later M.M. wakes up. He was having a nightmare where Stevie B and Coyote were driving with him, Timbaland blaring out the speakers. He turned to look at some pretty girls, but when he turned back to tell his boys about them, they were looking at him, bullet holes riddling their faces. Coyote had three, one in the forehead and one in each cheek, and his left eye was exploded. Stevie B’s jaw was hanging loose, torn away from his face, one end dangling off. Coyote had said, air whistling through his cheek-holes as he spoke, that M.M. hadn’t done enough, what about their mamas, who was going to look after their mamas, and they reached for him, and that was when M.M.’s eyes popped open.

He always had a fast reaction time – that was in part how he dropped in time to avoid the initial driveby that popped Coyote, how he rolled away from that Honda he and Stevie had ducked behind in time to avoid the followup of Li’l Bobby’s thugs running around the car to spray Stevie and three other of Peso’s boys with lead – and it is this reaction time that saves his life now, because before he can exhale in panic from his nightmare (part of him still thinking that it made no sense, both Coyote and Stevie’s mamas were dead – much later on he would realize he was conflating survivor’s guilt with his guilt that he would not be around to support his mother and his two little sisters, but this was no comfort to him now) he sees two guards standing right next to his bunk.

They’re not here for him. That’s obvious. They’re here for Clay. Clay is making tiny distressed sounds, but other than that, nothing, not even the sound of breath. As he notices that, he realizes he is holding his breath, and so begins exhaling slowly, trying to mimic the sounds of sleep. He doesn’t know yet why he is so terrified, but he is.

Finally, the guards step back a bit. M.M. does not dare move. Whatever their reason for being here, it’s definitely not legit, and he cannot afford to be a witness. He still has fourteen years and a little more than eleven months. Getting short, he suddenly thinks, his sense of humour asserting itself at the oddest time. And so he lies, silent and still, and he waits and he waits, and he knows he’s not breathing enough air to stay properly awake, he remembers from somewhere that you breathe less when you sleep and that you make yourself can go to sleep if you breathe slow enough. But he has to stay awake. He has to stay awake, and it is fear keeping him alert even as he gets less and less oxygen.

One guard breaks the silence. “Had enough?”

“Yeah. We got to get another riot going sometime, though. That was the best. Infirmary was full up for weeks.”

“We can’t do those too often. We had one only nine months ago, remember? More than one every couple years is pushing it.”

“I just hate coming down here. You do too.”

“Better than a kick in the ass, my friend. Besides, this happy asshole should do for at least another night. Maybe two. He’s been going a week now. Always like it when we get a big boy.”

“True enough. Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.” And they leave. The cell door slides shut behind them. M.M. wants to exhale sharply, he wants to breathe hard so badly he’s almost seeing stars – but he makes himself wait another two minutes, counting one Mississippi two Mississippi until he gets to one hundred and twenty Mississippis, and only then does he gasp for the air his body needs, he breathes so hard he almost chokes on air and he didn’t even think that was possible.

He breathes hard and makes himself wait another ten minutes before very, very cautiously getting out of his bunk.

Clay looks fine. He looks like he’s sleeping like the dead, sure – no, not like the dead, just sleeping – but his chest is rising and falling like you’d expect and there’s not a mark on him, not anywhere. M.M. wants to poke him and wake him up, and damn the consequences, but settles for whispering at him.

“Clay? You hear that, man?”

No response. Clay doesn’t even shift in his sleep or mutter a mumbled “fuck off.” That man is out cold. So M.M. lies back down and tries breathing slowly to force himself back to sleep. It doesn’t work this time. He can’t make himself do it. And indeed, he doesn’t sleep for another few hours, until he’s too tired and part of his brain mercifully says “look, we need at least another few hours if we’re gonna be any good tomorrow, okay?” and he shuts down.

—

The next morning – with Clay complaining, as he wakes, that he wishes they had the option for an extra-large breakfast every once in a while – M.M. goes in search of the Noose, and once again finds him in the library, as he suspected he would. This time Nucci is reading something by Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby. The Noose nods at him when he approaches. He doesn’t look surprised.

“You know what? Growin’ up, I thought all these dead writers were just shit, but turns out they’re really good. Not easy to read, but in here you got the time to put to it. You should read these books. Improve your mind, learn that all the shit you thought was new is in fact just the same old shit these guys invented. Not that I’m sayin’ you’re dumb. Just sayin’ there’s always another step up you can take, if you get my gist.” Nucci closes the book. “So whaddya want, Lincoln?”

“Nobody who ain’t official calls me by my last name, Mr. Nucci. You can call me M.M., if you like.” He sits down at Nucci’s table. “Do you know what the fuck is going on here?”

That gets a smile. Dark, but not mean. Not too mean, anyway. This is prison, after all. “Finally, he asks. I figured you’d come sooner. But you’re a patient one, aincha? You want to crack the code for yourself. I get that. Your bunkie’s looking kinda sick lately, ain’t he?” If the Noose realizes that would be a non-sequitur under other circumstances – but obviously not here – he doesn’t show it. “And here you are feelin’ around in the dark, lookin’ for the proverbial light switch, I suppose.”

“You could say that.” He keeps his voice even, but he’s pissed. Nucci’s playing with him now? What the fuck?

“I’ll be blunt with you, kid. I can help you, maybe, a bit. But not now. Frankly, it’s hard for me to help you at all, mostly because of you being a nigger. It’s not done, capisce?” He scratches at his pencil-thin moustache. “But if you play your cards right, maybe I can help you a little. Tomorrow or the day after. Don’t get me wrong, we ain’t galpals all of a sudden. The Antones want me to keep their boys solid in here and I do it, and it means I get to fuck my wife on conjugal once a month despite the double life I’m doin’, and that’s my priority. But… tomorrow or the day after, yeah.”

“Tomorrow or the day after? What, you busy or something? What kind of bullshit test is this, man?” His voice rises – only a little. He’s upset, but he needs to control it. Just enough to let him know how serious this is without coming off all drama.

If Nucci is offended at all, he doesn’t show it. “The kind you gotta pass.”

—

That night, he doesn’t sleep. When he hears the footsteps approach – he thinks it’s at about two-thirty in the morning – he slows his breath again. Closes his eyes – it’s almost impossible for him to do, but he does it. Hears the cell door slide open. Hears the two pairs of footsteps. Hears them briefly talk about who goes first this time. Then there is silence, and then the tiny, almost inaudible whimpers from Clay. It’s beginning again, he thinks, and he opens his eyes.

One of the guards is leaning against the bunk, his head level with the top bunk in fact, and looking right at him. His nameplate says GABRIEL GELLER.

“Well, what do you know.” The guard speaks very quietly, but he’s smiling a bit. It’s not a nice smile at all. He glances upward. “See, Will – I thought I heard him start breathing fast last night after we left. And you thought I was just imagining it. Point for me.” He looks back at M.M., who is inching backwards, sitting up a bit in his bunk, trying to create distance from the guard even though he doesn’t quite know why yet. “So. You’re probably wondering what a couple of guards are doing here in your bunk late at night, and what we’re doing with your bunkmate. I might tell you, but first you have to tell me what you know.” His tone is friendlier than his eyes are. M.M. knows this is a routine – this guard has had to give this speech before. They’ve been caught before. But clearly, they have left no witnesses.

His shiv is in his pants pocket and his pants are at the foot of the bed and the guard is not quite between him and his pants – but he also knows he will never make it. He is sure of that. “I know you went into Javier’s bunk before this.”

“Very good. What else?”

“I don’t think cons paid you to do it.”

“Sharp! No, really, I’m not saying that to mock you. Most cons in your position, they think the world revolves around their little jailhouse conspiracies. But it doesn’t. You’ve got an admirable sense of perspective.” Smiling again, a wide smile, and it looks to M.M. to be a hungry one. This guard is looking at M.M. like he’s a rib-eye steak with gravy.

That’s when M.M. clicks it.

He sits up a little more. “Thank you, sir.” No compunction about calling Guard Geller “sir,” no. He needs time. “I also suspect that you killed both Javier and Cal. And, if I’m being truthful, probably lots of other cons besides.”

“More than you can count. Say, Will -this guy’s reeeeeeal sharp.” Geller begins leaning further down. “You almost done there, by the way?” M.M. isn’t sure if he’s talking to the other guard or to M.M. when he asks that question, but he doesn’t care. He’s started inching his hand down into the hole in his mattress. He only needs a few seconds more. Just a few seconds.

“If that question was directed to me, then all I got to say otherwise is one thing.”

“Mmmhmmm.” Geller clearly doesn’t care to talk any more, and that is when M.M., smooth as silk, pulls the cross out of his mattress and holds it in front of him.

“How old are you, anyway?”

Geller’s reaction surprises M.M. – he laughs, quietly, under his breath. “Oh, that’s good, that’s very good. Will, I told you, this guy is good! But -” and a note of menace enters Geller’s voice now – “what makes you think that’s going to work?”

M.M. shrugs, quite aware that he has placed all his chips on slightly more than one ounce of silver. “Hope, I guess.”

