/ SOUNDPROOF / 1

The Soundproof Escape Pod Magazine

Digest 2, Q2 2012 Part of Escape Artists, Inc

Escapepod.org Editor: Mur Lafferty Assistant Editor: Nathaniel Lee Producer: Mat Weller Web Content Editor: Josh Roseman Publisher: Paul Haring Founder: Steve Eley

Creative Commons BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the authors / SOUNDPROOF / 2

Letter from the editor

Dear Faithful Listeners:

It’s been a fantastic quarter, with EP getting back on our feet with a new assistant editor, Nathaniel Lee, and a hard slog through our outstanding slush pile. We had our annual Hugo month, and we were able to feature four of the five nominated stories, and we’ll feature those here, as well. If you want to read John Scalzi’s story, you can see it at Tor.com. The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu, recently won the Nebula Award, and we’ll be featuring another story by Mr. Liu in coming months. Also this quarter we feature work from Catherine M. Valente and Lavie Tidhar, plus some Escape Pod originals! We also celebrated superheroes in June, so look for three awesome costumed stories. Be mighty-

Mur Lafferty [email protected] / SOUNDPROOF / 3

“Run,” Bakri Says by Ferrett Steinmetz

"I just want to know where my brother is," Irena yells at the guards. The English words are thick and slow on her tongue, like honey. She holds her hands high in the air; the gun she's tucked into the back of her pants jabs at her spine.

She doesn't want to kill the soldiers on this iteration; she's never killed anyone before, and doesn't want to start. But unless she can get poor, weak Sammi out of that prison in the next fifty/infinity minutes, they'll start in on him with the rubber hoses and he'll tell them what he's done. And though she loves her brother with all her heart, it would be a blessing then if the Americans beat him to death.

The guards are still at the far end of the street, just before the tangle of barbed wire that bars the prison entrance. Irena stands still, lets them approach her, guns out. One is a black man, the skin around his eyes creased with a habitual expression of distrust; a fringe of white hair and an unwavering aim marks him as a career man. The other is a younger man, squinting nervously, his babyfat face the picture of every new American soldier. Above them, a third soldier looks down from his wooden tower, reaching for the radio at his belt.

She hopes she won't get to know them. This will be easier if all they do is point guns and yell. It'll be just like Sammi's stupid videogames.

"My brother," she repeats, her mouth dry; it hurts to raise her arms after the rough surgery Bakri's done with an X-acto knife and some fishing line. "His name is Sammi Daraghmeh. You rounded him up last night, with many other men. He is - "

Their gazes catch on the rough iron manacle dangling from her left wrist. She looks up, remembers that Bakri installed a button on the tether so she could rewind, realizes the front of her cornflower-blue abayah is splotched with blood from her oozing stitches.

"Wait." She backs away. "I'm not - "

The younger soldier yells, "She's got something!" They open fire. Something tugs at her neck, parting flesh; another crack, and she swallows her own teeth. She tries to talk but her windpipe whistles; her body betrays her, refusing to move as she crumples to the ground, willing herself to keep going. Nothing listens.

This is death, she thinks. This is what it's like to die.

#

"Run," Bakri says, and Irena is standing in an alleyway instead of dying on the street - gravity's all wrong and her muscles follow her orders again. Her arms and legs flail and she topples face-first into a pile of rotting lettuce. The gun Bakri has just pressed into her hands falls to the ground.

Dying was worse than she'd thought. Her mind's still jangled with the shock, from feeling all her nerves shrieking in panic as she died. She shudders in the garbage, trying to regain / SOUNDPROOF / 4 strength.

Bakri picks her up. "What is your goal?" he barks, keeping his voice low so the shoppers at the other end of the grocery store's alleyway don't hear.

Why is he asking me that? she thinks, then remembers: all the others went insane. She wouldn't even be here if Farhouz hadn't slaughtered seventeen soldiers inside the Green Zone.

It takes an effort to speak. "To - to rescue Sammi."

"Good." The tension drains from his face. He looks so relieved that Irena thinks he might burst into tears. "What iteration? You did iterate, right?"

"Two," she says numbly, understanding what his relief means: he didn't know. He'd sent her off to be shot, unsure whether he'd linked her brother's technology to the heart monitor he'd stuck in the gash in her chest. It was supposed to trigger a rewind when her heart stopped. If he'd misconfigured it, Irena's consciousness would have died in an immutable present.

Irena looks back at The Save Point, stashed underneath a pile of crates, a contraption that's totally Sammi; it's several old X-Boxes wired together with rusted antenna and whirligig copper cups, the humming circuitry glowing green. It looks like trash, except for the bright red "<<" arrows Sammi spraypainted onto the side. That, and the fact that it just hauled her consciousness back through time.

Bakri gives her an unapologetic nod: yes, I sent you off to die. "We can't let the Americans get it."

"No," she agrees, then runs out to the street, headed four blocks down to where the prison is. She closes her hands into fists so her fingers don't tremble.

She's been shot. She will be shot again, and again, until she rescues Sammi.

#

"Run," Bakri says, and this time she pushes the tether up around her arm - it's wide enough to slide up over her bicep, underneath her abayah's billowing sleeves - but the guards are panicky. They shoot her when she crosses the chain they've strung across the road to the prison entrance.

God damn you, she thinks. I'm not like Sammi. I don't want to kill you. But they're terrified of what Fahrouz did. He cut the throats of seventeen men before anyone heard him; it's why the Americans rounded up anyone who had any connection to the resistance last night, including her brother. They think Fahrouz was a new breed of super-soldier; they believe any brown face is capable of killing them. But she's just a girl who's never fired a gun, not even in Sammi's stupid videogames.

"Run," Bakri says.

She tries climbing the high fence around the prison, but the barbed wire rips at her hands and the guard on the wooden sniper platform scans the prison every sixty seconds. He is inhuman, never tiring (at least in the fifty minutes she has before The Save Point's power / SOUNDPROOF / 5 fades and she's pulled back to the alleyway) - and his aim is infallible. He introduces her to the horror of her first headshot; when she reappears in the alleyway, her brain patterns are so scrambled she has a seizure.

"Run," Bakri says.

She tries different approaches; she smears her face with blood, yelling there's a shooter in the marketplace. She weeps, approaching as a mourner. She sneaks from the shadows. Anything to avoid killing them. They yell that they have orders to open fire on anyone crossing the line. Though they wince when they pull the trigger, open fire they do.

"Run," Bakri says.

She tries prostrating herself upon the ground. As she kneels to place her hands on the concrete, the tether slides down her arm. The sudden movement causes them to fire.

"Run," Bakri says.

She's getting good at dying, now. The trick is to go slack, so you don't flail upon waking when you rewind. Yet surrendering to her body's shutdown is like dying before she's dead. And every time she returns, Bakri's grabbing her with his sweaty palms, demanding to know her goal.

"Stop it." She slaps his hands away. She shakes the iron bracelet at him; things inside it rattle. "You gave me a tether that looks like a damn bomb. No wonder they're shooting me! You have to restart it - Sammi made a tether you could bite down on, so no one could see - "

"That one broke when they shot Fahrouz in the head," Bakri snaps back. "You're lucky I could build any tether at all. You're lucky I'm here. Everyone else thinks this machine just drives men mad. They want Sammi to die."

The stitches from where Bakri implanted the heart monitor never stop hurting, her gashes always bleeding in the same way. She's always thirsty; her body can never relieve itself as she loops through the same time again and again. She gorges herself on stolen drinks from the marketplace between the alleyway and the prison - but then she's back with Bakri, dryness tickling the back of her throat. Why didn't she drink before Bakri started this? Why didn't anyone tell her to start the Save Point when she was lying down, so she wouldn't keep falling over?

"Run," Bakri says. She wishes she could tell Sammi about her improvements. All this hard- earned knowledge, lost.

It becomes a game of inches. The babyfaced soldier is hair-trigger, ripping her body to shreds the moment anything unexpected happens - oh, Fahrouz, you put the fear of God into these Americans, you were only supposed to steal a laptop - but he's also a softie, arguing with his older compatriot if she's crying. The older black man is hard-edged, by the book; he yells that he will shoot if she comes two steps closer, and he always does.

Sometimes the babyfaced one vomits as she's dying. The soldier on the wooden sniper platform always looks down like a distant God, crossing himself as she bleeds out. Then / SOUNDPROOF / 6

Bakri, asking her what her goal is.

"Run," Bakri says.

She doesn't always die. She can usually get to the button on her wrist. But dying never gets easier. Her mind understands what will happen; her body cannot. No matter how she steels herself for the bullet, her body overwhelms conscious thought with dumb animal terror.

"Run," Bakri says.

She learns to optimize. If she's crying this way to tug on the younger one's emotions, and creeps that way when the older soldier's busy bickering with the young one that they can't help, then how far can she get before they fire? There's a wet newspaper flattened against the street, then a tire track a little further, then a rusty coil of barbed wire next to the entrance. She can get past the newspaper consistently, nearly getting to the tire track before they blow her apart; what can she say that will get her to the barbed wire?

"Run," Bakri says.

Their conversations become monotonous variants: Sir, she needs help. We have orders, soldier. Nothing she can do will make them discuss the weather, or tell her what cell her brother's in, or even smile. Just the same recycled topics, chopped into different words. It reminds her of home, listening to Sammi outwit AI guards and their recycled vocabulary, back when Sammi built bombs and played videogames.

"Run," Bakri says. Now she can always hit the tire track.

Sammi always played videogames. He hated going outside. He got political at thirteen after Mother was blown apart by a smart missile programmed with the wrong coordinates. Even then, Sammi never placed the bombs. He just handed people boxes of death, with instructions where to place them. Irena remembers how he'd tinker with his explosives and then play first-person shooters to relax, as though they were aspects of the same thing.

"Run," Bakri says.

Sammi was a genius with wires. When the Americans jammed the cell phones he used to activate his bombs, Sammi set the bombs to go off fifteen minutes after the cell phone signal cut out. And when the Americans got a jamming device that fuzzed the signal but didn't kill it, he switched to proximity sensors. Then he started working on other sensors - sensors that predicted when people would walk by, sensors that sent signals back to twenty seconds before they were disconnected.

By the time he was seventeen, bombs bored him. He started other experiments.

"Run," Bakri says. Now she's consistently past the tire track, her fingers halfway to the barbed wire.

She'd gotten janitorial jobs for Sammi's volunteers, after they'd finished their trial runs with The Save Point. They made lousy employees. They knocked over cups of coffee and stared at the spill for minutes, then sobbed in relief. / SOUNDPROOF / 7

Irena understands why, now. They were grateful the spill stayed. Something remained changed - unlike her thirst, unlike the gash in her side, unlike the endlessly soft-hearted boy soldier and his hard-assed sergeant.

"Run," Bakri says. Now her fingers always touch the barbed wire. Now she knows how to die.

Now she fires the gun when they're perfectly distracted. She aims for the young one first because he shot her first, it's only fair; the gun's kick almost knocks it from her hands. She fires three more times, gets lucky, the third shot catches him in that babyface, a wet red fountain, and as he tumbles to the ground she laughs because she's no longer scared.

She knows why Fahrouz killed seventeen soldiers. He was just supposed to get a laptop and get out, but how many times was he beaten before he slipped past the spotlights? How long did he endure the fear of being shot before he realized the Save Point erased all consequences? The guards' dumbstruck surprise as she kills them is the repayment for a thousand torments they can never remember.

"Run," Bakri says. She does, now, eagerly. She's going to kill them as many times as they killed her.

#

Irena realizes she's drifting off-mission when she starts shooting Bakri in the face.

She didn't mean to shoot him; it's just that Irena had gone down in a particularly bad firefight with the soldiers, one where they'd shot her left arm before tackling her to the ground, and she'd barely jammed the tether-button against the pavement before they hauled her off to prison. And she'd fallen over again once she'd rewound, and Bakri'd grabbed her and yelled "What is your goal?" and she yelled that her goal was to shut him up and she shot him.

It was a good idea, as it turns out. She needs to shoot well, and firefights aren't a good time for lessons. So when Bakri says "Run," now she walks down the alley, takes aim, and shoots Bakri in the head. The marketplace shrieks when they hear the gun, but she just empties the clip at a garbage can and presses the tether-button.

"Run," Bakri says.

Bakri should be the one running, but he doesn't know. He's always surprised. If her first shot doesn't kill him, he weeps, apologies.

"Run," Bakri says. Then, once she jams the gun into his belly, he blubbers: "I know I should have told you the heartbeat monitor might not work. But you might not have done it then - we can't let Sammi's ideas fall into their hands!"

She doesn't care about that. That was weeks ago.

"You drove him insane, didn't you?" she asks. "He wanted to stop, didn't he?"

"Him who?" Bakri is dumbfounded. Fahrouz was just yesterday for him, and already he's forgotten. She shoots him. / SOUNDPROOF / 8

"Run," Bakri says.

She feels a pang of guilt once she realizes that Bakri might not even know what he did. Yet she knows what happened all the same: they told Fahrouz he had to get the laptop, and condemned him to God knows how many cycles of breaking into the Green Zone until he returned with one. Bakri and Sammi would never have turned it off until Fahrouz brought them results.

The machine doesn't drive people mad. Its controllers do.

"Run," Bakri says.

She tortures Bakri for a while, trying to get him to turn off The Save Point. He won't, and she can't break him in fifty minutes. Bakri knows Sammi will reveal The Save Point's mechanisms once they start in with the serious interrogations. He tells her he'd die a thousand times before he let the Americans have this technology.

"Run," Bakri says.

"Run," Bakri says.

"Run," Bakri says.

Irena gets up to three hundred and seven deaths before she takes Bakri at his word.

She thinks about shooting The Save Point to end it all. But Bakri barely got it working, and Sammi's told her there's a shutdown sequence. What if she unplugs it and everything freezes but her? Her brother's technology is as vicious and unpredictable as Sammi himself. She doesn't dare.

Her aim's improved, though. She stops shooting Bakri and goes off to start in on the soldiers again. She's getting closer; she can catch the sniper on his wooden tower one time out of three now, and she almost always kills hard-ass or babyface. Though she's shot them enough that she thinks it's no longer their fault.

It's the damn machine. It puts them into position like chess pieces. If it wasn't for the machine, they could see the sunset, quench their thirst with lemonade, do something other than be railroaded into a shootout. The machine reduces them to inputs and outputs.

Was Sammi ever angry?

She doesn't think so. That thought slides under her skin like a splinter as she re-runs the four blocks to the prison. When her mother died, Irena didn't have time for anger. She had to feed her family. She hustled pirated DVDs, worked tables, whatever it took. But she cried when no one was looking.

Sammi never cried. He just played videogames and built bombs. She'd yelled at him for playing the Americans' videogames, but he went on about how well-designed they were.

"Run," Bakri says.

As she runs, she remembers a conversation: "Does it ever bother you that your bombs kill / SOUNDPROOF / 9 people?" she'd asked Sammi one night, as he harvested yet another X-Box for parts.

"That's the goal," he agreed, not looking up.

"No, but. what if it kills the wrong people?"

"Bound to happen." He plucked a chip out, held it to the light. "Sometimes, people are in the wrong place."