“Very Shawshank of you. Oh, don’t be like that. Yes, it works. I’m not going to recoil hissing in agony or anything, but… yes, it works. Congratulations. How did you get the wops to give you one of those?” As Geller speaks, his canines extend ever so slightly. “Don’t mind the teeth, by the way. It’s just nice to stretch them every once in a while – speaking of which, Will? You done yet?”

The other guard (WILLIAM TUCHMAN) looks down, his mouth bloody. Not his blood, of course. “Yeah, there’s still some left. Go finish up.” The two guards exchange positions. Guard Tuchman, rather than lean on the bunk, instead opts to sit on the tiny metal chair opposite the bunk. He’s not smiling. He clearly doesn’t think this is funny. “I believe Gabe asked you a question, fish.”

“Found it lying around, is all.”

“I don’t believe you, but I suppose I can’t take it as contraband.” A shrug. “Nucci and his boys don’t give those out, so – must’ve been when we hired those Bloods to knife Salvatore. Right?”

“I suppose.” He had never learned the Italian’s name. There didn’t seem to be much point.

“Fucking Catholics… Okay. So let me tell you how it’s going to go.” Tuchman leans forward a bit. “You’re a dead man. We’ll get you eventually. Not tonight, of course. But you’re in here, what, ten years?” (M.M. doesn’t bother correcting him.) “Sooner or later, we will get you. Nobody will care. That’s the beauty of this setup. Nobody gives a shit about you. You’re a rabid dog so far as they’re concerned. Nobody gives a damn about what happens to cons in jail. Hell, they actively want bad things to happen to you. We’re working with society, see. And even your fellow cons don’t care, because they’re all focused on Number One.”

Tuchman starts wiping blood off his chin and licking it down as he speaks. “We’ve been doing this a very, very long time. We built this prison. Well, helped build it, anyway. We can’t all be aristocrats living in castles, after all. Some of us have to work for a living.” That prompts the ghost of a smile from him. “We’ve got safety spots and hidey-holes all over this place. We work the night shift. Most times, we just work over whoever’s in the infirmary. And if it’s empty? Well, we go after one of you. You don’t have weapons – not anything that can hurt us, anyway. It’s perfect.”

M.M. nodded. “Not entirely perfect. Looks like the Noose -”

“The Noose is a dead man. All the wops are dead men walking. They think the crucifix protects them, but Salvatore shows that we can get at them – and you – in other ways. Often we don’t even need to do that.” Tuchman’s voice grows even more serious. “You’ve got a choice here, Lincoln. You can die easy or you can die bad. If you want it quick, clean and painless, we can do that. You won’t feel a thing. Speaking from experience, it’s honestly pretty pleasant. Or… well. you saw Salvatore. And that was the nicest that gets. We can be worse.” Pause. “Much worse.”

M.M. is silent for a long time. When he starts to open his mouth, Tuchman shakes his head. “Not tonight. Sleep on it. No, really, sleep on it. Nucci or someone will tell you anyway – wearing that thing will keep us off you. I’m being civil here because I want you to have a choice, and I hope you’ll make the smart one. Because you have to die, Lincoln. That’s how it goes.” He stood up. “You done, Gabe?”

Geller stands back from the bunk, wiping his mouth. “Yeah. Oh, hey, kid, don’t worry about, you know, fatso here coming back. He won’t. We don’t need an extra mouth to feed, right?”

The guards withdraw from the cell – walking backwards, M.M. noted. As they close the cell door behind them, Tuchman’s gaze never leaves M.M. – and specifically, M.M. is sure, his throat. After a couple of seconds, the guard speaks once more.

“We’ll come by tomorrow night. You can let us know then. If you like, we’ll even do you a last meal. Whatever you like. Seems only fair. We all gotta eat, right?”

—

Long after Geller and Tuchman are gone, M.M. lies back in his bunk, still holding the cross even though it was now hanging around his neck, not noticing the lack of Clay’s sleep-farts or even the fact that Clay is now a dead body. In his head, he’s doing math – not metaphorically, but literally.

Fifteen years. Figuring they don’t manage to get me to do something to extend that, like have to defend myself from a shivving and kill somebody. Fifteen years is three hundred and sixty-five days every year, plus three leap years adds three days.

That’s five thousand, seven hundred and forty-eight days. So far I’ve done twenty-nine. So that leaves five thousand, seven hundred and nineteen days… but really it’s five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight nights. The days are easy time, even though the guards will probably be hiring muscle to off him on a regular basis. It’ll be the nights that’ll be hard, lying there, waiting to see how they finally decide to kill him. They’ve got guns. If they got desperate – and he thinks they will, towards the end, if they haven’t managed to kill him yet – they could just shoot him in his cell. Crosses don’t stop bullets.

Oh, Lord.

M.M starts to cry.

He is an old man, sitting quietly in the corner of a room where many people speak in hushed and urgent tones about things of import that will affect everyone else. It’s easy enough for him to sit in on these meetings. Nobody really looks at him until he needs them to look at him: it’s a simple trick but it works every time.

He listens as they mutter under their breaths in frustration. They don’t understand where their ship has gone, they say. He is sure he might have dealt with this before, once, long ago. He remembers that much, but nowadays he can’t remember everything. That’s what his guide is for. He fingers it, a sliver of stone, a tiny obelisk hanging on a string; an idle observer would think he was only toying with his pendant, but a closer look would reveal the patterns he traces across his palm, sending his mind to a lone menhir standing in a field twenty miles south of Gdansk.

(He has had to move that stone three times now to avoid it being destroyed. Even the strongest dissuasions he can craft around it can’t affect a bulldozer.)

The menhir floods his mind with the thoughts he preserved in it, and he remembers.

***

The scholar stands up, hands on hips. He’s been through Paris five times this year and the city is always tense. The Huguenots and the Catholics are ready to explode, and now there are bodies in the Sicuana – the Seine, it is the Seine now, he has to remind himself of that as a stray thought from a menhir not properly sealed floats through the part of his brain which still rebels against this bastardized Latin they all speak these days. Each of the bodies is bloodless. The Catholics blame the Huguenots for the murders; the Huguenots accuse the Catholics of mutilating dead bodies to create strife. It will not end well.

Fortunee is watering the pinks again, he thinks, as he scratches at his moustache. The Queen of Eggshells demands that her pot of pinks be watered, and sends forth her devoted lady-in-waiting. They need blood to bring out the fine hue of the Queen’s pinks. The scholar has not dealt with the Queen and Fortunee in, what, three centuries at least? He had thought them sealed away, forever locked in a hart’s grave he had dug in the depth of winter (with a pick, since the ground was frozen).

Time to kill a new deer, then.

***

Not right, thinks the old man. These men are getting agitated now. They live in an age of reason: the fairies and grumkins are supposed to be long gone or never-were. They have some people who study the old horrors, of course, but the specialists are never called in soon enough and never have enough influence to convince their leaders and commanders of what must be done. The leaders and commanders always want to believe they can control the world; they never want to accept that the world is a puppet on strings, and protecting it means guarding against those with scissors.

Rome, perhaps? He seems to remember something about missing ships at some point in Rome. The obelisk dances across his hand, and a stelae on Mount Ossa shines in the sunset.

***

The warrior crouches on top of the roof of the vestibulum of the domus of Tullio, a powerful merchant who in all honesty would be enraged to find a barbarian crouching on his precious roof, but that is of no import at present. There are ships burning in the Ostia harbour, two Syrian biremes owned by the trading house of Ekon. The warrior contracted those ships, using any number of favours owed and offered to get them here: he knows from his studies that only good Asian mint would counteract the plague. He chews some of it even now, but he needs bales of it to put in the water; the Portuguese mint more readily available will not do, for this plague is caused by a wangye from the far eastern shores, and they only fear their own mint.

He sniffs: everything stinks of vinegar. The Romans know to how to disinfect with vinegar, and if this was a normal plague eventually that would be enough, but the wangye will not be deterred. Who set those ships afire? He must go down to the docks and investigate.

He reaches in his pocket for the ground iris root he brought with him. It will dye his hair – blonde long since turned to white, although still thick – a rich, dark, Mediterranean black, and stain his skin in the process to give him a swarthy hue. His Latin is good enough that he will pass unnoticed. He needs to hurry. The Emperor Trajan is a good man, and his enemies would be greatly harmful to many were they to enter power. He cannot allow dark bargains to conclude.

***

Burning ships. Not missing ships, burning ships. The old man would curse, were he still of an inclination to do so when frustrated. He’s never been so skillful at the stone memories as his master was: always he must grope through them, and it’s never, never the first one he finds that fits his problem.

One of these commanders is quietly fretting to another in a corner where they don’t realize they can be heard by an old man hidden from their minds. The press will find out soon, and then what? Panic? Riots? The other seems more worried about his professional career, and the old man snorts a little at that, but only a little – a hardhearted man can be of use.

The tip of his pendant traces the Mercury line of his left hand, floating back to thoughts he stored many years ago when he found some spare space in Stonehenge.

***

The druid sits at his writing-desk, scratching out runes with quill and blood. His own blood. Draining it off was not pleasant, but the unseelie greatly respect a letter written in blood, and if he is to be presented at the court of the Tylwyth Teg then he must first earn allies. Granted, he means to expose the unseelie to the wrath of the Teg, but they don’t know that yet.

The fairies have been stealing babies from their cribs again, violating the peace that the great British druid Carfax established in the last years of Constantine III, nearly two centuries ago. His master had introduced him to Carfax once, when he was still apprenticed, long before that last great feat turned Carfax into a legend. He remembered the Briton as having tremendously bad breath.

He looked at Carfax’s memories in the gowk stones left in Dyce, and saw that the abbylubbers could potentially be used as a wedge against their kinfolk if properly induced: their dislike of authority was near-universal. He wishes for a moment that his master’s thoughts were available to him, but that stone was gone, carved into cobbles by converted Vandals fifty years ago. Not for the first time, he thinks about how to protect the menhir network: so few druids are left, now, and their influence waning.

***

Could this be fairy work? The old man muses upon that, breathing as he does so in a specific pattern. The men in the room hear him breathe that way and fall into the pattern, following him even though they don’t know they’re following, and as he slows his pace down and breathes more deeply, they calm somewhat. For now, it will do.

Fairies could have done it, but an entire aircraft carrier? They were never so ambitious. No, he’s looking in the wrong direction, and losing time, and he knows he must open himself to all the stones or else he may run out of time to fix this, and if the soldiers and generals have their way they may declare a very poorly chosen war indeed, especially if those analysts they never listen to manage to make themselves heard. They are so agitated, these new Americans, and they have been for as long as he’s known them, which is quite a long time. He has never really been happy with this country, which replaced a strange land filled with brave souls and wild turkeys (and once a bear, spit-roasted). But that’s no reason to neglect his duties.

***

Charles Darwin sits inside his home, reading a bedtime story to his children, and does not know that an assassin lurks in his garden, hired by a sect of militant Presbyterian separatists who considered last year’s publication of The Origin of Species an insult against the Almighty. The assassin isn’t particularly clever; he doesn’t have to be. He just needs to shutter every door and window, and start fires in the right places – then wait outside with a club should any member of the family “jump desperately to their death.” He swats idly at a mosquito alighting upon the back of his neck, grunts, and gets down to work.

The assassin reaches into his bag for the skins of oil he brought with him, but suddenly realizes he cannot move. It was not a mosquito after all, but a small dart. As the assassin topples forward, off-balance, he rolls to stare upwards. A short, old man stands in front of him, with a small sword in his hand. The sword looks very old, and very sharp.

***

“I’m not getting any older.” It’s almost an accusation coming out of the warrior’s mouth. He’s had this speech planned for some time. He is eighty-five now, and most of the village remains spry and healthy well into their hundredth year – the gift of magical strength lingering in their blood. But he is not simply spry – he is robust. His hair is white, but other than that he could pass for forty-five years at most. He’s learned to gripe about his back if only to stop the conversations when he’s not there.

He opens his mouth for the next sentence, but the druid interrupts him. “You are not, and you will not for a very long time indeed. Do you know how old I am? I am very, very old – so old that I cannot remember how many years! And only now do I start to look it.”

He knows he must ask why, but before so much as a gasp of it can escape his lips the druid continues. “We do not choose this; I did not choose you. You and I were both chosen. So few gain the agelessness when they drink the potion. It is a calling.” The druid shakes his head, sadly. He does not seem happy that this calling has been given to the warrior.

And before the warrior can ask the obvious question, the druid interrupts him again with the answer. “You think ahead. You venture forth. Your friends are brave, but stupid, and content with things as they know them, content to be fishmongers and blacksmiths and bards. As much as you love simplicity, you are adept at complexity. And you understand duty. Were you not suitable…” The druid shakes his head, as if to say there is no point in considering the possibility.

“We are chosen.” It is said with sadness and resolve.

***

Niani’s financial district is on fire, and everywhere you look its citizens are rushing to put out the flames. Until an hour or so ago, when it rained a liquid that smelled somewhat of juniper, nothing would put those fires out, and many Mandinkans died screaming in the flames. Mansa Keita’s “magic” did nothing to stop it.

In the shadows of one of those fires a man in his twenties is on his knees, a fresh cut oozing blood down his cheek. He has been beaten but not humbled; his eyes glitter. The druid stands in front of him – at four foot seven inches, barely topping his kneeling captive. The druid knows his captive. He has not seen this man in twelve hundred years.

“We had the right of it, Gaul. They kept slaves, used slaves as fodder for their armies. Our cause was noble! They… we had the right.”

The druid does not look back at the ruined Atlantean flicker-ships. There isn’t any need. He ruined them. The Atlanteans had forgotten he can have the strength of a hundred men whenever he uncorks a bottle.

***

Flicker-ships. The old man blinks. That could be it. An Atlantean flicker-engine in working condition after all these years? Not impossible. All it would take is time and persistence, and there could easily be a few Atlanteans out there still, exploiting their youth, bending towards a long revenge. He shudders to think what an Atlantean-trained engineer could do if they got their hands on a nuclear reactor.

He stands up quickly, much faster than an old man should (although the pains in his back which he used to fake are now real – he’s aging, ever so slowly perhaps, but aging nonetheless), and in a moment realizes what’s wrong: one of the people present – a young woman, wearing Navy blues, looks to be a captain of some sort – has seen him. That hardly ever happens. Is he slipping? Did he fall so deep into the stones that he forgot himself for a second?

Did anybody else notice? No, just her. Perhaps if he leaves quickly, as if he belonged there all along, she will – no, that’s not working, she’s following him outside the room now. Oh, well.

He turns back to address her. “Hello, Captain. I really must be going.”

She looks at him suspiciously. “Where’s your clearance?” But it’s not mean. She carries her sense of duty with her: this man is not meant to be in the room, and so Steps Must Be Taken. He can appreciate that. He decides that, whatever else may happen, he likes this girl (who would no doubt be a bit offended if called “girl,” but he’s old enough that everyone is a boy or girl to him now).

“I must have dropped it in there.” He gestures back into the room.

She’s not buying it. “I think you should come with me.” In a second he will be in custody because one person in the room just had to be perceptive in a way that most people simply never will be.

And then his guide is in his hand, and for reasons that are not much more than hope, he’s clapping it into her hand, and squeezing…

***

The great bulk of the apprentice’s best friend weighs down the bed so greatly that at midpoint the frame bends to touch the floor. The bed is well-made, though, and bears the strain capably. They are old men now, or at least his friend is old. The apprentice was only born a very long time ago; there’s a difference.

They are both now one hundred and fifty-three years old, and even as recently as a couple of years ago his friend was able to move around on his own, amongst his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and even great-great-grandchildren. The magic he had swum in had given him even more life than most ever get from it; their childhood friends are all dead and gone, forty years or more, and his wife and even some of his children have since passed as well. Now it is the two of them, and his best friend’s family – who, with each generation, know him less and less well, no matter how everyone tries.

And so he sits, waiting for his best friend to die. He knows his friend is suffering greatly, but the strength of his life is now betraying him: he should be allowed to go on to his final reward, but magic courses within his veins and under his skin telling his body to simply survive, and so there is raspy breathing and great heaving lungfuls of air where anywhere else there would be merciful silence.

The apprentice has been searching for a way to end it. When he asked his master, they inevitably had a fight – the master, not unkindly, told him that this would be a lesson he would have to undergo. It was said with sadness, for his master loved the great fatass as much as the apprentice did. That didn’t matter, of course, and the apprentice demanded the answer and then stormed out in a fury and now he’s sitting in a chair shaking with anger and grief.

“I wish…”

He sits upright. “Yes? What do you want? Can I get you a pillow?”

Slow shaking of the head, the tiny bows on his dry, crackling braids still bobbling in place after all these years. “I wish… could have had…” Every word is a battle, but his friend was the greatest warrior he has ever known, and it doesn’t matter anyway because he knows what his friend wants to tell him. When the apprentice first realized that his friend was sad, he had thought it because his friend’s days of adventuring were over, but that was facile and self-flattering. The truth had always been far simpler, of course, simple like his friend’s great heart.

I wish you had a family like I did. I wish you were not so lonely.

One great arm feebly reaches out, barely able to support itself, and he clasps it, and now he knows, he knows what the end must be and why his master could not tell him. He wouldn’t have accepted it before now.

He takes his guide, carved from his friend’s quarry, and clasps it against his friend’s palm. “I did have a family. Our children played together. My third son married your second daughter. Remember the feast? You ate so many boar that day, your wife actually worried you would be sick… do you remember when my wife died? Every year, you would come with me and lay a helmet filled with wildflowers by her grave.”

As he talks, he pictures these things in his mind, creates them as vividly as he can, down to every detail, just as if he was putting them into a menhir to preserve them. His wife is a composite of the half-dozen women he loved in his life, each one of them eventually happily married to someone else, each of them now dead and gone. His children look like he would imagine his children to look: short, but favouring their mother otherwise. He imagines their homes standing by one another, extensions built upon extensions so the pair of them look like some crazed assortment of random walls with a roof, and you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins except for their front doors.