Irena flushed with anger. "Mother was in the wrong place."

He frowned, seemed to notice her for the first time. "Well, yes." He cocked his head and squinted at her, confused. "She was."

"Run," Bakri says. Those four blocks are getting longer.

She'd told herself she couldn't judge Sammi's genius by the standards of other people. Besides, the bombs paid for their apartment. But now, running, she wonders: did Sammi make bombs to avenge his dead mother? Or was it a convenient excuse to make things that interested him?

"Run," Bakri says. She's always running for Sammi.

And by luck more than skill, she finally shoots all three. Clean headshots. They fall to the ground, the sniper toppling from his roost.

Irena stands over their bodies, dumbfounded. I'm just a girl, she thinks. How did I kill three wary soldiers? Then she remembers how long she's been doing this. Months. Maybe years.

She's almost forgotten what she's supposed to do now. She searches the older soldier's body for the key, praising God that this is just a holding location - a real prison would have thumbprint scanners and cameras - and she wonders why reinforcements aren't charging out of the gates. Then she realizes: this has all taken perhaps ninety seconds in their time. Nobody knows yet.

She flings open the door to see a dank prison lobby in dreary bureaucrat beige, plastic bucket seats and buzzing fluorescent lights and a battered front desk. A receptionist sits at the desk - not a soldier, a local boy in an American uniform, looking strangely out of place. He glances up, surprised, from a phone call.

"Where is Sammi?" She smiles. It's been so long since she had a new conversation.

She aims the gun at him. He puts down the phone.

"S-Sammi?" he stammers. She's surprised he doesn't know already, then remembers this is all new to him. It's a pleasant reminder that the whole world hasn't been reduced to Sammi's Save Point.

"Samuel Daraghmeh."

"He's." He looks it up. "In cell #8." / SOUNDPROOF / 10

"And that is where?"

He points down a hallway with trembling fingers. She presses the gun barrel to his temple, whispers in his ear:

"If you alert anyone, I will kill you every time from now on, and you will never know why." She removes the gun from his holster, shoots the phone. She hears a wet dribble on the tile as he pees himself.

The prisoners see the young girl with the gun walking through the halls. They rise, bruised and bleeding, begging her to save them. Their words are canned. They will say the exact same thing whenever she returns. She ignores them.

The guards inside don't wear bulletproof vests, making this easy. The prisoners cheer as she fires.

And there, bunched in with ten other sweaty, beaten men, is Sammi. He looks miserable; the other men have crowded him out until he's perched on the dog-end of a cot. His lower lip sticks out as he stares at a urine stain in the corner, so concerned with his own fate that he hasn't even noticed the other men cheering. No wonder she has to rescue him. He's supposed to be reclined in a La-Z-Boy, a game controller in hand, not in a place where people actually get hurt.

She motions the other prisoners aside, presses her face against the rusted bars. "Have you ever seen one of your bombs go off?"

He registers the voice, not the words, jumping up with the same boyish thrill he gets whenever he beats a final boss. "Irena!" he shouts, running to the bars. His eyes well with tears of relief.

She unlocks the cell door. "The rest of you run," she tells them. "I need to talk to my brother."

"Irena." Sammi's chest heaves. "I knew you'd come for me."

"Always. But listen. Bakri is dead." That much, she thought, was true; she'd taken to strangling Bakri and burying his body under the garbage as a matter of routine. "How do you shut down the machine?"

"Oh, it's better than I'd thought," he says, eyes shining. "You're a part of my project! How many iterations did it take to get in? A thousand? Two thousand? You must have improvements."

"I do," she agrees. "I want to understand how it works. Tell me how to exit the loop." He does. It's simpler than she'd thought.

She hugs Sammi.

"You did it," she whispers. "Your machine is perfect. It makes an untrained girl into an unstoppable killer."

He squeezes her in triumph. She lets him ride his moment of absolute perfection, judging / SOUNDPROOF / 11 when her brother is happiest. Then she jams the gun against the base of his neck and pulls the trigger.

His face explodes. She clutches his body until it ceases quivering. Then she drops him.

Should she be sorrier? She probes her numbness and feels nothing. She shrugs, starts the walk back to The Save Point to shut it down and dismantle it.

It's not until she gets to the lobby that the tears come. It takes her a moment to understand what's triggering them. From under the desk she can hear the muffled sobbing of the receptionist. He must have hid when the prisoners escaped. She stops long enough to tug him out, struggling, from the desk, then embraces him tightly. He shivers, a frightened bird, as she nuzzles him, wetting his shoulder with tears.

"I don't have to kill you," she says, smelling his hair, feeling his clothes, loving him more than anyone she's ever loved before.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 339, originally released on April 5, 2012 Download audio Read by Mur Lafferty First published in Asimov’s Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 12

Golubash (Wine-Blood-War-Story) by Catherynne M. Valente

The difficulties of transporting wine over interstellar distances are manifold. Wine is, after all, like a child. It can _bruise_. It can suffer trauma—sometimes the poor creature can recover, sometimes it must be locked up in a cellar until it learns to behave itself. Sometimes it is irredeemable. I ask that you greet the seven glasses before you tonight not as simple fermented grapes, but as the living creatures they are, well-brought up, indulged but not coddled, punished when necessary, shyly seeking your approval with clasped hands and slicked hair. After all, they have come so very far for the chance to be loved.

Welcome to the first public tasting of Domaine Zhaba. My name is Phylloxera Nanut, and it is the fruit of my family’s vines that sits before you. Please forgive our humble venue— surely we could have wished for something grander than a scorched pre-war orbital platform, but circumstances, and the constant surveillance of Chatêau Marubouzu-Debrouillard and their soldiers have driven us to extremity. Mind the loose electrical panels and pull up a reactor husk—they are inert, I assure you. Spit onto the floor—a few new stains will never be noticed. As every drop about to pass your lips is wholly, thoroughly, enthusiastically illegal, we shall not stand on ceremony. Shall we begin?

2583 Sud-Cotê-du-Golubash (New Danube)

The colonial ship _Quintessence of Dust_ first blazed across the skies of Avalokitesvara two hundred years before I was born, under the red stare of Barnard’s Star, our second solar benefactor. Her plasma sails streamed kilometers long, like sheltering wings. Simone Nanut was on that ship. She, alongside a thousand others, looked down on their new home from that great height, the single long, unfathomably wide river that circumscribed the globe, the golden mountains prickled with cobalt alders, the deserts streaked with pink salt.

How I remember the southern coast of Golubash, I played there, and dreamed there was a girl on the invisible opposite shore, and that her family, too, made wine and cowered like us in the shadow of the Asociación.

My friends, in your university days did you not study the rolls of the first colonials, did you not memorize their weight-limited cargo, verse after verse of spinning wheels, bamboo seeds, lathes, vials of tailored bacteria, as holy writ? Then perhaps you will recall Simone Nanut and her folly, that her pitiful allotment of cargo was taken up by the clothes on her back and a tangle of ancient Maribor grapevine, its roots tenderly wrapped and watered. Mad Slovak witch they all thought her, patting those tortured, battered vines into the gritty yellow soil of the Golubash basin. Even the Hyphens were sure the poor things would fail. There were only four of them on all of Avalokitesvara, immensely tall, their watery triune faces catching the old red light of Barnard’s flares, their innumerable arms fanned out around their terribly thin torsos like peacock’s tails. Not for nothing was the planet named for a Hindu god with eleven faces and a thousand arms. The colonists called them Hyphens for their way of talking, and for the thinness of their bodies. They did not understand then what you must all know now, rolling your eyes behind your sleeves as your hostess relates ancient history, that each of the four Hyphens was a quarter of the world in a single body, that they were a mere outcropping of the vast intelligences which made up the ecology of Avalokitesvara, like one of our thumbs / SOUNDPROOF / 13 or a pair of lips.

Golubash I knew. To know more than one Hyphen in a lifetime is rare. Officially, the great river is still called the New Danube, but eventually my family came to understand, as all families did, that the river was the flesh and blood of Golubash, the fish his-her-its thoughts, the seaweed his-her-its nerves, the banks a kind of thoughtful skin.

Simone Nanut put vines down into the body of Golubash. He-She-It bent down very low over Nanut’s hunched little form, arms akimbo, and said to her: “That will not work-take-thrive- bear fruit-last beyond your lifetime.”

Yet work-take-thrive they did. Was it a gift to her? Did Golubash make room between what passes for his-her-its pancreas and what might be called a liver for foreign vines to catch and hold? Did he, perhaps, love my ancestor in whatever way a Hyphen can love? It is impossible to know, but no other Hyphen has ever allowed Earth-origin flora to flourish, not Heeminspr the high desert, not Julka the archipelago, not Niflamen, the soft-spoken polar waste. Not even the northern coast of the river proved gentle to grape. Golubash was generous only to Simone’s farm, and only to the southern bank. The mad red flares of Barnard’s Star flashed often and strange, and the grapes pulsed to its cycles. The rest of the colony contented themselves with the native root-vegetables, something like crystalline rutabagas filled with custard, and the teeming rock-geese whose hearts in those barnacled chests tasted of beef and sugar.

In your glass is ‘83 vintage of that hybrid vine, a year which should be famous, would be, if not for rampant fear and avarice. Born on Earth, matured in Golubash. It is 98% Cabernet, allowing for mineral compounds generated in the digestive tract of the Golubash river. Note its rich, garnet-like color, the gravitas of its presence in the glass, the luscious, rolling flavors of blackberry, cherry, peppercorn, and chocolate, the subtle, airy notes of fresh straw and iron. At the back of your tongue, you will detect a last whisper of brine and clarygrass.

The will of Simone Nanut swirls in your glass, resolute-unbroken-unmoveable- stone.

2503 Abbaye de St. CIR, Tranquilité, Neuf-Abymes

Of course, the 2683 vintage, along with all others originating on Avalokitesvara, were immediately declared not only contraband but biohazard by the Asociación de la Pureza del Vino, whose chairman was and is a scion of the Marubouzu clan. The Asociaciónhas never peeked out of the pockets of those fabled, hoary Hokkaido vineyards. When Chatêau Debrouillard shocked the wine world, then relatively small, by allowing their ancient vines to be grafted with Japanese stock a few years before the first of Salvatore Yuuhi’s gates went online, an entity was created whose tangled, ugly tendrils even a Hyphen would call gargantuan.

Nor were we alone in our ban. Even before the first colony on Avalokitesvara, the lunar city of St. Clair-in-Repose, a Catholic sanctuary, had been nourishing its own strange vines for a century. In great glass domes, in a mist of temperature and light control, a cloister of monks, led by Fratre Sebastién Perdue, reared priceless pinot vines and heady Malbecs, their leaves unfurling green and glossy in the pale blue light of the planet that bore them. But monks are perverse, and none moreso than Perdue. In his youth he was content with the classic vines, / SOUNDPROOF / 14 gloried in the precision of the wines he could coax from them. But in his middle age, he committed two sins. The first involved a young woman from Hipparchus, the second was to cut their orthodox grapes with Tsuki-Bellas, the odd, hard little berries that sprang up from the lunar dust when our leashed bacteria had been turned loose in order to make passable farmland, as though they had been waiting, all that time, for a long drink of rhizomes. Their flavor is somewhere between a blueberry and a truffle, and since genetic sequencing proved it to be within the grape family, the monks of St. Clair deemed it a radical source of heretofore unknown wonders.

Hipparchus was a farming village where Tsuki-Bellas grew fierce and thick. It does not due to dwell on Brother Sebastién’s motives.

What followed would be repeated in more and bloodier ways two hundred years hence. Well do I know the song. For Chatêau Marubouzu-Debrouillard and her pet Asociaciónhad partnered with the Coquil-Grollë Corporation in order to transport their wines from Earth to orbiting cities and lunar clusters. Coquil-Grollë, now entirely swallowed by Chatêau M-D, was at the time a soda company with vast holdings in other foodstuffs, but the tremendous weight restrictions involved in transporting unaltered liquid over interlunar space made strange bedfellows. The precious M-D wines could not be dehydrated and reconstituted—no child can withstand such sadism. Therefore, foul papers were signed with what was arguably the biggest business entity in existence, and though it must have bruised the rarified egos of the children of Hokkaido and Burgundy, they allowed their shy, fragile wines to be shipped alongside Super-Cola-nade! and Bloo Bomb. The extraordinary tariffs they paid allowed Coquil-Grollë to deliver their confections throughout the bustling submundal sphere.

The Asociación writ stated that adulterated wines could, at best, be categorized as fruit-wines, silly dessert concoctions that no vintner would take seriously, like apple-melon wine from a foil-sac. Not only that, but no tariffs had been paid on this wine, and therefore Abbe St. Clair could not export it, even to other lunar cities. It was granted that perhaps, if takes of a certain (wildly illegal) percentage were applied to the price of such wines, it might be possible to allow the monks to sell their vintages to those who came bodily to St. Clair, but transporting it to Earth was out of the question at any price, as foreign insects might be introduced into the delicate home terroir. No competition with the house of Debrouillard would be broached, on that world or any other.

Though in general, wine resides in that lofty category of goods which increase in demand as they increase in price, the lockdown of Abbe St. Clair effectively isolated the winery, and their products simply could not be had—whenever a bottle was purchased, a new Asociación tax would be introduced, and soon there was no possible path to profit for Perdue and his brothers. Past a certain point, economics are irrelevant—there was not enough money anywhere to buy such a bottle.

Have these taxes been lifted? You know they have not, sirs. But Domaine Zhaba purchased the ruin of Abbe St. Clair in 2916, and their cellars, neglected, filthy, simultaneously worthless and beyond price, came into our tender possession.

What sparks red and black in the erratic light of the station status screens is the last vintage personally crafted by Fratre Sebastién Perdue. It is 70% Pinot Noir, 15% Malbec, and 15% forbidden, delicate Tsuki-Bella. To allow even a drop of this to pass your lips anywhere but under the Earthlit domes of St. Clair-in-Repose is a criminal act. I know you will keep this in / SOUNDPROOF / 15 mind as you savor the taste of corporate sin.

It is lighter on its feet than the Cotê-du-Golubash, sapphire sparking in the depths of its dark color, a laughing, lascivious blend of raspberry, chestnut, tobacco, and clove. You can detect the criminal fruit—ah, there it is, madam, you have it!—in the mid-range, the tartness of blueberry and the ashen loam of mushroom. A clean, almost soapy waft of green coffee-bean blows throughout. I would not insult it by calling it delicious—it is profound, unforgiving, and ultimately, unforgiven.

2790 Domaine Zhaba, Clos du Saleeng-Carolz, Cuvée Cheval

You must forgive me, madam. My pour is not what it once was. If only it had been my other arm I left on the ochre fields of Centauri B! I have never quite adjusted to being suddenly and irrevocably left-handed. I was fond of that arm—I bit my nails to the quick; it had three moles and a little round birthmark, like a drop of spilled syrah. Shall we toast to old friends? In the war they used to say: go, lose your arm. You can still pour. But if you let them take your tongue you might as well die here.