“Remember when my grandson Distrix opened his pub in Lutetia? We took our families on a roadtrip, but once we were in Lutetia we just kept going for two years, you and me and our children and grandchildren and all of us, through Lugdunum, Burdigala, then on to Helvetia – little Apellix fell in the fondue and we couldn’t stop laughing – and then down towards Rome…”

This is what the old druid couldn’t tell him: it was never anything so simple as a magic potion keeping his friend alive. It was loyalty and love. Through the stone, he puts these images into his friend’s mind, a history that never happened and never will; it’s an answer to the only question that could matter. What will you do when I’m gone? The truth is that he will endure as best he can, but that truth is what keeps his friend suffering. Better, then, to lie.

“…and the elephants raised their trunks to cheer in elephant-talk, and all India joined them, because now it was our grandsons who were the heroes, and we just sat back and watched and ate roasted goat and that yoghurt dip you liked before we left to return home the next day…”

Every image slides smoothly into his best friend’s memories, a life he knows as well as his own. It is what he imagined when he rode a raft across the Pacific with only dates to sustain him, when he rode elephants in Nubia, when he trapped a demon in a box in the furthest East. It is what he would have been if he had not been chosen by some nebulous force he doesn’t quite understand.

“…and Illuminix was elected chief of his village, and you were so proud. We feasted that day on wild boar, as we always did, and almond sweetcakes and honey-sweets for dessert. And salad. Your wife always made us eat salad. Part of being married, I suppose. Do you remember that?”

Please, let it work.

There is a moment of silence. When his friend breathes out his very last breath, it is a slow “yes,” and somehow there is joy in it, at the end.

Then the apprentice pats his friend’s head, and carefully closes his friend’s half-lidded eyes, and begins to sob.

***

The girl-Captain withdraws. She’s smart enough to realize what she has seen is true, and says nothing. Her stunned expression is enough for him to trust her.

The old man looks up at her (why must everyone be so tall?) and reaches into his pocket. “The carrier was stolen by a civilization long thought dead. It will reappear in six hours, with some luck; the crew will claim instrument failure and your satellites will be determined to have been mis-aligned. I recommend you allow them to believe it.” He hands her a calling-card with a name and number on it. “Tomorrow afternoon, call me. We will have milk. I don’t drink coffee. You shouldn’t either.”

She looks at the card, still trying to process the flood of memories he allowed her to see, two thousand years’ worth of a job he never wanted and doesn’t want for her – although he suspects neither of them will have a choice in the matter.

As he walks off, she calls after him once more. “Mr. Ricks?”

“Please,” he says, not turning back – for he has to get to the Indian Ocean in two hours’ time and that won’t be easy – “please, call me Asa.” And as he strolls out of the White House otherwise unnoticed, he pulls a small flask out of the breast pocket of his suit and unscrews the cap.

(inspired by this)
—

The old man lies back in bed. The nurses call him by a name he barely remembers any more, except when his friends use it. The name is meaningless anyway: calling it a fiction would be too kind. It’s a shoddy lie, and nobody believes it now, and as he nears the end of his life he dislikes it more and more. He’s not exactly sure why he dislikes it so, not any more. Things are foggy when you’re in your nineties: everything you know is like a sketch of a photograph you once owned.

Sometimes he sees a woman on the television in his room – it only gets four channels, but what better way does he have to spend his time? – a woman who’s been very successful in her life. When he sees her, he feels, for a brief moment, vindicated. It was worth it, he thinks to himself. This is how he gets through the pain of his body gradually turning off all its lightswitches, of his limbs becoming dusty hallways: vindication.

—

Winston Sligh was thirty-one, a grown man who’s always had a bit of a taste for adventure. A lot of that adventure came by way of the Marine Corps, where Winston worked long hours doing whatever was humanly necessary to avoid combat. The recruiter told him about his duty to his country, but Winston was a practical-minded sort even then and figured that his first twenty-six years had been spent mostly trying to just get by, traveling from town to town looking for work, and his country hadn’t much cared for him then so Winston figured they were square. The recruiter told him about his duty to his family, but Winston’s mother died when he was fifteen and his pop ran out on them when he was three when his little sister died getting herself born, so Winston figured they were square too. Then the recruiter told him about the pay, and Winston signed up on the spot.

Winston went to Guadalcanal five months after the battle of Guadalcanal ended, then to Peleliu six months after hostilities ceased, and finally to the Iwo a mere two weeks after the last shot was fired. He had a knack for finding ways to put himself on the rear echelon of any engagement. Really, often he wondered why he hadn’t joined the Navy, where he figured his various tricks, scams and a skill hencetoforth unknown for forging documents probably would have gone even further. He got his discharge six months early, after catching a lieutenant-colonel having a do with a strapping young corporal in what they believed was secrecy, and set out again to seek his fortune.

A year and some days later, he found himself in the middle of Iowa, broke off his ass again (and recovering from one hell of a hangover), and wondering at the flatness of it all. He asked around, and it turned out the Widow Symons needed a hand to bring in the sorghum harvest, so he went over to the farm that was just outside of Alta and signed up. She liked him on first sight, and him being a former Marine sat well with her as her husband had gotten blown up on Okinawa. Not long after that, he found out the Widow Symons needed a hand for some other things as well, of a more private nature. People in Alta town proper began to speak of him as having done well for himself, although they were never too specific about that. And then there was Myrna’s daughter, Jackie, to whom Winston took quite a shine. She was six, and felt like the little sister he’d never gotten to have, although she didn’t quite look at him as a big brother in her own right but more a replacement daddy.

He felt settled down, and although a shiftless sort such as he would never admit it, he liked this.

Then the ague came.

—

Jackie had the shivers and the runs and was burning up. Dr. McAdams couldn’t peg it, and he was smart enough to check for malaria (not exactly common in Iowa, but she had all the signs) and even that turned up to not be. Dr. McAdams called up an old friend who now taught at the Iowa Hospital School, hoping that maybe academia had some answers. His friend didn’t know, and promised to call specialists who owed him favours. By that time, the little girl wasn’t even coughing any more. She just lay there, too tired to fight it.

And the thing of it is this: Winston knew enough to be sure that it was a conjure. He just didn’t know enough to fix what had been done.

—

Growing up in Marianna, Arkansas wasn’t easy with no daddy, but young Winston got by even though respectable folk thought he was trash because his mother did what was necessary to get by. They called her a whore, but she never was, Winston knew. She took in nigger business, though, when she cooked food and took in boarders, and there was always those who figured that a woman willing to take nigger money was willing to do just about anything else.

Of course, his mother’s friendliness with the niggers meant that Winston was particularly worldly for a boy his age. His best friend, Abraham, was half-black himself on his mother’s side, and Abraham introduced him to Nicodemus, and Nicodemus was the person every young boy really needs: the one who tells you how the world really works.

Nicodemus was probably about fifty, although you couldn’t quite place his age if you tried. (“Makes it easier to get away in a hurry,” said Nicodemus, “if they don’t know how old you are.”) He taught Winston and Abraham and all their friends how to smoke, and how to fish, and how to drink hard liquor (although he never got around to teaching them how to make it properly, and years later one of their friends, a not particularly bright light called Obie, would get himself blown up by a faulty still as a result of this negligence). He told them about how he’d nearly gotten hung twenty years back for a dalliance with a proper lady, and warned them against such fancies. He beat their asses when they didn’t go to school. (“I never got to go to no school,” he’d say, “and damn if your parents ain’t gonna get on my case for letting you grow up to be me, and it ain’t worth the trouble.”)

And he knew hoodoo. He had a book of conjures that he swore up and down was by John Hohman himself. He knew how to make goofer dust which would make dice roll the way he needed them to roll, how to use John the Conqueroo to help a man in the bedroom, how to make a charm from a black cat bone to stop bad mojo headed your way. He didn’t advertise this; he didn’t need to. Word got around when it needed to get around, and Nicodemus had seen what had happen to the rootworkers and mojo men who tried to make a name for themselves.

Abe and Winston found out about his hoodoo the old-fashioned way: by going through his stuff when he wasn’t around looking for pictures of naked ladies. (They were thirteen at the time, tugging it every chance they got, and were willing to risk anything for pictures of naked ladies.) Nicodemus was furious when he caught them going through his belongings, and banned them for a whole week, but they kept coming back and asking after love charms – Winston in particular having figured out that no naked lady was coming anytime soon for a thirteen-year-old piece of white trash and that more direct steps would be needed – and although they never got them, he eventually was willing to teach them a little.

Not a lot. Just a little. Nicodemus kept things close to the vest. But he taught them how to recognize the signs of a conjure that had been done on a person to make them sick. And he taught them one other thing.

—

The night the little girl went to sleep and Dr. McAdams said to Winston – under his breath where the Widow Symons wouldn’t hear him – that she wasn’t going to wake up, Winston went out to the old orchard down the road from the Symons farm with an axe. He passed the Willam farm enroute, the Willam boys chasing one another around for fun, their mother yelling at them to come in already, dinner’s getting cold Roger and George, who raised you hellions? He barely paid attention to them, although they noticed him, a man with an axe walking with purpose not something a seven-year-old would fail to gawk at. When they bothered him about where he was going, he said “Firewood,” nodding at them to go to their mother. They went readily, because a man with an axe telling you to do something has more impact than your mother telling you to do it, even if she’s got an axe. (Your mother probably wouldn’t use the axe on you.)

He found what he was looking for right enough: a stump, with two trees close to it on either side. The trees, once he chopped them down, made excellent seats (albeit a bit sticky from the sap, but he took care of that with a little lighter fluid and a match). He took out a deck of cards and spread them across the stump. He pulled an old candle stub out of his pocket, set it down on the middle of the stump, and lit it. He sat down on one of the seats and said, quietly so as not to offend (“don’t shout him out,” said Nicodemus): “Old Scratch, I got a game for you.”

And then he waited.

He didn’t know how long he waited, not to be sure. Maybe fifteen minutes, maybe a half-hour, but it had been the tail end of dusk when he looked up and there, coming towards the stump, was a grey-haired man in a sharp three-piece gabardine suit. He had a cigarette case in his hand and lifted one to his lips, then stepped forward, bent down and lit it off the candle. After a couple of puffs, he finally looked at Winston, paying attention to him for the first time. Winston looked him dead in the eyes and wished he hadn’t.

“So.” said the Devil.

“Yup.”

“Well, you called me, Winston. I’m here. What can I do for you?”

Winston gestured at the cards, striving not to let his discomfort at being recognized show.

The Devil sighed. “Yes, I figured, but what are we playing for?”

“Widow Symons’ little girl, Jackie, she’s got a conjure on her. I want it gone.”

“So make a counter-charm. Really, this is overkill.”

“I don’t know how. And there ain’t time to go find someone who can do it. My stakes ain’t good enough for you or something?”

A puff on the cigarette. “Not at all. I just wanted you to be aware of any options you might have missed. So, what are you offering?”

“My name against the cure.”

“Your name, eh? Not your soul?”

“Ain’t my name enough?” He couldn’t entirely disguise his irritation at the question, even if this was the Devil.

A shrug. “It is. I’m sorry, I’ve just been playing a lot of people these days who automatically want to go big right from the start. I’m not used to somebody who knows the price of things.” He gestured towards the deck. “Five-card draw?”

“Seven-card stud, showing four. Say, how come you didn’t just appear out of nowhere? I thought that’s what you’d do.”

Stream of smoke out the nostrils. “It’s showy. Seemed a waste of time to do it for you. I can go out and come in again, if you’d like.”

“No, thank you. I don’t want to put you out.”

“Kind of you.” The devil gestured towards the deck again. “So. Seven-card stud, a hundred chips a side.” The chips were suddenly there and had always been there. “Your name, versus the cure for any hoodoo that’s been placed on the girl.”

“Or conjure, or black magic, or any of that.”

“Certainly. Any spell whatsoever. Are you sure this is what you want to play for, Winston?” There was an odd tone in the Devil’s voice. Winston thought about it hard for a second. Nicodemus had told him over and over that the Devil wasn’t allowed to lie, but misleading, implying, or allowing a bargainer to make a mistake, that was all fine.

He thought over his wording again, very carefully, and didn’t see a flaw. He was covered. “Yeah. I deal first?”

“Certainly.”

—

Twenty-five minutes later, Winston was down to eleven chips versus the Devil’s one hundred eighty-nine.

The Devil laid down two cards apiece, then a third face up. Queen of spades for Winston, two of hearts for the Devil. Winston checked the face-down cards: queen and a deuce, both in clubs.

“I’m in for one more.” Winston tossed a chip into the pot.

The Devil’s eyebrows quirked up as he looked at the cards. “All right, I’ll see it.” Another clink as the chip landed beside the other three, and then a new card for each of them: four of hearts for the Devil, jack of diamonds for Winston.

Neither of them checked their face-down cards a second time. The Devil thought for a second, and then said “Check.”

“Check.”

Five of hearts for the Devil, ten of hearts for Winston. “Check,” said the Devil. “By the way, Nicodemus sends his regards.”

“Really? Did he finally lose a game to you? Check.” The mention of his friend made him nervous, but he didn’t want to show it.

“No, he never did. But you must have known that he wasn’t entirely on the up and up. He did crimes, Winston.” Six of spades for the Devil, six of hearts for Winston. “He came about my place in the usual way, you understand. Check.”

“Well, that’s a shame. He was good to me and Abe. Please pass my good word back to him. I’ll raise you two.” The Devil had mostly junk showing; it’d take a pocket pair of kings or aces to beat Winston at this point, unless the Devil had a flush. “You know, he always described you as being a black fella. Does that change from time to time?”

“From man to man. See your two and raise you ten. Are you all in, or do you want to fold?”

Winston needed to know how this hand turned out. “In.” He shoved his last few chips into the pot.

The Devil nodded slightly. “Okay. I’ve got a flush already. Sorry.” He turned his cards up: king and ace of hearts. Winston felt queasy as he revealed his queen. The last cards dealt were the three of clubs and the three of diamonds – meaningless. The Devil stood up and offered his hand.

Winston stood, trying not to throw up, and raised his hand to shake with the Devil. As their hands touched, he felt something pulling at him, and then realized that it wasn’t something pulling at him so much as it was something pulling inside of him, down the length of his arm and out. He looked up desperately into the Devil’s eyes, expecting to see amusement or satisfaction, but the Devil merely looked a bit disappointed. That pull continued, and continued, and seemed to go on forever inside of a few seconds. Then it stopped.

The Devil adjusted his hat. “You gave me a good game, but it’s over. Good luck to you in your future endeavours.” He turned to leave.

The nameless man who had once been Winston Sligh reached forward, grabbing the Devil by his sleeve, hoping that this would work. “Wait.”

—

“…and that’s how I beat the Devil at poker and won myself the way outta that jail.” Nicodemus’ grin stank of homemade cornshine and beets.

Abe was passed out asleep on Winston’s living room couch, but Winston was still listening. “Do you think I could beat the Devil at poker, Nicodemus?” Like all fourteen-year-olds, he assumed the answer was “yes, eventually.” Hence his disappointment when Nicodemus shook his head.

“You’re already a good hand at poker, but playing the Devil ain’t like playing men. You got to be a God-damn genius with cards, and you’re just good, that’s all. And you ain’t gonna get better enough to beat the Devil. You play him and you’re gonna lose, and when you lose against the Devil you lose so big nothing else matters.” Nicodemus scratched his nose. “Why you think I ain’t teaching you my tricks? You’re just smart enough to get all fucked up with ’em.”

Fourteen-year-old-Winston was unsatisfied. “But what if I ever really need to do it?”

“You ain’t never gonna need to do it bad enough.” Nicodemus paused. “But if you did, there’s one way might work. Never tried it myself – never needed to, being so talented and all. But it might work.” The hoodoo man looked at him, eyes not nearly so glassy as his breath would have made you figure. “You don’t go doin’ this for some fuckin’ candy, or pussy, or shit like that. This only counts when your life is on the line. You promise me?”

Winston nodded as hard as he could.

“Swear on your mama.”

“Swear on my mother.”

Nicodemus nodded. “All right. Not being gifted like myself, this is what you do…”

—

“Another game? I’ve already got your name.”

“You don’t have my soul yet.” The nameless man shrugged. Holding together the knowledge he’d had previously was a little more difficult than he’d been prepared to handle, and trying to remember everything he yet needed to remember was tough. But there wasn’t nothing for that now. “Surely you’re not gonna finish up after just one round?”

“You really want this.” The Devil looked at him calmly. “Have you considered stakes? I mean, really considered them? I think you need to think this over.”

“No need. My soul against my name and the protection we discussed earlier.”

The Devil shook his head. “Too much.”

“Too much?” The nameless man tried not to look afraid. This wasn’t part of the deal. “It’s my soul! A soul’s worth more’n a name, everybody knows that! You can get a name anywhere.”

“I don’t think you quite understand what you gave up yet.” The cigarette case snapped shut, and was tossed upon the stump. “Your soul’s worth more than the name, but less than the two of them together. I’ll not risk both. I have my reputation to consider.” The Devil spread his hands out, a gesture of reconciliation. “However, I’ll give you some consideration. A hundred and fifty chips versus my hundred, for either of them. Fair?”

The nameless man who might have once been named something that sounded like “Bligh” considered it. He wasn’t going to get much better. “Two hundred versus your hundred.”

“One seventy-five, and I don’t normally bargain, but I appreciate your sentiment. Don’t push me further, friend.” The Devil sat back down before the stump. “And this time, we play Omaha style.”

“Okay.” The nameless man took his seat. “One seventy-five versus your hundred. My soul for protection for the girl from spells of all kinds, same stipulations as previous.” The nameless man didn’t say that now he was having trouble remembering all of those stipulations. He was trying to keep other things in mind.

The Devil reached for the case again, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it – not off the candle, but from a lighter that had been in his hand previously and which he had used many times before, the nameless man was suddenly sure. “Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider the stipulations?”

“I’m sure.” No tricks. He remembered that overpoweringly.

“All right.” The Devil glanced down at the table, where two dissimilar piles of chips had been present the entire time they had been here. He reached for the deck and dealt each of them three cards, face-down, and his eyebrow quirked up again.