By the time Simone Nanut and her brood, both human and grape, were flourishing, the Yuuhi gates were already bustling with activity. Though the space between gates was vast, it was not so vast as the spaces between stars. Everything depended on them, colonization, communication, and of course, shipping. Have any of you seen a Yuuhi gate? I imagine not, they are considered obsolete now, and we took out so many of them during the war. They still hang in space like industrial mandalas, titanium and bone—in those days an organic component was necessary, if unsavory, and we never knew whose marrow slowly yellowed to calcified husks in the vacuum. The pylons bristled with oblong steel cubes and arcs of golden filament shot across the tain like violin bows—all the gold of the world commandeered by Salvatore Yuuhi and his grand plan. How many wedding rings hurled us all into the stars? I suppose one or two of them might still be functional. I suppose one or two of them might still be used by poor souls forced underground, if they carried contraband, if they wished not to be seen.

The 2790 is a pre-war vintage, but only just. The Asociación de la Pureza del Vino, little more than a paper sac Chatêau Marubouzu-Debrouillard pulled over its head, had stationed… well, they never called them soldiers, nor warships, but they were not there to sample the wine. Every wine producing region from Luna to the hydroponic orbital agri-communes, found itself graced with inspectors and customs officials who wore no uniform but the curling M-D seal on their breasts. Every Yuuhi gate was patrolled by armed ships bearing the APV crest. It wasn’t really necessary. Virtually all shipping was conducted under the aegis of the Coquil-Grollë Corporation, so fat and clotted with tariffs and taxes that it alone could afford to carry whatever a heart might desire through empty space. There were outposts where Super Cola-nade! was used in the Eucharist, so great was their influence. Governments rented space in their holds to deliver diplomatic envoys, corn, rice, even mail, when soy-paper letters sent via Yuuhi became terribly fashionable in the middle of the century. You simply could not get anything if C-G did not sell it to you, and the only wine they sold was Marubouzu-Debrouillard.

I am not a mean woman. I will grant that though they boasted an extraordinary monopoly, the Debrouillard wines were and are of exceptional quality. Their pedigrees will not allow them to be otherwise. But you must see it from where we stand. I was born on Avalokitesvara and / SOUNDPROOF / 16 never saw Earth till the war. They were forcing foreign, I daresay alien liquors onto us when all we wished to do was to drink from the land which bore us, from Golubash, who hovered over our houses like an old radio tower, fretting and wringing his-her-its hundred hands.

Saleeng-Carolz was a bunker. It looked like a pleasant cloister, with lovely vines draping the walls and a pretty crystal dome over quaint refectories and huts. It had to. The Asociacióninspectors would never let us set up barracks right before their eyes. I say us, but truly I was a not more than a child. I played with Golubash—with the quicksalmon and the riverweed that were no less him than the gargantuan thin man who watched Simone Nanut plant her vines three centuries past and helped my uncles pile up the bricks of Saleeng- Carolz. Hyphens do not die, any more than continents do.

We made weapons and stored wine in our bunker. Bayonets at first, and simple rifles, later compressed-plasma engines and rumblers. Every other barrel contained guns. We might have been caught so easily, but by then, everything on Avalokitesvara was problematic in the view of the Asociacion. The grapes were tainted, not even entirely vegetable matter, being grown in living Golubash. In some odd sense they were not even grown, but birthed, springing from his-her-its living flesh. The barrels, too, were suspect, and none more so than the barrels of Saleeng-Carolz.

Until the APV inspectors arrived, we hewed to tradition. Our barrels were solid cobalt alder, re-cedar, and oakberry. Strange to look at for an APV man, certainly, gleaming deep blue or striped red and black, or pure white. And of course they were not really wood at all, but the fibrous musculature of Golubash, ersatz, loving wombs. They howled biohazard, but we smacked our lips in the flare-light, savoring the cords of smoke and apple and blood the barrels pushed through our wine. But in Saleeng-Carolz, my uncle, Grel Nanut, tried something new.

What could be said to be Golubash’s liver was a vast flock of shaggy horses—not truly horses, but something four-legged and hoofed and tailed that was reasonably like a horse— that ran and mated on the open prairie beyond the town of Nanut. They were essentially hollow, no organs to speak of, constantly taking in grass and air and soil and fruit and fish and water and purifying it before passing it industriously back into the ecology of Golubash.

Uncle Grel was probably closer to Golubash than any of us. He spent days talking with the tall, three-faced creature the APV still thought of as independent from the river. He even began to hyphenate his sentences, a source of great amusement. We know now that he was learning. About horses, about spores and diffusion, about the life-cycle of a Hyphen but then we just thought Grel was in love. Grel first thought of it, and secured permission from Golubash, who bent his ponderous head and gave his assent-blessing-encouragement- trepidation-confidence. He began to bring the horses within the walls of Saleeng-Carolz, and let them drink the wine deep, instructing them to hold it close for years on end.

In this way, the rest of the barrels were left free for weapons.

This is the first wine closed up inside the horses of Golubash: 60% Cabernet, 20% Syrah, 15% Tempranillo, 5% Petit Verdot. It is specifically banned by every planet under APV control, and possession is punishable by death. The excuse? Intolerable biological contamination.

This is a wine that swallows light. Its color is deep and opaque, mysterious, almost black, the / SOUNDPROOF / 17 shadows of closed space. Revel in the dance of plum, almond skin, currant, pomegranate. The musty spike of nutmeg, the rich, buttery brightness of equine blood and the warm, obscene swell of leather. The last of the pre-war wines—your execution in a glass.

2795 Domaine Zhaba, White Tara, Bas-Lequat

Our only white of the evening, the Bas-Lequat is an unusual blend, predominately Chardonnay with sprinklings of Tsuki-bella and Riesling, pale as the moon where it ripened.

White Tara is the second moon of Avalokitesvara, the first being enormous Green Tara. Marubouzu-Debrouillard chose it carefully for their first attack. My mother died there, defending the alder barrels. My sister lost her legs.

Domaine Zhaba had committed the cardinal sin of becoming popular, and that could not be allowed. We were not poor monks on an isolated moon, orbiting planet-bound plebeians. Avalokitesvara has four healthy moons and dwells comfortably in a system of three habitable planets, huge new worlds thirsty for rich things, and nowhere else could wine grapes grow. For awhile Barnarders had been eager to have wine from home, but as generations passed and home became Barnard’s System, the wines of Domaine Zhaba were in demand at every table, and we needed no glittering Yuuhi gates to supply them. The APV could and did tax exports, and so we skirted the law as best we could. For ten years before the war began, Domaine Zhaba wines were given out freely, as “personal” gifts, untaxable, untouchable. Then the inspectors descended, and stamped all products with their little Prohibido seal, and, well, one cannot give biohazards as birthday presents.

The whole thing is preposterous. If anything, Earth-origin foodstuffs are the hazards in Barnard’s System. The Hyphens have always been hostile to them, offworld crops give them a kind of indigestion that manifests in earthquakes and thunderstorms. The Marubouzu corporals told us we could not eat or drink the things that grew on our own land, because of possible alien contagion! We could only order approved substances from the benevolent, carbonated bosom of Coquil-Grollë, which is Chatêau Marubouzu-Debrouillard, which is the Asociación de la Pureza del Vino, and anything we liked would be delivered to us all the way from home, with a bow on it.

The lunar winery on White Tara exploded into the night sky at 3:17 am on the first of Julka, 2795. My mother was testing the barrels—her bones were vaporized before she even understood the magnitude of what had happened. The aerial bombing, both lunar and terrestrial, continued past dawn. I was huddled in the Bas-Lequat cellar, and even there I could hear the screaming of Golubash, and Julka, and Heeminspr, and poor, gentle Niflamen, as the APV incinerated our world.

Two weeks later, Uncle Grel’s rumblers ignited our first Yuuhi gate.

The color is almost like water, isn’t it? Like tears. The ripple of red pear and butterscotch slides over green herbs and honey-wax. In the low-range you can detect the delicate dust of blueberry pollen, and beneath that, the smallest suggestion of crisp lunar snow, sweet, cold, and vanished.

2807 Domaine Zhaba, Grelport, Hul-Nairob

Did you know, almost a thousand years ago, the wineries in Old France were nearly wiped / SOUNDPROOF / 18 out? A secret war of soil came close to annihilating the entire apparatus of wine-making in the grand, venerable valleys of the old world. But no blanketing fire was at fault, no shipping dispute. Only a tiny insect: Daktulosphaira Vitifoliae Phylloxera. My namesake. I was named to be the tiny thing that ate at the roots of the broken, ugly, ancient machinery of Marubouzu. I have done my best. For awhile, the French believed that burying a live toad beneath the vines would cure the blight. This was tragically silly, but hence Simone Nanut drew her title: zhaba, old Slovak for toad. We are the mite that brought down gods, and we are the cure, warty and bruised though we are.

When my Uncle Grel was a boy, he went fishing in Golubash. Like a child in a fairy tale, he caught a great green fish, with golden scales, and when he pulled it into his little boat, it spoke to him.

Well, nothing so unusual about that. Golubash can speak as easily from his fish-bodies as from his tall-body. The fish said: “I am lonely-worried-afraid-expectant-in need of comfort- lost-searching-hungry. Help-hold-carry me.”

After the Bas-Lequat attack, Golubash boiled, the vines burned, even Golubash’s tall-body was scorched and blistered, but not broken, not wholly. Vineyards take lifetimes to replace, but Golubash is gentle, and they will return, slowly, surely. So Julka, so Heeminspr, so kind Niflamen. The burnt world will flare gold again. Grel knew this, and he sorrowed that he would never see it. My uncle took one of the great creature’s many hands. He made a promise —we could not hear him then, but you must all now know what he did, the vengeance of Domaine Zhaba.

The Yuuhi gates went one after another. We became terribly inventive—I could still, with my one arm, assemble a rumbler from the junk of this very platform. We tried to avoid Barnard’s gate, we did not want to cut ourselves off in our need to defend those worlds against marauding vintners with soda-labels on their jump-suits. But in the end, that, too, went blazing into the sky, gold filaments sizzling. We were alone. We didn’t win; we could never win. But we ended interstellar travel for fifty years, until the new ships with internal Yuuhi- drives circumvented the need for the lost gates. And much passes in fifty years, on a dozen worlds, when the mail can’t be delivered. They are not defeated, but they are…humbled.

An M-D cruiser trailed me here. I lost her when I used the last gate-pair, but now my cousins will have to blow that gate, or else those soda-sipping bastards will know our methods. No matter. It was worth it, to bring our wines to you, in this place, in this time, finally, to open our stores as a real winery, free of them, free of all.

This is a port-wine, the last of our tastings tonight. The vineyards that bore the Syrah and Grenache in your cups are wonderful, long streaks of soil on the edges of a bridge that spans the Golubash, a thousand kilometers long. There is a city on that bridge, and below it, where a chain of linked docks cross the water. The maps call it Longbridge; we call it Grelport. Uncle Grel will never come home. He went through Barnard’s Gate just before we detonated, and he was gone. Home, to Earth, to deliver-safeguard-disseminate-help-hold-carry his cargo. A little spore, not much more than a few cells scraped off a blade of clarygrass on Golubash’s back. But it was enough.

Note the luscious ruby-caramel color, the nose of walnut and roasted peach. This is pure / SOUNDPROOF / 19

Avalokitesvara, unregulated, stored in Golubash’s horses, grown in the ports floating on his - her-its spinal fluid, rich with the flavors of home. They used to say wine was a living thing— but it was only a figure of speech, a way of describing liquid with changeable qualities. This wine is truly alive, every drop, it has a name, a history, brothers and sisters, blood and lymph. Do not draw away—this should not repulse you. Life, after all, is sweet, lift your glasses, taste the roving currents of sunshine and custard, salt skin and pecan, truffle and carmelized onion. Imagine, with your fingers grazing these fragile stems, Simone Nanut, standing at the threshold of her colonial ship, the Finnish desert stretching out behind her, white and flat, strewn with debris. In her ample arms is that gnarled vine, its roots wrapped with such love. Imagine Sebastién Perdue, tasting a Tsuki-Bella for the first time, on the tongue of his Hipparchan lady. Imagine my uncle Grel, speeding alone in the dark towards his ancestral home, with a few brief green cells in his hand. Wine is a story, every glass. A history, an elegy. To drink is to hear the story, to spit is to consider it, to hold the bottle close to your chest is to accept it, to let yourself become part of it. Thank you for becoming part of my family’s story.

I will leave you now. My assistant will complete any transactions you wish to initiate. Even in these late days it is vital to stay ahead of them, despite all. They will always have more money, more ships, more bile. Perhaps a day will come when we can toast you in the light, in a grand palace, with the flares of Barnard’s Star glittering in cut crystal goblets. For now, there is the light of the exit hatch, dusty glass tankards, and my wrinkled old hand to my heart.

A price list is posted in the med lab.

And should any of you turn Earthwards in your lovely new ships, take a bottle to the extremely tall young lady-chap-entity living-growing-invading-devouring-putting down roots in the Loire Valley. I think he-she-it would enjoy a family visit.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 340, originally released on April 12, 2012 Download audio Read by Marguerite Croft First published in Federations Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 20

Aphrodisia By Lavie Tidhar

It began, in a way, with the midget hunchback tuk-tuk driver.

It was a night in the cool season...

The stars shone like cold hard semi-precious stones overhead. Shadows moved across the face of the moon. The beer place was emptying –

Ban Watnak where fat mosquitoes buzzed, lazily, across neon-lit faces. Thai pop playing too loudly, cigarette smoke rising the remnants of ghosts, straining to escape Earth’s atmosphere.

In the sky flying lanterns looked like tracer bullets, like fireflies. The midget hunchback tuk- tuk driver said, ‘Where are you going -?’ mainlining street speed and ancient wisdom.

Tone: ‘Where are you going?”

The driver sat on the elevated throne of his vehicle and contemplated the question as if his life depended on it. ‘Over there,’ he said, gesturing. Then, grudgingly – ‘Not far.’

But it was far enough for us.

Tone and Bejesus and me made three: Tone with the hafmek body, all spray-painted metal chest and arms, Victorian-style goggles hiding his eyes, a scarf in the colours of a vanished football team around his neck – it was cold. It was Earth cold, not real – there was no dial you could turn to make it go away. Bejesus not speaking, a fragile low-gravity body writhing with nervous energy despite the unaccustomed weight – Bejesus in love with this planet Earth, a long way away from his rock home in space.

Tone, in Asteroid Pidgin: ‘Yumi go lukaotem ol gel.’

‘No girls,’ I said. Tone smirked. Bejesus danced on the spot, nervous, excited, it was hard to tell. Tone said: ‘Boy, girl, all same.’

Bejesus, to the driver: ‘I dig your body work, man.’

Tone shaking his head. ‘Dumb ignorant rock-worm,’ he said, but with affection.

The hunchback midget tuk-tuk driver grinned, said, ‘You come with me, no pay. Free tuk- tuk!’

‘Best offer we’re going to get,’ Tone said, and I nodded. Bejesus passed me a pill. I dry- swallowed. The floating lanterns seemed larger then, like warm eyes blinking high above. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. My heart was beating too fast. ‘Hungry and horny and a long way from home,’ Tone said – a bad poet in hafmek armour.

We went.

# / SOUNDPROOF / 21

Piled at the back of a solar-powered tuk-tuk at night, Aphrodisia tunes blaring out, blurring my careful composure – Aphrodisia, the Upload Deity, queen of no-space – Aphrodisia who loved me and fucked me and sang to me and left me – left everything and everyone behind. She was everywhere now, goddess bitch, and I cried and the tears were multicoloured in rust and acid-rain. Bejesus, the tentacle-junkie, wrapped his arms around me, and even Tone patted me on the back, there, there, awkwardly.

I shrugged them off. Nest-brothers, we shared a hub in Tong Yun City years before, the asteroid-worm and the orbital hafmek and me – shared food and drugs and sex and minds – but we were younger then, on Mars.

Earth is different to anything you can imagine.

Picture a globe, a blue-green world... more base-level humans than anywhere else in the worlds. There are no protocols! Everything’s unchecked, with no controls, even the weather doesn’t obey a simple command. It’s a strange place... a big place... they still do things the old way on Earth.

‘Turn that shit off!’ Tone, bass-voice rumbling like distant thunder – the tuk-tuk driver turning, sickly grin in place around a cigarette – ‘Aphrodisia number one!’

‘My friend don’t like it!’

Hunchbacked shoulders shrug, a ‘Fuck you,’ as clear as any network broadcast. Aphrodisia singing of love and sweat and blood and rain, the pure clean rain of Polyport, on distant Titan.

‘Aphrodisia, can you hear me –?’ my voice small and lost, the artificial wind cold, cold on my exposed skin – Bejesus waving tentacles and munching on a speed-squid slice, suckers opening and closing in time with the tune. Aphrodisia, singing – ‘I loved you and I left you and now I no longer know – what name you cried in the dark –‘

‘Your name,’ I say, or try to. Tone pats me on the back again, there, there, the tuk-tuk shoots forward, a blur of music and rushing lights – so many people out in these un-domed streets, the shadows of the giant spiders moving high above, across their moon – music and lights and people calling out greetings – the tuk-tuk halts with a smooth silent swerve and the midget hunchback tuk-tuk driver says, ‘We there.’

‘Me like,’ Tone says, a hafmek of simple tastes and means. Bejesus’s tentacles wave in ecstasy – he, too, approves.

And me?

Before Aphrodisia I was base-level too – more or less. Looking in a mirror – which I try not to do any more – I am a tall, pale, willowy figure. Lunar-born, not the small pathetic Earth one, home to spiders, but the majestic ones of Jupiter, the Galilean moons with a view of the rings... holes are punctured through my arms and legs, my chest and thighs. Sockets, sockets, even my sex had been removed to make another interface available. Unplugged I feel an alien, alone, afraid. Plugged in to a Conch in the no-gravity of space, I become the hub, the nucleus, the focal point of convergence; I become an intersection of data-streams, my fleshbot existence erased as irrelevant – I become pure data, without physicality – the only / SOUNDPROOF / 22 place where I can meet her, still.

But they took me off the cables and they barred me from that pure wide ocean, and when I cried and fought and tried to kill they restrained me, and pumped me with drugs, and plugged all my sockets to stop me from going back. I scratched and I bit and I tried to chew my own flesh off, but they were too strong, they were concerned for me, and they left me in rehab until the worst of it was over.

But it is never over. And as we got off that tuk-tuk on Earth, Vientiane, that city reaching for the stars and failing, there in the Mekong Valley, I felt the shakes coming on and bit my lips until I drew blood – which was enough, it simply was not enough, not while Aphrodisia was singing, singing all around me, singing –

‘You will never know – what it is like – to be everywhere, everywhere – at once –‘

And suddenly Bejesus was wrapping tentacles around me again and the tuk-tuk driver’s grin dropped to the pavement and Tone boomed out in Asteroid Pidgin, ‘Leggo, leggo! Bae yumi pati nao!’

Let it go, let it go – let’s party now!

And so I nodded and grinned and shook (only a little) and we followed our new Earth friend who had not even a node to broadcast out his name, just a little Earth fellow with a hunchback not even paid for, towards the lights – the songs and music, the beer and smokes, the guys and girls – towards the lights.

#

The Monstrous Feminine: Ban Don Pamai, late at night, the party in full swing – the girls flocked around Bejesus, tentacle-groupies reaching out to squeeze and touch – Tone in a corner talking hushed protocols with a robo-girl – the tuk-tuk driver dozing in the corner, happy smile, a bong on the table beside him – Aphrodisia’s music filling the air like a second layer of atmosphere.

‘I swore off sex,’ an American told me – a type of Earthman from another continent. Bald- headed, an animal-leather jacket draped over broad shoulders. ‘Makes you do crazy things.’

But it was never about the sex, with Aphrodisia. It was about love.

‘Love is just another word for sex,’ the American said.

I said: ‘What do you know?”

It must have come across strong. He pulled back, raised his arms. ‘Take it easy, buddy,’ he said.

But I didn’t know how to take it easy.

I needed a fix. There were Vietnamese dolls on the street and there were guys selling Plateau and weed and opium – The Monstrous Feminine a building of bamboo and concrete, the party building up, someone set up a miniature battle arena on the floor and set two blobs of Chinese nano-goo fighting – people taking bets, people hooking up, people high, people low, / SOUNDPROOF / 23 people – Earth was chockfull of people, too many people, and there was only one I wanted, and she wasn’t human any more.

I needed a fix.

No one was paying me any attention. Bejesus had slunk away to a dark corner. Tone was motionless with his robo-girl friend – talking or fucking, you could never tell with the meks. Aphrodisia was singing all around me – ‘When the dark rains came, you washed away forever –‘

You could do anything on Earth. too many people, no way to control them all. I needed a majik man. I needed a voodoo man. I needed a wizard, a black-list operator, a back-street fixer. And this was a back street if ever there was one.

#

It didn’t take long – though longer than I liked. Searching the crowd for tell-tale signs: thin bodies in too many clothes, hiding the plugs, the self-mutilation of love – we were people like thin wires, taut and easy to break, and always hungry – followed a girl with a black eye- patch over her left eye, deeper down the street, towards the back alleys, sleepy hollows of bamboo and bricks, frangipani and jasmine on the night’s winds –

The One Way Ticket looked like a gamers’ zone from the outside, dripping neon light and the sound of explosions, guns going full blast – zombie kids inside strapped into warrior gear, a far away look in their deadened eyes, but this was just a front –

Deeper into the shop and through an unmarked door – no one tried to stop me. I saw the girl remove her eye-patch – nothing below but a gaping hole. Masses of writhing cables bursting out of a white-painted wall. She took the end of a thick cable and rammed it into her eye and was still.

I needed it, needed it bad. It was quiet here, too quiet, but I could still hear Aphrodisia’s singing. She always sang to me. For me. I had that, at least, even when she took everything else.

A Jack put up his hand – politely. ‘Mister, you want in?’

I said, ‘I want in.’

He nodded, sadly. ‘You have socket?’

I took off my coat. Underneath it I was naked. My socket-riddled body, perforated with holes. He cast a critical eye. ‘All blocked,’ he said, the same sad voice. I said, ‘Give me a knife.’

I scraped out goo and blood and bones and opened up – one, two – at three he stopped me, said, ‘Enough. The bandwidth not good too much. Two is plenty –‘

I scowled but let him lead me, by the hand. Cables sprouting from the wall – direct access, pure shit, not like nodes on the edge of vision... he selected two and I rammed them in. / SOUNDPROOF / 24

I screamed.

#

They call the first spray sitsit blong data, in the same way the ocean’s spray is called sitsit blong solwota – the shit of the sea. Man, it was beautiful shit.

It hit me in waves – hovering closer to the nexus, rushing through – the rush took me, lifted me, shot me forward – her voice in the distance, murmuring words – she was everywhere, a hundred thousand fragments of Aphrodisia. She was on Jettisoned and she was in Polyport, she was in Tong Yun and she was in the lonely longhouses of the asteroid belt – she was on Luna and she was on Earth and she was everywhere in between. How many of them are there? No one knows. They are not like Others, those alien, digital intelligences St. Cohen bred, so long ago, in his Breeding Grounds. They are not like Vietnamese dolls, with a rudimentary expert system built into an android body, and they are not like Dragon, who is a mix of both. They were human, once, but now they weren’t, they were floating in the no- space of everywhere – ol devel blong spes, they called them, devel meaning spirit, ghost – a vui in the old tongue of the islands.

I didn’t care about the others. I cared only for her.

Floating, floating in the sea of no-space... you can’t describe it, so I won’t. I was waiting for her, calling out to her, fashioning around me a shrine of black nothingness, a temple of despair.

‘Aphrodisia,’ I said.

Her song came through the blackened sea: ‘So long ago, I wasn’t real, I was a thing of flesh and blood –‘

‘Enough, enough,’ I murmured, singing, ‘so long ago, when time was love –‘ / SOUNDPROOF / 25

‘But now I am, and everything – is cast aglow, is made anew –‘

‘So go, so leave, you mortal thing, a boy who dares look at his queen –‘

‘Aphrodisia, I need –!’

She whispered through me; and was gone.

#

They found me lying on the ground – the sun was rising in the skies. If I was cold I didn’t know it. My coat was gone. My open sockets bled – the cables missing. So was the Jack. The One Way Ticket shut. The open socket of my groin cried tears of puss and blood.

‘You’re fucking sad.’

Tone, tin man monster, hafmek, friend, towering above me. Bejesus writhing on the ground, in fear or ecstasy, it was never easy to tell. ‘I saw her, Tone. I told her –‘

‘You told her shit,’ he said – but not unkindly.

They had the tuk-tuk driver with them. His dopey smile welcomed the day. ‘We thought it would be better, here,’ Tone said. I tried to smile, and failed. ‘Screw Earth,’ the tin man said, ‘let’s go back up, to pure clean space.’

‘She’ll always be there,’ Bejesus said – the rock-worm’s words ached in my head.

‘She told me she was going,’ I said, trying to remember. / SOUNDPROOF / 26

Bejesus: ‘Going where?’

‘Beyond no-space,’ I said, and shivered.

‘There’s no such place.’

Yet she was gone. I couldn’t hear the music. A blackness where memory should be. How will I find it? There were no maps beyond the holes...

‘We brought you some clothes,’ Tone said. They helped me up. They dressed me. The midget hunchbacked tuk-tuk driver said, ‘I take you home. No pay –‘

We went.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 341, originally released on April 19, 2012 Download audio Read by Alasdair Stuart First published in Strange Horizons Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 27

Certus Per Bellum (Decided By War) By S. Hutson Blount

"It's quiet outside," Nohaile said, trying to find a comfortable way to sit in his armor suit. "Are you sure it's started?"

"It'll get plenty loud," said the girl. She was armored only in a ratty sweatshirt and a patched bib coverall. She'd entered the bunker with a vest and some sensible-looking boots, but promptly removed them. Her bare feet made her look about twelve years old. "For right now," she continued after some rapid two-thumb typing on her hand console, "we got time to kill."

"Miz Bamboo, do you think we can win?" Nohaile had a matching helmet to go with his armor. He felt foolish either leaving it off or putting it on, so it worried in his hands.

The girl laughed a little. It didn't reach her eyes. "There's no 'miz.' Bamboo is my handle, not my name."

"I'm sorry."

"No worries. And yeah, we can win. The other guy hired cheap."

Bamboo kept looking at the display on her console, checking through her seemingly-infinite pockets and producing unidentifiable items to inspect and disappear again. Everything she carried seemed dirty but functional.

Nohaile looked down at his shiny armor suit and was ashamed.

"So, when do I get the story?" Bamboo asked.

"I thought you said you didn't care about the circumstances of the lawsuit." She'd been very clear on that point. Rude, even.

"I don't. But every client has to tell. You care enough about whatever this disagreement is to put your ass on the line. You might as well get it over with."

"I don't want to burden you while you're…" He gestured at her control pad, blinking and murmuring to itself on the concrete floor beside her.

She'd produced a handgun hidden somewhere in that shapeless coverall, a considerable- looking piece of artillery. To Nohaile's inexperienced eyes, it looked like it would break her wrists if fired.

Bamboo stopped disassembling it and looked at him more pointedly. "Where did you say you were from, again?"

"Baltimore," Nohaile said. "Before that, Dire Dawa. In Ethiopia," he added, because he knew he would have to.

"They grow 'em polite in Ethiopia, I guess. Burden away. When something happens, I / SOUNDPROOF / 28 promise I'll take care of it." She grinned at him, freckles behind straw-colored bangs.

Nohaile set his streamlined, buglike helmet beside him. "It was a patent infringement case. Originally, I mean. I had tried to interest

VesterDyne in my extrusion bearing process. Shortly after the first round of presentations, they cancelled the exploratory contract. They said they'd found another source with a similar product. I knew it couldn't be similar, I had a patent."

Bamboo test-fitted a cartridge the length of her hand into one of the gun's three barrels, frowned, and kept cleaning.

"I looked into it after the press release," he continued, emotion creeping in to his voice. "It was exactly the same. They didn't even bother to disguise it. Their source was one of their own engineers, one of the ones who had reviewed my proposal."

"That's this Sintov guy?" She'd been paying attention after all.

"Yes. Niklaus Sintov."

"He stole your bearing design and shafted you for your payment." She put her hand-cannon away, finally satisfied. Was it a flare gun?

"Not a design for the bearing itself, a manufacture process improvement for making them."

"Is that really worth fighting over?"

His eyes grew distant. "It's saving them about three million a year, in materials and time."

"Wow," Bamboo said, in distinctly non-wow tones. "I may be in the wrong racket. So, the lawsuit didn't go how you'd hoped."

"No. Sintov quit VesterDyne and I had to sue him personally. He had some documents stating that I'd stolen the process from him and tried to patent it."

Bamboo nodded. "There was a countersuit brewing, and you took certus per bellum."

"My attorney advised it," Nohaile said, feeling trapped all over again. "Sintov accepted. The judge just seemed glad to be rid of us.

I'd be ruined if I lost, or even if I won after a drawn-out trial."

"Yeah, that's how we in the champion racket stay in business."

"My attorney, he— he recommended you."

"Artie's good people. He knows not to send clients to crap outfits like your friend there hired."

"My friend?" / SOUNDPROOF / 29

"Sintov. The guy in the other bunker."

"He is definitely not my friend. He's a thief!"

Bamboo raised a hand in defense. "Just an expression."

"He is a coward besides. He's not in the other bunker, he sent his new wife."

Bamboo's feigned interest was instantly replaced by laser-like focus. "What do you mean, 'new wife?'"

"Sintov was married during the course of the suit, about two weeks ago. The lawyers said it was legal for her to take his place."

"Oh, it is. It's just-" She dug in her pockets again, produced a ruggedized phone. "Office," she said to it.

The phone clicked, and a tinny voice said, "Bam, I thought you were on today."

Bamboo set down the phone and took up her control terminal again. "I am, Zats. It's started. Look up the case file for me, quick."

"Which case file?"

"The one I'm on! No-hile." She looked up at Nohaile. "What was your first name again? Wendell?"