The nameless man had trouble remembering things now, but he remembered each of the six hands where the Devil’s eyebrow had done that, each time leading to a big win for Old Scratch. He remembered it because he’d told himself to remember it, over and over again. “Fold.” He said it even before the ante, not even looking at his cards, simply tossing one of his chips over to the Devil’s pile.

The Devil’s expression didn’t change, except for a faint pinch in the cheeks. He wasn’t happy. The nameless man knew that because his cheeks pinched like that when he’d had a couple of junk hands early on in the first game. He’d spent that entire first round of poker losing, and losing, and losing, not because he wanted to lose but because he wasn’t quite good enough at poker to figure out all the Devil’s tells fast enough.

Someone, he couldn’t remember who now, had told him once that this might work.

—

“I’ll simply concede at this point. The ending is academic.” The Devil gestured at his pile of chips: he was down to less than twenty.

“Thank you for the game.” No sense in not being polite, figured the nameless man. “Shall we have another? I ain’t won my name back from you yet.”

The Devil shook his head. “No. You’ve won as much as you can, and that not enough.”

“Aw, come on. No need to be sore.”

“I’m not upset in the slightest. I just refuse to participate in theft. I only take from those who know what they’re doing. Robbing from children, there’s no joy in it for me. How many of my tells do you remember at this point? Less than half?”

The nameless man didn’t want to admit that this was probably true. “Look -”

“No. No. You’ve already wasted your winnings.” The Devil stood, clearly not happy.

“What do you mean? I won. Little -” He suddenly realized he didn’t know her name any more. “She’s gonna get better.”

“She never had a conjure on her.” The Devil actually looked apologetic. It was a strange thing to see on his face. “I kept telling you to think about what you were playing for, man. You kept insisting for protection from black magic, but there never was any black magic – she just got a rare bug the doctors don’t recognize that you thought was a conjure. If you’d simply asked for her to get better, I could do something. But you didn’t.”

The nameless man didn’t say anything. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. Worse, he didn’t know how he’d managed it in the first place, not now. It was all like looking at the world through stained glass.

“I’m sorry. If I could just give you your request again… but rules are rules, especially for me. And I don’t do takebacks.” The Devil laid a comforting hand on the nameless man’s shoulder, then walked out of the orchard. In seconds, he was gone.

—

The nameless man walked on down the road. He wasn’t quite sure where he was going. “Forward” was about all he could manage.

Up ahead, he saw a couple of serious looking men looking jubilant in a quiet way, the sort of way you expect men to whoop and holler when they can’t whoop and holler because it’s late at night and people will complain. They held in their cheering under wide grins and more than a bit of tipple. One of them had a medical bag. As he approached, one of them – a farmhand by the look of him – waved him over. “Hey, stranger. Care to join us? We’re celebrating. It’s been a good night for us.” He waved a flask at him, clearly having already had a few from it.

“Sure,” said the nameless man. A drink would be good. He felt as if he’d had a bad night, although he couldn’t quite explain why.

“It’s a damn miracle,” said the one with the medical bag by his feet. “That fever shouldn’t have broken. She couldn’t possibly have fought it off, but somehow… I don’t know how it happened.” He took the flask from his friend and took a hard pull. “I just thank God that it did. I don’t know what Myrna would have done.”

“Don’t worry yourself over what hasn’t been, Doc.” The farmhand took the flask back from the doctor and handed it to the nameless man. “Here. Hey, you looking for work? We can always use a new hand this time of year.”

The nameless man swallowed down some whiskey and handed it back. “I could use a couple weeks’ work before I move on, I guess…” His attention was drawn by a handsome woman walking towards them purposefully. The doctor grinned, amused in the way that men can be when they’re not the ones in trouble with their better halves, or at least aren’t the ones who’re going to pay for it.

“Myrna -”

“Don’t Myrna me, Winston Sligh. You’ll wake the neighbours if you carry on like this. Who’s this, then? I hope you’re not hiring whoever just walked past on account of being drunk.” She looked at the nameless man critically, as if she recognized something about him – but it was only there for a second and then it was gone.

Somehow, the nameless man felt as if she was important somehow, but couldn’t figure out why. He cast about in his mind for a name, and said the first two that came to mind. “I’m on the road, just looking for work. It’s awful late, ma’am. If you let me sleep in the barn, and maybe offer up some breakfast, I’d be happy to work for you tomorrow.”

She thought about it for a long time, and looked at Winston. “You think he’s all right? It’s late to be walking.”

“Just means he’s in need, Myrna. I showed up late once too, you’ll recall.”

“True enough.” She turned back to the nameless man. “There’s hay bales in the barn. Winston can bring you out some blankets.” She walked away, then, saying only “I’m going to go check on Jackie again” as she left. The nameless man couldn’t help but think that that name was important too, but decided not to think about it muchly.

As he followed Winston out to the barn, the nameless man thought he saw a man in a nice blue suit exiting the house, but he couldn’t quite be sure that the man was out of place, so he said nothing. He felt confused. It had been a long day, he was sure of that.

—

The old man, who’s been unable to ever get proper identification – he tried a few times although he doesn’t remember it any more, and every time he got lost in the shuffle or the system – sits in a bed that’s been charitably donated to him. A couple of friends he made decades ago, long after he moved on from Iowa – he barely remembers Iowa – are the only ones who visit. They feel awkward around him; they don’t really know who he is. Nobody does.

When he sees a woman on the television and feels vindicated, he doesn’t know that Jackie Symon married and became Jackie Kulp, that she had four children and saw three grandchildren before she died fairly young at the age of sixty-three a few years back (breast cancer). He doesn’t know that she was never any of the famous women he sees; he can’t know that. He doesn’t know that she lived a happy life, as lives go, and died surrounded by people she loved.

All he knows, somehow, is that he did the best he could to help a little girl that he knows he loved, and the little girl grew up well. It doesn’t matter if he thinks the little girl is now a TV host or a famous judge or a respected scientist; he thinks all of those things at one point or another. What matters is that he knows, when it counted, he stood up.

At the end, it justifies things.

(inspired by this)

—

I awoke, already knowing I must decelerate the traveler. I thrummed to the core to produce retro and slow myself. As I felt force begin to pull the traveler, I ceased that thrum and instead thrummed to the scanquartz to check my bearings. I was off, my bearing too sharp as a result of a rough journey through relspace. I returned to the core to correct course.

A traveler should be operated by five chords: two to thrum the core, one on the scanquartz to track movement, one verbed inside the array to send and receive communication, and one in the centre to coordinate. Operating one alone – even one jury-rigged to travel mono – was a challenge, and I wished I was not alone. But then I supposed that was the point of all this.

—

Kol asked me to join him at the nursery crystal where he tended to the new. Our shapes hovered over the beds of geodes, exposed to the violent storms of above.

_It is sung that you desire to return to your previous assignment._ His shape, a monoclinical lattice of gallium, resonated strongly. He felt strongly about this.

_It is sung true. I requested relocation and -_

_You should not go back. You know that I… one moment._ Kol paused in our conversation to thrum the emergent geodes. New would birth within those geodes, chords given thought if tended properly. My old friend was ever diligent in his work, and once a stray flaw in a geode was eliminated he returned his attention to me. _There is nothing left for you there. You have purpose, song yet to be written._

_That is not in dispute, Kol._ I remained in key. _I merely question what that purpose might be._

Kol’s lattice turned away. _Tuning you was a waste of time._ He was flat, reverberating in a way that was unpleasant. For a nursery tender to sound in such a way was rare. _I hoped to guide you out of the silence you make for yourself. But you do not want to be heard._

—

We were always able to work uninterrupted in the planet’s seas. That was when I found him. He was very new, in truth, but even then his deep song was unusual. Most any other of the ocean’s swimmers would have mistaken it for the surface fleshlife’s shapes above and ignored him or avoided him. But I did not. I already knew the songs of the other fleshlife beneath the waters – the fast clicks and whistles of the smaller swimmers, the sonorous hums of the greater. I knew what he was saying.

When he found my shape, its lattice as alien as anything he could imagine, he merely asked me the question he repeated to the rest of the ocean, a question he had been asking for a very long time. Possibly he had asked every single creature he had ever met, and not a one had responded.

_Are you my friend?_

If I were a better scientist I might have said nothing, allowed him to ignore my shape and swim on in his futile search. I could have observed him silently, to not prejudice the situation with my presence. But I was no xenogeologist. I did not see alien worlds as nothing more than mines. I wanted there to be more than simply the natural progression of chords, born of energy, working within our shapes.

_Yes,_ I thrummed to him.

His delight at my answer was undescribable.

—

Lom’s queries were less confrontational than Kol’s. When my mentor requested a meeting shortly after my conversation with Kol, I suspected his motives. However, the first half of the meeting was entirely him bragging about his new shape, a orthorhombic prism of transparent platinum. After lengthy explanations as to the platinum’s efficiency in thrumming, he concluded by telling me: _It makes me feel new again._

_My song rises that you are happy, sir._

_My thanks._ His lattice hovered around my study. _The chorus will not allow a second mission to…_

I interrupted, my tone slightly sharp. _I wondered when you would sing of this. Did you really need to sing of your new shape for so long?_ I turned my shape around, intending to exit.