"Wendimu," Nohaile said, not bothering to correct her pronunciation of his last name. She got closer than most.

"Wendimu Nohaile," Bamboo repeated. "And fast, they're moving."

Nohaile could see symbols moving on what he recognized was a topographic map on her terminal's screen. He started to put on his helmet, but stopped when he noticed Bamboo wasn't armoring back up.

"Okay, I found it," said the phone. "I've sent it to your phone."

"Don't have time to read, Zats. That's why you're on speaker. Hit me the highlights in the hostage section." Bamboo's thumbs were moving very rapidly now, tapping both screen and buttons harder than Nohaile thought one should. Her head shook occasionally.

"It's his wife," said the phone. "Amberlee Sintov. Newlyweds, looks like."

"I got that far, Zats. Is it legal?"

There were popping noises outside, loud enough to be heard through the concrete. Nohaile put his helmet on. / SOUNDPROOF / 30

#

Six army-surplus scout robots sat low in the desert scrub, compound wheels drawn up to let their chassis rest on the dust. Remnants of pixilated camouflage paint had faded to a splotchy gray-green that matched the sage around them. With only camera eyes and the slender barrels of automatic cannon visible, they scanned and waited for their enemy.

A converted bulldozer was afire already, too large to hide and its tool-steel 'dozer blade inadequate to stop thirty-millimeter tungsten slugs.

The robots identified another luckless opponent, composed mainly of golf cart and lawnmower parts, as it struggled out of the arroyo that bisected State Battlefield Twelve.

They waited. They'd received no orders to move, and their own dim intelligences were patient.

#

The disembodied voice of Zats cut in again. "Nevada marriage license. Court tagged it. It's legit."

"Does it say who Sintov's lawyer is?"

The phone paused. "Gregory Young. From the firm of Young, Van Ness, and Shabahangi."

Bamboo shook her head some more, not taking her eyes off the terminal. "Never heard of them."

"They're-" Nohaile started to say, then remembered to lift his helmet visor. "They're the same firm that represents VesterDyne."

Bamboo looked at him as if she'd never seen him before. "Thanks, Zats," she said after a moment. "Stay close by the phone." The phone went dark again. "Wendell-"

"Wendimu."

Bamboo visibly bit back her response, took a breath, then continued. "Is there a reason why this Sintov guy would hire a hot-shit law firm, agree to a per bellum decision, and then hire total amateur dipshits to fight for him?"

"I… I could not say…" Nohaile's English was failing him. He had to calm down and think.

"These guys are sending garage-built robots at us. This isn't a champion firm I'm facing here, this is a street gang that's been to shop class. They aren't even sophisticated enough to have networked controls. There are twelve live operators on the field out there."

#

The former golf cart/mower had followed the arroyo for much of its length, seeking a shallower grade. It was sophisticated enough to have a camera on an extensible mast, allowing the remote operator to take bearings above the limited horizon of the gully, as well as watch for enemy action. It also had a rack full of spigot mortars, homemade and short- / SOUNDPROOF / 31 ranged, but throwing enough explosive to be dangerous. No attempt at camouflage had been made; what skin the machine had was decorated with spray-painted flames.

Behind it came a rustling crunch as a scout robot slid down the arroyo's steep bank, its wheels-of-wheels and active suspension sure-footed on the loose gravel. It stabilized itself behind the scrambling homebuilt machine, turret whipping around to bear on it.

#

There were more popping noises. Nohaile looked around in horror, as if he could see the fighting through the bunker's walls. "I thought only one other person was allowed inside, besides the-" He couldn't bring himself to use the word hostage. "-the party to the suit."

"Minimum of one. You can bring as many as you want, but nobody does, because it's dangerous. These punks can't afford to automate. This won't even make good TV." She turned her attention back to her terminal for a brief flurry of tapping. "Anyway," she continued, "it doesn't add up."

"Why would he send his wife," Nohaile wailed. "Why would he send her, if he was sure to lose?"

"I just asked you, remember?"

Nohaile wanted to hold his head in his hands, but holding his helmet just felt stupid. "It isn't right," he said, rocking back and forth. "It isn't right."

"Goddamn straight, it isn't right," Bamboo agreed, sweeping up her clamshell armor vest and latching it on. She stepped into her boots, which automatically hinged shut around her step and sealed themselves. "Somebody's up to something."

"Bamboo," said Nohaile, recovering himself, "what did you mean earlier about being 'good TV'?"

"Not good TV. Nobody wants to watch amateurs get their bots trashed by professionals. Well, I take that back. Some of the raw feed from this fight will wind up somewhere on the 'net. Set to music, probably." Bamboo wasn't looking up at him, engrossed in images flashing on her handheld.

"Even if people die?"

"Especially if people die. Selling broadcast franchise to the battlefields pays for the upkeep and then some."

"I only wanted what they owed me for my work! I did not come to this country to be made into bloodsport!"

Bamboo was still distracted. "You could have pressed the suit," she said. "I-"

She was interrupted by a piercing tri-tone shriek from her terminal's overworked speaker. On the screen, the overhead map had zoomed way out, showing several red lines drawing themselves towards the center of the image. / SOUNDPROOF / 32

Bamboo's eyes went wide. She grabbed his hand, hard enough to hurt through the gel layers and carbon fiber, and pulled him towards the bunker door.

#

The rockets themselves were not sophisticated. They were empty shells devoid of any refinements beyond a simple radar altimeter. Their cargo, however, was the product of decades of refinement in the art of killing machines. High over the desert, the thin skins of the rockets separated into petals, pulling canisters into the wind at the end of parachutes.

As soon as the canisters floated to a stable vertical beneath their chutes, glowing streams of tracer rose from the ground, seeking them. Bamboo's scout robots were able to fire at flying targets but were not specialized for it, and the descending cans were difficult targets even before they released themselves from the chutes and began to spin and dance on tiny jets.

The canisters flung disc-shaped skeets from themselves once they were up to speed. Each skeet had a tiny, fixed eye that scanned loops beneath its flight path as it spun along. When the infrared image of something that might be a vehicle-sized object passed before its sensor's view a few times, the skeet detonated. Its pancake of explosive melted the copper plate coating the bottom of the disc, the action of the shockwave reforging the metal into a bullet- shaped ingot, now propelled downward faster than sound.

#

Nohaile exited the bunker and thought the battle was over; the desert was as empty as when they'd stepped in. Then everything started exploding.

Nohaile jumped at the first detonation; the rest came so close behind it that there was no more surprise left in him. Drumbeats ignored the hearing protection built into his helmet, hammering him to the ground. He curled up, shaking, as the crackling went on and on.

And suddenly, all he could hear was a girl, sobbing.

Sitting up, there was little in view besides dust, and several thin columns of oily black smoke. More smoke was coming out of the bunker door behind them, smelling of hot metal. Bamboo seemed unaffected by the explosions, but was intent on beating the ground with her fist.

"Fuckers!" she kept saying.

Her terminal lay discarded beside her. Nohaile couldn't understand most of the symbology used, but assumed all the flashing red symbols corresponded to the funeral pyres of robots that now decorated the desert waste.

"Miz Bamboo," he began.

With that, she was herself again. "Come on, Wendell," she said with a last sniffle. "We have to get moving."

"What happened?" / SOUNDPROOF / 33

"What happened is that the other side had a plan. They hired somebody else in addition to their official champion. Whoever that second outfit is, they launched a bunch of tank-killers over the area, wiped out all my bots. Looks like all the rest of theirs, too." She looked around after retrieving her console. "Probably both bunkers while they were at it."

"Is that legal?"

"No. Well, yes. It's a gray area. C'mon, we have to hurry." She began picking her way through the sage.

Nohaile's head was swimming from the concussion, from the heat, and from the unreality of his situation. "But… Both bunkers, you said. Why would they harm their own side? Sintov sacrificed his own wife?"

Bamboo looked over her shoulder at him, pityingly. "If you were both killed, there's no certus per decision, and he goes on using your patent. I doubt the garage-built kids over there were informed of the grand strategy. It's a godsend for them if they pull off a victory now, anyway." She kept walking.

Nohaile scrambled to catch up. The shiny armor suit he'd bought had already picked up a thick coat of dust. Nohaile hoped it would help conceal him somewhat. "What are we going to do?"

"Daisy—my number four machine—is showing a malfunction signal," she said, pointing at the screen. "That means she's not completely dead."

"Why does that help us? Isn't it over? Won't they just send more of those things until they kill us, if we don't surrender?"

"A BLU-108 won't trigger on a person. We don't look enough like a tank. Besides, that was an expensive little stunt they just pulled. And as long as they're willing to push the envelope, we will too." Bamboo's openly predatory grin repelled Nohaile. He wasn't as confident in their safety from whatever a "blue one-oh-eight" was, but there was nothing else he could think of to do. It was easy enough to catch up with her while she was concentrating on her computer again.

"What do you mean by a 'gray area'?" he asked eventually.

"We're not allowed to bring in fighting units from outside the combat area once the battle is on," she said, brushing hair out of her eyes as she tapped out new messages. "The loophole is that UAVs are allowed. The legal definition is vague enough that guided munitions technically can be written off as 'reconnaissance devices' and their impacts as 'crashes.' They're really stepping over the line here. I just texted Zats about starting up a complaint. You won't have to worry about that, that'll be something between us and Sintov's people."

"You told your friend to wait by the phone."

"Left it in the bunker," Bamboo said. "Next to everything else that's happened today, that's chump change. Zats got the message."

The robot they came upon was obviously the worse for wear. It took Nohaile a minute to find / SOUNDPROOF / 34 it despite its proximity, but once he did, it was obviously in no shape to travel. One of its curious multiple wheels was scattered in blackened shreds on the sand, and that entire corner of the machine looked scorched and pitted.

Bamboo attached a cable to a port hidden on the machine's hull.

"Crap," she said after some poking on the terminal. "Oh, wait."

The robot made a grinding noise, and the turret turned slowly. Nohaile moved over to the side Bamboo was on in a hurry, opposite the gun's muzzle. It was extremely hot out in the noon sun. Though it reminded him of home, he was concerned. Most of his water was back in the bunker, probably splashed all over the concrete.

"This is not going to cut it," Bamboo said. "I can only get the weps package to move in maintenance mode, meaning they'd have to practically walk up and stand still for me to hit them manually."

Nohaile was going to lower his visor, to protect his eyes, but stopped. "Hit them? I thought all the machines were destroyed."

"They have twelve guys out here, remember? They aren't going to give up now. I wouldn't, in their place. At least, not until I give them a little of their own medicine." The jackal's smile again. It made Nohaile shiver inside his armor.

Bamboo pulled her awkwardly-large pistol and pointed it at the sky. It coughed twice, a hollow sound, replaced quickly by rising shrieks that sounded like holiday fireworks.

"It is a flare pistol, after all," Nohaile said.

"Nope. It's a drone launcher. I'm going to find those sumbitches and bend the rules a little for our side."

#

The eight-wheeled truck sat off its wheels some miles from the State Battlegrounds, propped up on metal jackstands not unlike a mobile crane's. The resemblance didn't end there: it had a long pole mounted on a revolving turntable like a crane did and was painted in industrial- looking white and orange safety colors.

The long boom wasn't for lifting loads on hooks, though. It was the tube of a former 130mm coastal defense gun. When it had been built, it would have needed a crew of five and another two trucks full of equipment. Bamboo had that amount of computer power and more in her handheld console. Getting it to talk to the gun's systems had been trivial compared to getting the vehicle into the country from Russia.

Once the gun had fired its ready ammo there would be no one to reload it, but that was hardly an issue.

High over the battlefield, the two drones coasted on their burnt-out motors until gravity finally bent their paths back Earthward. Fins sprang from their sides, rotating like falling seed pods as they caught the apparent wind. Suspended from their rotorkites, the bullet-shaped / SOUNDPROOF / 35 drones opened their camera eyes and beheld the world.

#

"There they are!" Bamboo almost squealed. "Somebody's about to find out they signed on to the wrong outfit."

"Do not kill these men," Nohaile said suddenly. "This kind of victory, I no longer wish it." He wanted to spit into the dust, but couldn't because of the helmet.

"They're coming for us, Wendell. They don't have bots, but they do still have guns. The Saturday Night Special club out there is just this close," Bamboo held up her thumb and forefinger next to each other, "to pulling off the upset victory of the year. And whether you 'wish it' or not, I have no intention of surrendering to ease your poor conscience. You signed a contract to abide by the results of the combat, and these are the results."

Nohaile stepped closer to her. Even without his armor, he was a head taller than she. "Do not fire," he said quietly. "We'll surrender."

"I fired twenty-five seconds ago," she replied without much concern for his tone. "And 'we' will do no such thing. Mister Nohaile, I recommend in your future endeavors you have someone do a better job of reading the fine print on your agreements. They signed away their safety just like we did."

"It's monstrous!"

"Yet, you agreed to it. You were afraid of being ruined. Now, I'm the one that's ruined unless I win this fight, and probably several to come afterward."

They locked eyes for several seconds. Nohaile could see nothing human in Bamboo's.

"Splash," she said.

There was a noise like cloth ripping. Then the ground vibrated, and detonations in the distance kicked up fountains of dust. The noise from the bursts followed, noise Nohaile could feel in his chest. "I think we've just won," Bamboo said.

#

The bunker was a ruin when they reached it, caved in around several direct hits. Identifiable parts of bodies were visible from beneath some of the jagged concrete slabs. Nohaile wanted to retch, but couldn't show any further weakness to Bamboo.

They found the new Mrs. Sintov sprawled in an intact corner. She had no visible wounds, but blood streamed from her eyes, nose, and ears. Bamboo photographed the body with her terminal.

"Concussion," Bamboo said, shaking her head.

The bride didn't look very young, or pretty. Nohaile wondered what Sintov had promised her.

Nohaile tasted ashes when he tried to swallow. He wandered away from his capably / SOUNDPROOF / 36 murderous champion and all the carnage to await the trucks that would bear him away to the fruits of victory.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 341, originally released on April 28, 2012 Download audio Read by Mat Weller First published in The Fifth Dimension Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 37

Nominee for the 2012 Hugo Award, Best Short Story The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees By E. Lily Yu

For longer than anyone could remember, the village of Yiwei had worn, in its orchards and under its eaves, clay-colored globes of paper that hissed and fizzed with wasps. The villagers maintained an uneasy peace with their neighbors for many years, exercising inimitable tact and circumspection. But it all ended the day a boy, digging in the riverbed, found a stone whose balance and weight pleased him. With this, he thought, he could hit a sparrow in flight. There were no sparrows to be seen, but a paper ball hung low and inviting nearby. He considered it for a moment, head cocked, then aimed and threw.

Much later, after he had been plastered and soothed, his mother scalded the fallen nest until the wasps seething in the paper were dead. In this way it was discovered that the wasp nests of Yiwei, dipped in hot water, unfurled into beautifully accurate maps of provinces near and far, inked in vegetable pigments and labeled in careful Mandarin that could be distinguished beneath a microscope.