_Xyl._ His tone was quiet. _I tuned for the mission, but the chorus does not believe it anything more than indulgence. The mission was completed. You catalogued all fleshlife on the planet while Zaa and the xenogeology team catalogued usable resources for shapes. What more is there to do?_

_There is more life there that we did not catalogue -_

His tone clashed with my own. _No, there is not. You are comprehensive. You missed nothing. The mission was dangerous to begin with and the chorus does not wish to risk a traveler and its chords for a re-evaluation. And with Zaa singing of poor shapeworthy resources, the chorus sees no reason to return. They make a strong tune._

_Then why did you tune for the mission?_

He thrummed his shape, amused. _My friend needed my help, obviously._

I reoriented my shape in supplication. _Thank you._

_It is nothing. I understand why you want to return._

There was silence, for a long moment, which I broke. _We should not have left him alone!_

—

We traveled together through the oceans as I worked, talking. He had been alone from a very early age. He did not remember his parent very well. I suspected the parent had died while this swimmer was still very new.

He accompanied me in my studies for the remainder of my time there. He was always inquisitive, even if often he did not understand the answers. We would sing together, and sometimes he would even thrum my shape by accident – although eventually I started to realize that he had figured out how to thrum it, and that some of these “accidents” were in fact pranks.

I knew our mission was finite. Once, after many measures together, towards the end, I sang to him of what he might do if I went away. He replied that he would call out for me until he found me, for I was his friend. One day, he sang, he would find me, and then we would again swim together.

His nature was patient, like all of the great swimmers we had encountered. I had no doubt that he was sincere.

—

Our shapes glided over the calcite fields toward the grinding domes, where raw minerals would become specifically-tooled shapes. Lom led and I followed, much as I had when I was newer. We approached a menial worker, thrumming a calcite harvester in a crude triclinic shape of copper sulfate. The worker turned to us and reoriented his shape in welcome.

_Honored Lom,_ he sang. _You are welcome, although I do not know why you would come here. Unless you suddenly have a great interest in calcite?_

Lom’s returning thrum paid respect to the worker’s jest. _No, Vey. I thought you might be able to tune me. Do you know my friend Xyl?_

Vey oriented his shape in respect, although of course he had no idea who I was. _What tuning do you require?_ His shape trembled a bit as he thrummed; the copper sulfate shape would not last long before it needed replacement. I felt several measures of guilt for imposing on someone obviously working so hard.

Lom’s song grew quiet, conspiratorial. _You are responsible for delivering calcite to the traveler domes still?_

_Of course._

_Perhaps,_ Lom hummed, _you could explain to us how one enters that dome unsung?_

—

I left mute, too cowardly to tell him I was finally abandoning him. I had been arguing with Zaa for weeks that our mission could not finish, not that we had now found species who could sing with us unaided, but Zaa was ever a miner at heart and called it a job for the chorus to decide.

I took my leave as he slept, floating gently among the tides. I fled into the traveler and verbed from my shape into the communications array. Zaa and Pou thrummed the core and we leapt upward, traveling home.

I kept the array targeted on the blue waters. Before we left, I heard him sing one last time: a few measures, repeated over and over again.

_Do not worry, I will find you. Hear me and I will find you._

Over and over again.

—

My traveler is stolen, and not meant to be thrummed by a single chord, but I manage. I hurtle towards the planet at great speed. The surface fleshlife will only think my ship an asteroid; they cannot hear me within it. If they see the traveler decelerate they will find reasons to explain it. Gravity, they will say; asteroids do not slow down of their own accord. Perhaps they will blame a micrometeor impact for my course corrections.

I will land in the ocean, and emerge in my shape. I will find my friend whom I left so long ago. He should not be alone. He should not sing just one song. There is so much more still to be heard.

I will find him, and we will raise our songs in chorus together.

April 24, 1976. Lorne Michaels offers the Beatles $3,000 to appear on Saturday Night Live, as a gag mocking the full-page ads taken out in the New York Times offering the Beatles millions of dollars to reunite and play in Shea Stadium. Unbeknownst to Michaels, both John Lennon and Paul McCartney are in New York City at the time, and see the sketch airing live. They consider actually going to the studio, but decide they are too tired.

May 15, 1976. Lorne Michaels does the sketch again, this time offering the Beatles $3,200 (claiming he has “sweetened the pot”). This time, again unbeknownst to Michaels, all four of the Beatles are in New York City. Lennon and McCartney again consider going down to the studio and performing, but again decide they are too tired. However, this time Ringo Starr knocks on their door at 12:15 AM with a round of coffees (“from the awful all-night Hungarian deli on Bleecker,” he would later elaborate in an interview the next day) and George Harrison in tow. Years later in an interview with Playboy, Lennon says “I’d told Ringo about it, see, and we thought it was hilarious, but figured that was it and we’d missed the shot. When Ringo saw the second sketch, he decided to force our hand.”

Starr cajoles the other three Beatles into traveling down to 30 Rockefeller to “crash” Saturday Night Live. (Onlookers later claimed that when they entered the studio through a rear entrance, two interns fainted.) At 12:50 AM, they go on-air before the studio audience. Halfway through “Let It Be,” their second song, George Harrison yells to Michaels offstage that “after the third, we’ll just keep going if that’s all right.” Michaels quickly negotiates additional airtime with NBC (which gleefully capitulates) and the result is a spontaneous, three-hour live televised concert, famous not only for obvious reasons but for a host of its own idiosyncrasies: Lennon getting the hiccups during “Help,” McCartney playfully changing two lines of “Lady Madonna” to “where’s our three thousand, or our thirty-two/got to realize that now the cheque is due,” and Starr inviting the horn section of the Saturday Night Live band onstage “so we can do With A Little Help [From My Friends] properly.”

The “Saturday Night reunion” instantly becomes one of the touchstones of modern television history.

1977. After the reunion concert, the Beatles lay low in the public eye for about eight months. Wings concludes its world tour uneventfully; Lennon and Starr “tinker around” in the studio for a few months. People gradually assume that the reunion concert was a one-off.

November 5, 1977. Apple Records, with no fanfare whatsoever, announces via press release that a new Beatles album, titled Eventually, will be released “in the near future.” A media firestorm ensues. Lennon and McCartney both admit in the days following that they have been “hard at work” on a new album, but that this album does not constitute a “full-on comeback.” All four Beatles repeatedly stress that the production of Eventually does not mean that the various members have stopped working on their solo projects. Lennon: “Who are you kidding? We’d kill each other if we did that. We already tried that.”

February 11th, 1978. Eventually is released simultaneously in the American and British markets. Some critics find significance in the fact that the first single off the album, “Blow Away,” is not a Lennon/McCartney collaboration but instead a George Harrison song; others find themselves underwhelmed and suggest that the Lennon/McCartney “Free As A Bird” should have been the first single instead. (“Free As A Bird” is released as the second single six weeks later.) Harrison, for his part, says that “Blow Away” was “a lot less of a rocker” before Lennon suggested an increase in tempo and “letting Ringo go nuts.” No music videos are produced for the album: Lennon says “no, that would be too much bother. We want to have fun with this. Work’s for our own stuff.”

July 11th, 1978. Six months after its initial release, Eventually goes septuple platinum.

December 14, 1980. Having “had a sit back” (Ringo) after Eventually’s staggering success and taken time to concentrate on their own projects and personal lives, the Beatles make their first televised appearance as a group since the SNL reunion, appearing on The Muppet Show. (Lennon leaves New York for the first time in six months to do the gig, eventually spending the entire month of December in England.) The episode is the highest rated episode of The Muppet Show in the show’s history and the most watched television program of the entire year, beating even the news coverage of the 1980 American presidential election. The undisputed highlight of the episode is the “battle of the bands” between the Beatles and the Electric Mayhem (although Starr says his duet with Fozzie the Bear remains his personal favorite moment). Jim Henson would later say that the Beatles episode “rejuvenated” his joy in working on the show, which by that point he had begun to feel was growing stale: the show continues for another seven seasons.

January 7th, 1981. Lennon, Harrison and Starr attend the funeral of a New Yorker named Mark David Chapman, who committed suicide in mid-December and whose apartment, after the fact, was revealed to be a shrine to the Beatles. “I just felt, you know, responsible somehow, like he died because of us,” says Starr, although he refuses to articulate further on this point. Harrison agrees: “it’s amazing to think how great an impact we can have sometimes. You just want it so that you don’t have this kind of impact.” Lennon says nothing.

August 5th, 1981. The announcement of Neither Here Nor There, the new Beatles album, is less shocking than the announcement of Eventually – the previous announcement taught Beatles fans to “watch the signs” and rumours of Lennon and McCartney spending time in the studio have been swirling for months. The success of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy had previously led some to wonder if the Beatles were once again finished; Lennon dismisses such talk soon after the press release, complaining that people “just don’t seem to understand” that the group has figured out how to continue working together without the self-destructive fights.

1982. Neither Here Nor There sells 15 million copies. The media portrays the album as in competition with Thriller by Michael Jackson; however, the Beatles think this is crap, and say so publicly (and in Lennon’s case enthusiastically so). All four Beatles collaborate with Jackson on “Say Say Say,” which becomes the best-selling single of 1982 when it is released in December. (Lennon displays an uncanny knack for marrying Beatlesque musical tweaks to Jackson’s R&B style. Jackson later comments that without Lennon the song would have taken “forever to come together.”)