The villagers' subsequent incursions with bee veils and kettles of boiling water soon diminished the prosperous population to a handful. Commanded by a single stubborn foundress, the survivors folded a new nest in the shape of a paper boat, provisioned it with fallen apricots and squash blossoms, and launched themselves onto the river. Browsing cows and children fled the riverbanks as they drifted downstream, piping sea chanteys.

At last, forty miles south from where they had begun, their craft snagged on an upthrust stick and sank. Only one drowned in the evacuation, weighed down with the remains of an apricot. They reconvened upon a stump and looked about themselves.

"It's a good place to land," the foundress said in her sweet soprano, examining the first rough maps that the scouts brought back. There were plenty of caterpillars, oaks for ink galls, fruiting brambles, and no signs of other wasps. A colony of bees had hived in a split oak two miles away. "Once we are established we will, of course, send a delegation to collect tribute.

"We will not make the same mistakes as before. Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand."

It took two weeks to complete the nurseries with their paper mobiles, and then another month to reconstruct the Great Library and fill the pigeonholes with what the oldest cartographers could remember of their lost maps. Their comings and goings did not go unnoticed. An ambassador from the beehive arrived with an ultimatum and was promptly executed; her wings were made into stained-glass windows for the council chamber, and her stinger was returned to the hive in a paper envelope. The second ambassador came with altered attitude and a proposal to divide the bees' kingdom evenly between the two governments, retaining pollen and water rights for the bees—"as an acknowledgment of the preexisting claims of a free people to the natural resources of a common territory," she hummed.

The wasps of the council were gracious and only divested the envoy of her sting. She / SOUNDPROOF / 38 survived just long enough to deliver her account to the hive.

The third ambassador arrived with a ball of wax on the tip of her stinger and was better received.

"You understand, we are not refugees applying for recognition of a token territorial sovereignty," the foundress said, as attendants served them nectars in paper horns, "nor are we negotiating with you as equal states. Those were the assumptions of your late predecessors. They were mistaken."

"I trust I will do better," the diplomat said stiffly. She was older than the others, and the hairs of her thorax were sparse and faded.

"I do hope so."

"Unlike them, I have complete authority to speak for the hive. You have propositions for us; that is clear enough. We are prepared to listen."

"Oh, good." The foundress drained her horn and took another. "Yours is an old and highly cultured society, despite the indolence of your ruler, which we understand to be a racial rather than personal proclivity. You have laws, and traditional dances, and mathematicians, and principles, which of course we do respect."

"Your terms, please."

She smiled. "Since there is a local population of tussah moths, which we prefer for incubation, there is no need for anything so unrepublican as slavery. If you refrain from insurrection, you may keep your self-rule. But we will take a fifth of your stores in an ordinary year, and a tenth in drought years, and one of every hundred larvae."

"To eat?" Her antennae trembled with revulsion.

"Only if food is scarce. No, they will be raised among us and learn our ways and our arts, and then they will serve as officials and bureaucrats among you. It will be to your advantage, you see."

The diplomat paused for a moment, looking at nothing at all. Finally she said, "A tenth, in a good year—"

"Our terms," the foundress said, "are not negotiable."

The guards shifted among themselves, clinking the plates of their armor and shifting the gleaming points of their stings.

"I don't have a choice, do I?"

"The choice is enslavement or cooperation," the foundress said. "For your hive, I mean. You might choose something else, certainly, but they have tens of thousands to replace you with."

The diplomat bent her head. "I am old," she said. "I have served the hive all my life, in every fashion. My loyalty is to my hive and I will do what is best for it." / SOUNDPROOF / 39

"I am so very glad."

"I ask you—I beg you—to wait three or four days to impose your terms. I will be dead by then, and will not see my sisters become a servile people."

The foundress clicked her claws together. "Is the delaying of business a custom of yours? We have no such practice. You will have the honor of watching us elevate your sisters to moral and technological heights you could never imagine."

The diplomat shivered.

"Go back to your queen, my dear. Tell them the good news."

#

It was a crisis for the constitutional monarchy. A riot broke out in District 6, destroying the royal waxworks and toppling the mouse-bone monuments before it was brutally suppressed. The queen had to be calmed with large doses of jelly after she burst into tears on her ministers' shoulders.

"Your Majesty," said one, "it's not a matter for your concern. Be at peace."

"These are my children," she said, sniffling. "You would feel for them too, were you a mother."

"Thankfully, I am not," the minister said briskly, "so to business."

"War is out of the question," another said.

"Their forces are vastly superior."

"We outnumber them three hundred to one!"

"They are experienced fighters. Sixty of us would die for each of theirs. We might drive them away, but it would cost us most of the hive and possibly our queen—"

The queen began weeping noisily again and had to be cleaned and comforted.

"Have we any alternatives?"

There was a small silence.

"Very well, then."

The terms of the relationship were copied out, at the wasps' direction, on small paper plaques embedded in propolis and wax around the hive. As paper and ink were new substances to the bees, they jostled and touched and tasted the bills until the paper fell to pieces. The wasps sent to oversee the installation did not take this kindly. Several civilians died before it was established that the bees could not read the Yiwei dialect.

Thereafter the hive's chemists were charged with compounding pheromones complex enough to encode the terms of the treaty. These were applied to the papers, so that both species could / SOUNDPROOF / 40 inspect them and comprehend the relationship between the two states.

Whereas the hive before the wasp infestation had been busy but content, the bees now lived in desperation. The natural terms of their lives were cut short by the need to gather enough honey for both the hive and the wasp nest. As they traveled farther and farther afield in search of nectar, they stopped singing. They danced their findings grimly, without joy. The queen herself grew gaunt and thin from breeding replacements, and certain ministers who understood such matters began feeding royal jelly to the strongest larvae.

Meanwhile, the wasps grew sleek and strong. Cadres of scholars, cartographers, botanists, and soldiers were dispatched on the river in small floating nests caulked with beeswax and loaded with rations of honeycomb to chart the unknown lands to the south. Those who returned bore beautiful maps with towns and farms and alien populations of wasps carefully noted in blue and purple ink, and these, once studied by the foundress and her generals, were carefully filed away in the depths of the Great Library for their southern advance in the new year.

The bees adopted by the wasps were first trained to clerical tasks, but once it was determined that they could be taught to read and write, they were assigned to some of the reconnaissance missions. The brightest students, gifted at trigonometry and angles, were educated beside the cartographers themselves and proved valuable assistants. They learned not to see the thick green caterpillars led on silver chains, or the dead bees fed to the wasp brood. It was easier that way.

When the old queen died, they did not mourn.

#

By the sheerest of accidents, one of the bees trained as a cartographer's assistant was an anarchist. It might have been the stresses on the hive, or it might have been luck; wherever it came from, the mutation was viable. She tucked a number of her own eggs in beeswax and wasp paper among the pigeonholes of the library and fed the larvae their milk and bread in secret. To her sons in their capped silk cradles—and they were all sons—she whispered the precepts she had developed while calculating flight paths and azimuths, that there should be no queen and no state, and that, as in the wasp nest, the males should labor and profit equally with the females. In their sleep and slow transformation they heard her teachings and instructions, and when they chewed their way out of their cells and out of the wasp nest, they made their way to the hive.

The damage to the nest was discovered, of course, but by then the anarchist was dead of old age. She had done impeccable work, her tutor sighed, looking over the filigree of her inscriptions, but the brilliant were subject to mental aberrations, were they not? He buried beneath grumblings and labors his fondness for her, which had become a grief to him and a political liability, and he never again took on any student from the hive who showed a glint of talent.

Though they had the bitter smell of the wasp nest in their hair, the anarchist's twenty sons were permitted to wander freely through the hive, as it was assumed that they were either spies or on official business. When the new queen emerged from her chamber, they joined unnoticed the other drones in the nuptial flight. Two succeeded in mating with her. Those who failed and survived spoke afterward in hushed tones of what had been done for the sake of the / SOUNDPROOF / 41 ideal. Before they died they took propolis and oak-apple ink and inscribed upon the lintels of the hive, in a shorthand they had developed, the story of the first anarchist and her twenty sons.

#

Anarchism being a heritable trait in bees, a number of the daughters of the new queen found themselves questioning the purpose of the monarchy. Two were taken by the wasps and taught to read and write. On one of their visits to the hive they spotted the history of their forefathers, and, being excellent scholars, soon figured out the translation.

They found their sisters in the hive who were unquiet in soul and whispered to them the strange knowledge they had learned among the wasps: astronomy, military strategy, the state of the world beyond the farthest flights of the bees. Hitherto educated as dancers and architects, nurses and foragers, the bees were full of a new wonder, stranger even than the first day they flew from the hive and felt the sun on their backs.

"Govern us," they said to the two wasp-taught anarchists, but they refused.

"A perfect society needs no rulers," they said. "Knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nests. Hear what you can hear and learn what you can learn while we remain among them. But be ready."

#

It was the first summer in Yiwei without the immemorial hum of the cartographer wasps. In the orchards, though their skins split with sweetness, fallen fruit lay unmolested, and children played barefoot with impunity. One of the villagers' daughters, in her third year at an agricultural college, came home in the back of a pickup truck at the end of July. She thumped her single suitcase against the gate before opening it, to scatter the chickens, then raised the latch and swung the iron aside, and was immediately wrapped in a flying hug.

Once she disentangled herself from brother and parents and liberally distributed kisses, she listened to the news she'd missed: how the cows were dying from drinking stonecutters' dust in the streams; how grain prices were falling everywhere, despite the drought; and how her brother, little fool that he was, had torn down a wasp nest and received a faceful of red and white lumps for it. One of the most detailed wasp's maps had reached the capital, she was told, and a bureaucrat had arrived in a sleek black car. But because the wasps were all dead, he could report little more than a prank, a freak, or a miracle. There were no further inquiries.

Her brother produced for her inspection the brittle, boiled bodies of several wasps in a glass jar, along with one of the smaller maps. She tickled him until he surrendered his trophies, promised him a basket of peaches in return, and let herself be fed to tautness. Then, to her family's dismay, she wrote an urgent letter to the Academy of Sciences and packed a satchel with clothes and cash. If she could find one more nest of wasps, she said, it would make their fortune and her name. But it had to be done quickly.

In the morning, before the cockerels woke and while the sky was still purple, she hopped onto her old bicycle and rode down the dusty path. / SOUNDPROOF / 42

#

Bees do not fly at night or lie to each other, but the anarchists had learned both from the wasps. On a warm, clear evening they left the hive at last, flying west in a small tight cloud. Around them swelled the voices of summer insects, strange and disquieting. Several miles west of the old hive and the wasp nest, in a lightning-scarred elm, the anarchists had built up a small stock of stolen honey sealed in wax and paper. They rested there for the night, in cells of clean white wax, and in the morning they arose to the building of their city.

The first business of the new colony was the laying of eggs, which a number of workers set to, and provisions for winter. One egg from the old queen, brought from the hive in an anarchist's jaws, was hatched and raised as a new mother. Uncrowned and unconcerned, she too laid mortar and wax, chewed wood to make paper, and fanned the storerooms with her wings.

The anarchists labored secretly but rapidly, drones alongside workers, because the copper taste of autumn was in the air. None had seen a winter before, but the memory of the species is subtle and long, and in their hearts, despite the summer sun, they felt an imminent darkness.

The flowers were fading in the fields. Every day the anarchists added to their coffers of warm gold and built their white walls higher. Every day the air grew a little crisper, the grass a little drier. They sang as they worked, sometimes ballads from the old hive, sometimes anthems of their own devising, and for a time they were happy. Too soon, the leaves turned flame colors and blew from the trees, and then there were no more flowers. The anarchists pressed down the lid on the last vat of honey and wondered what was coming. Four miles away, at the first touch of cold, the wasps licked shut their paper doors and slept in a tight knot around the foundress. In both beehives, the bees huddled together, awake and watchful, warming themselves with the thrumming of their wings. The anarchists murmured comfort to each other.

"There will be more, after us. It will breed out again."

"We are only the beginning."

"There will be more."

Snow fell silently outside.

#

The snow was ankle-deep and the river iced over when the girl from Yiwei reached up into the empty branches of an oak tree and plucked down the paper castle of a nest. The wasps within, drowsy with cold, murmured but did not stir. In their barracks the soldiers dreamed of the unexplored south and battles in strange cities, among strange peoples, and scouts dreamed of the corpses of starved and frozen deer. The cartographers dreamed of the changes that winter would work on the landscape, the diverted creeks and dead trees they would have to note down. They did not feel the burlap bag that settled around them, nor the crunch of tires on the frozen road.

She had spent weeks tramping through the countryside, questioning beekeepers and villagers' / SOUNDPROOF / 43 children, peering up into trees and into hives, before she found the last wasps from Yiwei. Then she had had to wait for winter and the anesthetizing cold. But now, back in the warmth of her own room, she broke open the soft pages of the nest and pushed aside the heaps of glistening wasps until she found the foundress herself, stumbling on uncertain legs.

When it thawed, she would breed new foundresses among the village's apricot trees. The letters she received indicated a great demand for them in the capital, particularly from army generals and the captains of scientific explorations. In years to come, the village of Yiwei would be known for its delicately inscribed maps, the legends almost too small to see, and not for its barley and oats, its velvet apricots and glassy pears.

#

In the spring, the old beehive awoke to find the wasps gone, like a nightmare that evaporates by day. It was difficult to believe, but when not the slightest scrap of wasp paper could be found, the whole hive sang with delight. Even the queen, who had been coached from the pupa on the details of her client state and the conditions by which she ruled, and who had felt, perhaps, more sympathy for the wasps than she should have, cleared her throat and trilled once or twice. If she did not sing so loudly or so joyously as the rest, only a few noticed, and the winter had been a hard one, anyhow.

The maps had vanished with the wasps. No more would be made. Those who had studied among the wasps began to draft memoranda and the first independent decrees of queen and council. To defend against future invasions, it was decided that a detachment of bees would fly the borders of their land and carry home reports of what they found.

It was on one of these patrols that a small hive was discovered in the fork of an elm tree. Bees lay dead and brittle around it, no identifiable queen among them. Not a trace of honey remained in the storehouse; the dark wax of its walls had been gnawed to rags. Even the brood cells had been scraped clean. But in the last intact hexagons they found, curled and capped in wax, scrawled on page after page, words of revolution. They read in silence.

Then—

"Write," one said to the other, and she did.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 343, originally released on May 3, 2012 Download audio Read by Mur Lafferty Originally appeared in Clarkesworld Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 44

Nominee for the 2012 Hugo Award, Best Short Story The Homecoming by Mike Resnick

I don’t know which bothers me more, my lumbago or my arthritis. One day it’s one, one day it’s the other. They can cure cancer and transplant every damned organ in your body; you’d think they could find some way to get rid of aches and pains. Let me tell you, growing old isn’t for sissies.

I remember that I was having a typical dream. Well, typical for me, anyway. I was climbing the four steps to my front porch, only when I got to the third step there were six more, so I climbed them and then there were ten more, and it went on and on. I’d probably still be climbing them if the creature hadn’t woke me up.

It stood next to my bed, staring down at me. I blinked a couple of times, trying to focus my eyes, and stared back, sure this was just an extension of my dream.

It was maybe six feet tall, its skin a glistening, almost metallic silver, with multi-faceted bright red eyes like an insect. Its ears were pointed and batlike, and moved independently of its head and each other. Its mouth jutted out a couple of inches like some kind of tube, and looked like it was only good for sucking fluids. Its arms were slender, with no hint of the muscles required to move them, and its fingers were thin and incredibly elongated. It was as weird a nightmare figure as I’d dreamed up in years.

Finally it spoke, in a voice that sounded more like a set of chimes than anything else.

“Hello, Dad,” it said.

That’s when I knew I was awake.

“So this is what you look like,” I growled, swinging my feet over the side of the bed and sitting up. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m glad to see you too,” he replied.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, feeling around for my slippers.

“I heard about Mom – not from you, of course – and I wanted to see her once more before the end.”

“Can you see through those things?” I asked, indicating his eyes.

“Better than you can.”

Big surprise. Hell, everyone can see better than I can.

“How did you get in here anyway?” I said as I got to my feet. The furnace was as old and tired as I was and there was a chill in the air, so I put on my robe.

“You haven’t changed the front door’s code words since I left.” He looked around the room. / SOUNDPROOF / 45

“You haven’t painted the place either.” “The lock’s supposed to check your retinagram or read your DNA or something.”

“It did. They haven’t changed.”

I looked him up and down. “The hell they haven’t.”

He seemed about to reply, then thought better of it. Finally he said, “How is she?”

“She has her bad days and her worse days,” I answered. “She’s the old Julia maybe two or three times a week for a minute or two, but that’s all. She can still speak, and she still recognizes me.” I paused. “She won’t recognize you, of course, but nobody else you ever knew will either.”

“How long has she been like this?”

“Maybe a year.”

“You should have told me,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. “You gave up being her son and became whatever it is you are now.”

“I’m still her son, and you had my contact information.”

I stared at him. “Well, you’re not my son, not anymore.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he replied. Suddenly he sniffed the air. “It smells stale.”

“Tired old houses are like tired old men,” I said. “They don’t function on all cylinders.”

“You could move to a smaller, newer place.”

“This house and me, we’ve grown old together. Not everyone wants to move to Alpha whatever-the-hell-it-is.”

He looked around. “Where is she?”

“In your old room,” I said.

He turned, walked out into the hall. “Haven’t you replaced that thing yet?” he asked, indicating an old wall table. “It was scarred and wobbly when I still lived here.”

“It’s just a table. It holds whatever I put on it. That’s all it has to do.”

He looked up at the ceiling. “The paint’s peeling too.”

“I’m too old to do it myself, and painters cost money. I’m living on a fixed income.”

He didn’t reply to that, but walked down the hall and was fiddling with the door handle when I joined him.

“It’s locked,” he said. / SOUNDPROOF / 46

“Sometimes she gets up and goes out for a walk, and then can’t remember how to get back home.” I grimaced. “I can probably keep her here another few months, but then she’s going to have to move into a special care facility.”

I uttered the code word and the door opened.

Julia was propped up on her pillows, staring at a blank holoscreen across the room, unmindful of a lock of gray hair that had worked its way loose and obscured her left eye’s vision. The channel she was on had finished broadcasting for the night, but it didn’t make any difference to her. She was content watching the flickering gray cube.

I ordered the bedlamp to turn on and gently pinned the hair back up. Now that the room was illuminated, I could see our son staring at it. The holographs of him when he played on the high school basketball team were still on the wall, as well as the one of him in his tux at the prom, and his trophy for winning the science contest remained atop the dresser, though it needed dusting. Just above it was his framed diploma from college. Lining the walls were other photos and holographs, from when he was still a baby until a month before he’d undergone what Julia always referred to as his Change. I could see his face twitching as he looked around at the memorabilia of his youth, and I felt like I could almost read his thoughts: They’ve turned the damned place into a shrine. Which I suppose we had – but to what he had been, not to what he was now. And I’d moved her in here because she was comforted by things from the past, even things she could no longer name.

“Hello, Jordan,” said Julia, smiling at me. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Julia. Do you mind if I turn off the holo?”

“I was enjoying it,” she said. “How are you?”

I ordered the screen to deactivate.

“Is it August yet?” she asked.

“No, Julia,” I said patiently. “It’s February, just like it was yesterday.”

“Oh,” she said, frowning. “I thought it might be August.” Then a friendly smile. “How are you?”

Suddenly our son stepped forward. “Hello, Mother.”

She stared at him and smiled. “You are really quite beautiful.”

He reached out and took her hand with those incredibly long, stick-like fingers before I could stop him.

“I’ve missed you, Mother,” he said. He seemed like he was choked with emotion, but I couldn’t tell, because his voice never changed from those musical chimes. It was so unlike a human voice that I don’t know how we were able to understand him, but somehow we did.

“It is Halloween already?” asked Julia. “Are you dressed for a party?” / SOUNDPROOF / 47

“No, Mother. This is the way I look.”

“Well, I think you’re beautiful.” She stopped and frowned. “Do I know you?”

He smiled, sadly I thought. “You did once. I am your son.”

She was silent for a moment, and I knew she was trying to remember. “I think I had a little boy once, but I can’t recall his name.”

“My name is Philip.”

“Phillip…Phillip…” she repeated. Finally she shook her head. “No, I think it was Jordan.”

“Jordan is your husband,” said Philip. “I’m your son.”

“I think I had a little boy once,” she said. Her face went blank for a moment. Then: “Is it Halloween already?”

“No,” he said gently. “I’ll let you go back to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“That will be fine,” she said. “Do I know you?”

“I’m your son,” he said.

“I’m sure I had a son a long time ago,” she said. “How are you?”

I could see a crystal tear run down his silver cheek. He tenderly laid her hand on the bed and stepped back. I activated the holoscreen, found a station that was still transmitting, killed the sound, and left her staring happily at it as I followed Phillip out into the hall, locking the door behind me.

We walked to the cluttered kitchen, with its ancient appliances and the three cracked tiles on the floor. (Each of us had been responsible for one of them.) I found the room homey and comforting, but I saw him looking at a burn spot on a counter that had been there since he’d accidentally made it as a kid and for just an instant I felt guilty about never having fixed it.

“You should have told me about her,” he said when he’d gotten his emotions under control.

“You shouldn’t have left, or become whatever it is that you are.”

“Damn it, she’s my mother!” The chimes were louder; I assumed he was yelling or snapping.

“There was nothing you could have done.” I ordered the refrigerator door to open and pulled out a beer. “You want one before you go back to wherever the hell you came from?” I thought about it and frowned. “Can you drink human drinks?”

He didn’t answer, but walked over and grabbed a beer. I could see that his mouth wouldn’t be able to accommodate the container, so I just watched and waited for him to ask for a glass, or maybe a bowl. He knew I was staring at him, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Instead something – not a tongue, and not a quite straw – slid out of his mouth, and when it was a few inches long he inserted it into the top of the container. He swallowed a few seconds later, / SOUNDPROOF / 48 and I knew he was somehow getting the beer into his mouth.

He set the container down and stared at an old pennant I had stuck on the wall when he was a little boy.

“You’re still a Pythons fan,” he observed.

“Always.”

“How are they doing?” There was a time when he actually cared, but that was many years ago.

“They haven’t had a decent quarterback since Christ was a corporal,” I answered.

“But you root for them anyway.”

“You don’t stop rooting for a team just because they’ve fallen on hard times.”

“A team, or a parent,” he said. I didn’t know how to reply to that, so I remained silent, and after a moment he spoke again. “I know there are medications for Alzheimer’s. I assume you’ve tried them?”

“There are all kinds of senile dementias. They call them all Alzheimer’s, but they aren’t. They haven’t yet found out how to cure the one she’s got.”

“There are specialists on other worlds. Maybe one of them could have done something.”

“You’re the space traveler,” I said bitterly. “Where were you when she might have been cured?”

He stared at me. I stared back, determined not to look away first.

“Why are you so angry at me? I know you cared for me once. I’ve never hurt you, I never took a penny from you once I got out of college, I never—”

“You deserted us,” I said. “You deserted your mother, you deserted me, you deserted your planet, you even deserted your species. That poor woman down the hall can’t remember the name of her son, but she can remember that people only look like you at Halloween.”

“It’s my job, damn it!”

“There are thousands of exobiologists right here on Earth!” I snapped. “I only know of one who turned into a silver-skinned monster with red eyes.”

“I was offered an opportunity that has been afforded very few men and women,” he replied. “I took it.” Even with the chimes he couldn’t keep the resentment out of his voice. “Most fathers would have been proud.”

I stared at him for a moment, amazed that he still didn’t understand. “I’m supposed to be proud that you became a thing that hasn’t got a trace of humanity left in him?” I said at last.

He stared right back through those multi-faceted insect eyes. “You really believe there is / SOUNDPROOF / 49 nothing human left of me?” he asked curiously.

“Look in a mirror,” I told him.

“Don’t I remember you telling me back when I was a boy that you should never judge a book by its cover?”

“That’s right.”

“Well?” he said.

“I just saw one of your pages slide out and suck up the beer.”

He signed deeply, to the delicate tinkling of chimes. “Would you have been happier if I couldn’t drink it?”

I seriously considered it for a minute. “No, that wouldn’t have made me happier,” I told him when I’d formulated my answer in terms even he could understand. “You know what would have made me happier? Grandchildren. A son who visited us for Christmas. A son I could leave the house to now that it’s finally paid off. I never asked you to follow in my footsteps, attend my college, go into my business, even live in this town. Would expecting you to want to be a normal human being be so goddamned wrong for a father?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” he admitted. Then: “For better or worse you’ve lived your life. I have the right to live mine.”

I shook my head. “Your life ended eleven years ago. You’re living some alien creature’s life now.”

He cocked his head to one side and studied me curiously. It seemed almost birdlike. “Which bothers you more – that I left Earth, or that I became what I am?”

“Six of one, a half dozen of the other. You knew you were the center of your mother’s life, but you left her and went to the far end of the galaxy.”

“Not quite the far end,” he said, and I couldn’t tell from the chimes whether that was sarcastic or sardonic or simply a straight answer. “And my mother wouldn’t have wanted me to stay here when I wanted to be out there.”

“You broke her heart!” I snapped.

“If I did, then I am truly sorry.”

“She spent years wondering why, back when she could still wonder,” I continued. “So did I. You had so much promise and so many opportunities, damn it! You could have been anything you wanted! The sky was the limit!”

“I became what I wanted,” he said gently. “And the stars were my limit.”

“Damn it, Philip!” I said, though I had promised myself never to call him by his human name. “You could have spent your whole life here and never seen a thousandth of the things / SOUNDPROOF / 50

Earth has to offer.”

“That’s true. But others have already seen them.” He paused, and turned his palms up in a very human gesture. “I wanted to see things no one else had ever seen.”

“I don’t know what’s up there,” I said, “but how different can it be? What makes our mountains and deserts and rivers so boring for you?”

He sighed, a delicate high-pitched tinkling sound. “I tried to explain that to you eleven years ago,” he answered at last. “You didn’t understand then. You don’t understand now.” He paused. “Maybe you just can’t.”

“Probably not,” I agreed. I walked to the cabinet with the missing knob, and opened the door with my fingernails the way I always do.

“You still haven’t replaced the knob,” he observed. “I remember the day I pulled it off. I expected to be punished. You just laughed, like I’d done something cute.”

“You should have seen the expression on your face when it came away in your hand, like you expected me to send you off to prison.” I felt a smile fighting to reach my mouth, and I pushed it back. “Anyway, it still opens.” I reached in, pulled down a couple of small bottles, and put them in my pocket.

“Mother’s medication?”

I nodded, holding them up. “She gets four different kinds in the morning, and two at night. I’ll give them to her a little later.” I pulled out another bottle.

“I thought you just said she only got two pills at night.”

“She does,” I said. I held up the third bottle. “These are sugar pills. I leave them on the dresser for her.”

“Sugar pills?” he repeated with what I assume passed for a puzzled frown.

“She thinks she can still medicate herself. She can’t, of course, but this gives her the illusion that she can. And if she takes six one day and forgets to take any the next, it doesn’t make any difference.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you.”

“I’ve loved her for close to half a century,” I answered. “I could have put her in a home and just visited her every day – or every tenth day. She probably wouldn’t know the difference. But I do this because I love her. Even if she doesn’t know it she has to be more comfortable in her own home, surrounded by the bits and pieces of her life. That’s why I moved her to your room instead of the guest room; the photos, the trophies, even that old catcher’s mitt in the closet, that’s all she has left of you.” I glared at him. “I didn’t walk out of her life for eleven years and come back only when she was past remembering me.”

He just looked at me but made no reply.

“Damn it!” I snapped. “Couldn’t you have said it was a secret mission for the military, even if / SOUNDPROOF / 51 it was a lie?”

“You’d have found out soon enough that I was lying.”

“I wouldn’t have tried to! We’d have been proud that you were serving your country, or your planet, or whatever the hell you were serving.”

“Is that it?” he demanded, suddenly angry. “You could lose a son to another world as long he didn’t enjoy it, as long as someone might be shooting at him?”

“That’s not what I said,” I replied defensively.

“That’s precisely what you said.” He stared at me with those insect eyes for a long minute. “You would never have understood. She might have, but you wouldn’t.”

“Then why did you never tell her?”

“I tried.”

“Well, you sure as hell didn’t succeed,” I said bitterly. “And it’s too late to try again.”

“She’s not the one who hates me,” he said. “I had already moved out and started my own life when this opportunity arose. You make it sound like I was your support network. I was an independent adult, living halfway across the country.” He paused. “I still don’t know which bothers you more: that I left the planet at all, or that I left it looking like this.”

“One day you were a member of our family. Four months later you weren’t even a member of the human race.”

“I still am,” he insisted.

“Look in a mirror.”

He placed a twelve-inch-long forefinger to his head. “It’s what’s in here that counts.”

“They say the eyes are the windows to the soul,” I replied. “Yours belong on an insect.”

“Just what the hell did you want from me?” he demanded. “Did you want me to go into business with you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Would you have disowned me if I’d been sterile and couldn’t give you any grandchildren?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“What if I’d moved halfway around the world? I might not have seen you more than once a decade if I had. Would you have disowned me as you did eleven years ago?”

“Nobody disowned you,” I pointed out, trying to keep my temper. “You disowned us.”

He sighed deeply. At least I think he did. With those chimes I couldn’t be sure. / SOUNDPROOF / 52

“Did you ever think to ask me why?” he said at last.

“No.”

“If it bothered you that much, why didn’t you?”

“Because it was your choice.”

I think he frowned. I couldn’t tell for sure, not with that face. “I don’t understand.”

“If it was a necessity, something you had to do to save your life or something like that, I’d have asked. But since it was a freely-made choice, no, I didn’t care why you did it, only that you did it.”

He looked long and hard at me. “All those years that I lived here, and even after I left, I thought you loved for me.”

“I loved Philip,” I said, and then grimaced. “I don’t know you.”

Suddenly I heard Julia knocking weakly at her door, and walked down the shopworn hallway to unlock it. I hadn’t noticed how threadbare the carpet had become, or the crack in the plaster, but I saw him looking at it so I looked too, and made up my mind to do something about it one of these days.