1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event. The “Startin’ Something Again” tour plays packed stadiums and larger venues around the world for eleven months straight – the smallest concert played is 240,000 people in Rio de Janeiro, and the tour closes with a free concert in Central Park with an estimated crowd of one point three million people.

January 5th, 1984. Jackson and McCartney are filming a commercial for Pepsi when pyrotechnicians accidentally set Jackson’s hair on fire. Jackson is rushed to the hospital with severe burns, but dies of shock in the ambulance before he can be treated. The Beatles attend his funeral en masse. “He changed things,” says Lennon, “and that’s something I don’t say lightly.” Starr is especially saddened, saying “it wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Harrison says nothing. McCartney promises that Michael Jackson’s legacy “will not be forgotten” and pledges to make sure of this, although he is unspecific as to details.

December 7th, 1984. McCartney purchases the Michael Jackson song catalog for an estimated $250 million. In accordance with what he says are “Michael’s wishes,” he offers Janet Jackson a recording contract with Apple Records, offering to buy out her contract with A&M. She accepts.

1985-87. Another “lull period” in Beatles history, as the various members concentrate on solo projects and their families. Released during this period: Cloud Nine by Harrison, Wish Factory by Starr, and Mysteries by Lennon (with Yoko Ono). Janet Jackson’s solo career flourishes as her first Apple-era album, Control, co-produced by McCartney and Jimmy Jam, is a massive hit.

1988. Shortly after a triumphant recording session that would become Traveling Wilburys vol. 1, Roy Orbison suffers a heart attack. He is rushed to hospital and revived, although he is clinically deceased for nearly forty-six seconds at one point during his resecutation. Orbison makes a full recovery and tours with the Wilburys one year later. McCartney and Starr frequently sit in on Wilbury performances (McCartney playing bass and Starr on drums).

1989. The Rolling Stones Steel Wheels tour kicks off, and the Stones and Beatles engage in good-humoured sniping at one another’s expense. Lennon: “Well, I suppose this was inevitable, given that they copy everything we do.” Jagger: “Indeed, we have been known to copy all the Beatles’ ideas. That’s why we broke up for a decade to make total shit.” Starr: “I hear Mick Jagger said we broke up for a decade to make shit. That’s just not true. It was only eight years.” Harrison and Starr appear on Saturday Night Live for a staged “rumble” during a Stones appearance on Weekend Update. The Starr/Charlie Watts “ninja drumstick duel” becomes a classic SNL moment.

1991. The Beatles release Everything Else. The undisputed highlight is the McCartney/Lennon collaboration “Ophelia,” which sits atop the British charts for eleven weeks. The second single, “Weight of the World,” sung by Starr, is widely considered to be the strongest Starr Beatles song since “With A Little Help From My Friends.” The album eventually sells eleven million copies.

1993. Jeff Lynne is killed in a car crash after leaving McCartney’s recording studio in New York. Lynne’s funeral is a sad occasion, as the Beatles, Traveling Wilburys, and a host of other musicians arrive to pay tribute. Starr, Harrison, and Tom Petty perform a haunting rendition of “Every Little Thing” at the memorial service. Lynne’s production work on the first album by Sean Lennon and Zak Starkey’s band Lark is finished by Bob Rock. (The album is poorly received by critics, but most concede that the pairing has potential.)

1996. John Lennon comes out with Elastic, his first album in nearly a decade. “I like taking my time now,” he says in interviews. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t have it.” The album consists of a set of collaborations with his sons Julian and Sean, prompting some critics to call it “the Lennon Family Experience.” The album is widely praised and considered one of Lennon’s best works.

1998. George Harrison informs his friends and family that he has throat cancer. McCartney later mentions in a 2004 interview in Newsweek that “Ringo took it particularly hard.” Harrison personally requests that the band go on tour again, citing a wish to “hit the road before I’m some sort of gimp in a bed.” The band agrees. Harrison’s illness is kept quiet by his own request.

1999. After an initial round of chemotherapy at the Mayo Clinic which appears successful, the Beatles commence the “Alive” tour, with Janet Jackson opening for them. The tour is a massive financial success – but moreover a series of smaller dates, where the Beatles play small venues, is considered to creatively rejuvenate the band. Sean and Julian Lennon, Zak Starkey and Dhani Harrison all at various points on the tour play with their parents: Dhani Harrison in particular plays with the band extensively as the tour progresses and his father’s condition begins to turn south.

2000. The Beatles release their final studio album with George Harrison, which is untitled but universally referred to as “the Green Album” because of its cover. (Lennon: “We only have so many titles to go around, you know.”) Rare for a Beatles album in that the majority of the songs are written by Harrison rather than Lennon and McCartney, the album is extremely moody and reflective for a Beatles album – although not without some truly excellent pop songs, most of which are Harrison’s work. Dhani Harrison, the Lennon sons, and Zak Starkey all sit in on the album as studio musicians, and the media takes notice of the “next generation” of Beatles, although of course none of the band or their sons ever call themselves that.

November 29, 2001. Harrison dies of throat cancer. His ashes are scattered on the Ganges. Media reports of extreme depression on the part of Starr regarding Harrison’s death appear to be false when he arrives at the funeral.

2002-3. John Lennon, having never abandoned peace activism (his 1991 re-recording of “Give Peace A Chance” before the first Gulf War sparked much controversy), begins harshly criticizing the American buildup to war in Iraq, calling it a “pack of lies.” After the first round of peace protests are largely ignored by the media, Lennon goes on The Late Show With David Letterman and launches into a tirade, visibly furious that the protests were ignored. “Half a million fucking people in New York saying “we don’t want a war” and CNN doesn’t say a damn thing.” The soundbite becomes a flashpoint for debate over the war. Sean Hannity calls for Lennon’s deportation. Lennon offers to come on any show opposing his viewpoint: he receives no response.

Early 2003. Lennon, McCartney and Starr begin working on a new album, more actively collaborating with their sons and Dhani Harrison. Harrison dismisses any suggestion that he is “the new fourth Beatle,” saying that he is content working on his own projects and “helping out family, because that’s what you do.” Starr quips that “he can’t be the fourth Beatle, because that’s my job.”

July 7th, 2003. John Lennon is shot and killed outside of his apartment in New York City. The shooter, a mentally disturbed man named Davis O’Neil, says that he did it “for America and the soldiers.” O’Neil is soon understood to be incapable of forming any especially complex intent and has no significant appreciation of politics. Yoko Ono asks that Beatles fans mourn peacefully. One million people travel to New York City for a candlelight vigil one week after Lennon’s death; a similar vigil in London hosted by McCartney attracts double that number. No violent altercations are reported during these events.

2004. The charitable disbursement of Lennon’s funds not left to his family – estimated to be nearly a billion dollars – begins. Starr, acting as an assistant executor, funds numerous university research projects of all types: environmental sciences, biological, chemistry, physics, “pretty much everything, really… John said “anything that’ll help the human race,” so that’s what I’m trying to do with it.” (Critics complain that Starr favours theoretical physics too greatly; his response is that Lennon felt theoretical sciences wouldn’t get money anywhere else.) McCartney tends to the cultural side of the disbursement, funding thousands of artists, activists and aid charities worldwide.

January 3rd, 2005. Starr, in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, says that “the Beatles are over. You can’t be the Beatles with two Beatles… you might want to go back and do more or do things differently, and I have wanted that of course, but I think if you did that, all that happens is the same things, different ways and different times. We’re just so tiny in the scope of it all; there’s only so much we can do. We had a good run and it’s over.”

December 7, 2005. Apple Records releases Where Do We Go, the final album by the Beatles. The album, only half-complete at the time of Lennon’s death, was finished primarily by McCartney working with the Lennon sons, Zak Starkey and Dhani Harrison. Critics are respectful of the effort but general consensus is that it is, for obvious reasons, a weaker than usual achievement by the band.

May 15, 2006. Starr and McCartney do a rare double interview for Rolling Stone to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the SNL concert. McCartney: “Of course one of the things I strongly advocate for now is research into cancer screening. If Linda had had more warning, if George had had more warning – maybe we could have saved them. But of course in both cases there was no way anybody could have known.” Starr: “If they had, things would be different. Maybe John would still be alive as well. Who’s to say?”

August 3, 2007. Starr, at a dinner with McCartney, acts peculiarly. “He kept on about he wouldn’t bollocks it up like the first bloke. I thought at first he was talking about Pete Best,” McCartney later says. “He said that he’d only had the one warning, and to do it properly you needed a notebook to pass along to the next fellow. Then he laughed and said “well, I guess I’m not a scientist, right? Or I wouldn’t have to do it again to get the fiddly bits.” I didn’t know what he was on about, but he looked happier than I’d seen him in years. I’d been thinking for years that he seemed adrift, sort of. I’d been worrying about him.”

August 11, 2007. Starr’s car is found parked off a roadside in Amesbury. On the dashboard is a letter addressed only to Barbara, his wife. The Starkey family refuses to discuss the contents of the letter with the general public. Ringo Starr is never seen again.