I uttered the code word, softly enough that she couldn’t hear it on her side of the door, and a moment later it swung open. She was standing there barefoot in her nightgown, thin and frail, her arms and legs like toothpicks with withered flesh on them, looking mildly puzzled.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I thought I heard you arguing with someone.” Her gaze fell on Philip. “Hello,” she said. “Have we met before?”

He took her hand very gently and gave her what seemed like a wistful smile, though I couldn’t be sure. “A long time ago.”

“My name is Julia.” She extended a wrinkled, liver-spotted hand.

“And mine is Philip.”

A frown crossed her once-beautiful face. “I think I knew someone called Philip once.” She paused, then smiled. “That’s a very pretty costume you’re wearing.”

“Thank you.”

“And I love your voice,” she continued. “It sounds like the wind chimes on our porch when a summer breeze blows through them.”

“I’m glad it pleases you,” said the creature that used to be our son.

“Can you sing?” / SOUNDPROOF / 53

He shrugged, and his whole body seemed to sparkle as the light reflected off it. “I really don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve never tried.”

“You look hungry,” she said. “Can I make you something to eat?”

I prodded him and when he looked at me, I very briefly shook my head No. She’d already set the kitchen on fire twice before I started ordering all our meals delivered.

He picked up on it instantly. “No, thank you. I ate just before I arrived.”

“That’s too bad,” she said. “I’m a good cook.”

“I’ll bet you make a wonderful Denver pudding.” That had always been his favorite dessert.

“The best,” she answered, glowing with pride. “I like you, young man.” Then a puzzled frown. “You are a man, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Is it Halloween?”

“Not yet.”

“Why are you wearing that costume, then?”

“Would you really like to know about it?”

“Very much,” she said. Suddenly she shivered. “But it’s chilly standing here barefoot in the doorway. Would you mind very much if I got under the covers while we chatted? You can sit right next to the bed, and we can be nice and cozy. Jordan, could you make me some hot chocolate? And maybe some for… I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Philip,” he said.

“Philip,” she repeated, frowning. “Philip. I’m sure I knew a Philip once, a long time ago.”

“I’m sure you did too,” he said softly.

“Well, come along.” Julia turned, walked back into her room, and climbed into the bed that had once belonged to Philip, propping herself up with some pillows and pulling the blanket and comforter up to her armpits. He followed her and stood next to the bed. “There’s no need to stand, young man,” she told him. “Pull up a chair.”

“Thank you,” he said, getting the chair he’d used while writing his masters’ thesis on his computer and carrying it over so that he was sitting right next to her.

“Jordan, I think we’d like some hot chocolate.”

“I don’t know if he drinks it,” I replied.

“I’d very much like some,” he said. / SOUNDPROOF / 54

“Good!” said Julia. “You can bring two cups on a tray, one for me and one for…Excuse me, but I don’t know your name.”

“It’s Philip.”

“And you must call me Julia.”

“Why don’t I just call you Mother?” he suggested.

She frowned in puzzlement. “Why would you do that?”

He reached out and very gently held her hand. “No reason, Julia.”

“Jordan,” she said, “I think I’d like some hot chocolate.” She turned to Philip. “Would you like some too, young man? You are a man, aren’t you?”

“I am, and I would.”

I left to get the hot chocolate before she asked again. I went out to the kitchen, mixed up a fair-sized pan – I don’t know why; there were only two of them, and I don’t drink the stuff myself – and was about to pour a pair of cups. Then I remembered the shape of his hands and fingers, and decided he was less likely to spill a mug, so I got the old chipped Pythons mug he’d given me for my birthday when he was nine or ten years old. I think he’d saved up a month’s allowance to buy it. I looked at it fondly for a moment, and wondered if he’d recognize it. Then I remembered who – or rather what – I was pouring it for, and got on with it. The whole process took maybe three or four minutes, start to finish. I put the cup and the mug on a tray, added a spoon for Julia since she liked to stir everything whether it needed it or not, and folded a pair of napkins. Then I picked up the tray and carried it back to the bedroom.

“Just put it on the table, please, Jordan,” she said, and I placed it on her nightstand.

She turned back eagerly to Philip. “What were they like?”

To this day I don’t know how a face like his could look wistful, but it did. “They are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” he said, his voice chiming delicately. “I want to say they’re transparent, but that’s not exactly right. Their bodies are actually prisms, separating the rays of the sun and casting a hundred colors on the ground beneath them as they fly.”

“They sound wonderful!” said Julia, her face more alive than I’d seen it in months.

“They swarm by the tens of thousands. It’s as if a miles-long kaleidoscope has taken wing, and the ever-changing colors cover an area the size of a small city.”

“How fascinating!” she said enthusiastically. “What do they eat?”

A shrug. “No one knows.”

“No one?”

“There are only about forty men and women on the planet, and none of us has yet climbed the / SOUNDPROOF / 55 crystal mountains where they nest.”

“Crystal mountains!” she repeated. “What a pretty picture!”

“It’s not a world like any you have ever imagined, Julia,” he said. “There are plants and animals no one’s ever even dreamed of.”

“Plants?” she asked. “How different can a plant be?”

“I saw some potted plants in your living room, right by that old piano that’s probably still out of tune,” he said. “Do you ever talk to them?”

“Of course,” said Julia. She flashed him a smile. “But they never answer.”

He returned her smile. “Mine do.”

She clutched his hand with both of hers, as if she was afraid he might leave before telling her about his plants.

“What do they say?” she asked. “I’ll bet they talk about the weather.”

He shook his head. “Mostly they talk about mathematics, and once in a while about philosophy.”

“I knew about those things once,” she said, and then added hazily: “I think.”

“They have no sense of self-preservation, so they’re not concerned with rain or fertilizer,” continued Philip. “They don’t care if they’re eaten or not. They use their intelligence to solve abstract problems, because to them all problems are abstract.”

I couldn’t help but speak up. “They really exist?”

“They really exist.”

“What do they look like?”

“Not like any plant on Earth. Most of them have translucent flowers, and almost all of them have rigid protrusions, like, I don’t know, tiny branches that rub together. That’s how they communicate.”

“So you speak in chimes and they speak in little clicks?” asked Julia. “How do you understand each other?”

“The first few men to study them spent half a century learning the meanings behind their clicking and rubbing. Now we both speak to my computer, and it translates each of our languages into the other’s.”

“What do you say to a plant?” I asked.

“Not much,” he admitted. “They’re very different. But after you speak to them for any length of time, you know why Men fight so hard to stay alive. Nothing matters to them. They accomplish nothing and they care about nothing, not even their mathematics. They have no / SOUNDPROOF / 56 hopes, no dreams, and no goals.” He paused. “But they are unique.”

“I’d—” I began, and then stopped. I’d been about to say I’d like to see one of those plants, but I didn’t want him to think he’d said anything of interest to me.

Just then Julia reached for her cup, but either her vision wasn’t working right or her hand was shaking – they both fail a lot these days, her eyes and her hands – and it began tottering, about the spill over. Philip moved his fingers so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it, and he righted the cup before three drops had fallen to the tray.

“Thank you, young man,” she said.

“You’re welcome.” He glanced at me, and his expression said: Whatever you think of what I’ve become, that’s something I couldn’t have done twelve years ago,

There was a momentary silence. Then Julia spoke up again. “Is it Halloween?”

“Not for a while yet.”

“Oh, that’s right! You wore your costume on some other world. Tell me more about the animals.”

“Some of them are beautiful, some of them are huge and awesome, some are petite and delicate, and all of them are different from anything you’ve ever seen or even imagined.”

“Do they have…?” she frowned. “I can’t remember the word.”

“Take your time,” he said, holding her hand in one of his and patting it gently with the other to comfort her. “I’ve got all night.”

“I can’t remember,” she said, close to tears. Her whole body tensed as she reached for a word that might forever elude her. “Big,” she said at last. “It was big.”

“A big word?” he asked.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Big!”

He looked puzzled. “Do you mean dinosaurs?”

“Yes!” she shouted, an expression of relief on her face as the missing word finally appeared.

“We don’t have dinosaurs,” he said. “They’re unique to Earth. But we have animals that are bigger than the biggest dinosaur that ever lived. One of them is so big, so huge, that he has no natural predators – and because nothing can hurt him, and he has no reason to hide, he glows in the dark.”

“All night long?” she asked with a giggle. “Can’t he turn off the glow so he can sleep?”

“He doesn’t have to,” said Philip as if speaking to a child, which in a way she was. “Since he’s glowed all his life it doesn’t bother him or keep him awake.” / SOUNDPROOF / 57

“What color is he?” asked Julia.

“When he’s hungry, he glows a deep red. When he’s angry, he’s blue.” Finally he smiled. “And when he wants to attract a ladyfriend, he becomes the brightest yellow you ever saw, and pulsates like crazy, almost like a 50-foot-high flashbulb going off every other second.” “Oh, I wish I could see him!” said Julia. “It must be a wonderful place, this world you live on!”

“I think so.” He looked over at me. “Not everybody does.”

“I would give everything I have to go there.”

“It doesn’t take quite everything,” said Philip, and I tried to imagine the tone of voice he’d have used if he had still been human. “Just most things.”

She stared at him curiously. “Were you born there?”

“No, Julia, I wasn’t,” he said and somehow his face seemed to reflect an infinite sadness as he used her proper name. “I was born right here, in this house.”

“It must have been before we moved here,” she said, dismissing the notion with a shrug of her narrow shoulders. “But if you were born here, why are you wearing a Halloween costume?”

“This is what people look like where I live.”

“It must be one of the suburbs,” she said with conviction. “I don’t remember seeing anyone like you at the supermarket or the doctor’s.”

“It’s a very distant suburb,” he said.

“I thought so,” said Julia. “And your name is…?”

“Philip,” he said, and for the second time that night I saw a shining tear roll down his cheek.

“Philip,” she repeated. “Philip. That’s a very nice name.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“I’m sure I knew a Philip once.” Suddenly she yawned. “I’m getting a little tired.”

“Would you like me to leave?” he asked solicitously.

“Could I ask you a favor?”

“Anything.”

“My father used to tell me a bedtime story when I went to sleep,” said Julia. “Would you tell me a fairy tale?”

“You’ve never asked me for one,” I blurted out. / SOUNDPROOF / 58

“You don’t know any,” she replied.

I had to admit she was right.

“I’ll be happy to,” said Philip. “Shall we lower the light a little – just in case you fall asleep?”

She nodded, spread her pillows out, and lay her head back on one of them.

He reached for the lamp in the wall above the nightstand – the only thing I’d added to the room since he’d left. When he couldn’t find a switch, he remembered that it worked by voice command and ordered it to dim itself. Then, in the same room where she had told him a fairy tale almost every night, he told one to her.

“Once there was a young man,” he began.

“No,” said Julia. He stopped and looked at her curiously. “If this is a fairy tale, he has to be a prince.”

“You’re right, of course. Once there was a prince.”

She nodded her approval. “That’s better.” Then: “What was his name?”

“What do you think his name was?”

“Prince Philip,” said Julia.

“You’re absolutely right,” he replied. “Once there was a prince named Philip. He was a very well-behaved young man, and tried always to do the bidding of the King and Queen. He studied chivalry and jousting and any number of princely things – but when his classes were done and his weapons were polished and put away and he’d finished his dinner, he would go to his room and read about fabulous places like Oz and Wonderland. He knew that such places couldn’t exist, but he wished they could, and every time he found a book or a holo about a new one he would read it or watch it, and wish that somehow, someday he could visit such places.”

“I know just how he felt!” said Julia with a happy smile on the wrinkled face that I still loved. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to walk along the yellow brick road with the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, or to have a conversation with the Cheshire Cat, or visit the Walrus and the Carpenter?”

“That’s what Prince Philip thought too,” he agreed. He leaned forward dramatically. “And then one day he made a wonderful discovery.”

She sat up and clapped her hands together in her excitement. “He learned how to get to Oz!”

“Not Oz, but an even more wonderful place.”

She leaned back, suddenly tired from her efforts. “I’m very glad! Is that the end?”

He shook his head. “No, it isn’t. Because you see, nobody in this place looked like the Prince or his parents. He couldn’t understand the people who lived there and they couldn’t / SOUNDPROOF / 59 understand him. And they were afraid of anyone who looked and sounded different.”

“Most people are,” she said sleepily, her eyes closed. “Did he wear a Halloween costume too?”

“Yes,” said Philip. “But it was a very special costume.”

“Oh?” she said, opening her eyes again. “How?”

“Once he put it on, he could never take it off again,” explained Philip.

“A magic costume!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, but it meant that he could never be the King of his parents’ country, and his father the King was very, very angry at him. But he knew he would never have another chance to visit such a wondrous kingdom again, so he donned the costume and he left his palace and went to live in the magical kingdom.”

“Was the costume uncomfortable to put on?” she asked, her voice very briefly more alert than it had been.

“Very,” he answered, which was something I’d never thought about before. “But he never complained because he never doubted that it was worth it. And he went to this mystical land, and he saw a thousand strange and beautiful things. Every day there was a new wonder, every night a new vision.”

“And he lived happily ever after?” asked Julia.

“So far.”

“And did he marry a beautiful princess?”

“Not yet,” said Philip. “But he has hopes.”

“I think that’s a beautiful fairy tale,” she said.

“Thank you, Julia.”

“You can call me Mother,” she said, her voice sharp and cogent. “You were right to go.” She turned to me, and somehow I could tell it was the old Julia, the real Julia, looking at me. “And you had better make your peace with our son.”

And as quickly as she said it, the old Julia vanished as she did so often these days, and she was once again the Julia I’d grown used to for the past year. She lay back on the pillow, and looked at our son once more.

“I’ve forgotten your name,” she said apologetically.

“Philip.”

“Philip,” she repeated. “What a nice name.” A pause. “Is it Halloween?” / SOUNDPROOF / 60

Before he could answer she was asleep. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek with his misshapen lips, then stood up and walked to the door.

“I’ll leave now,” he said as I followed him out of her room.

“Not yet,” I said.

He stared at me expectantly.

“Come on into the kitchen,” I said.

He followed me down the shabby hallway, and when we got there I pulled out a couple of beers, popped them open, and poured two glasses. “Did it hurt that much?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s over and done with.”

“There really are crystal mountains?”

He nodded.

“And flowers that talk?”

“Yes.”

“Come into the living room with me,” I said, heading out of the kitchen. When we got there I sat in an easy chair and gestured for him to sit down on the sofa.

“What is this about?” he asked.

“Was it really that special?” I asked. “That much of an honor?”

“There were more than six thousand candidates for the position,” he said. “I beat them all.”

“It must have cost them a pretty penny to make you what you are.”

“More than you can imagine.”

I took a sip of my beer. “Let’s talk.”

“We’ve talked about Mother,” he replied. “All that’s left is the Pythons, and I haven’t kept up with them.”

“There’s more.”

“Oh?”

“Tell me about Wonderland,” I said.

#

He stayed for three days, slept in the long-unused guest room, and then he had to go back. He invited me to come visit him, and I promised I would. But of course I can’t leave Julia, and / SOUNDPROOF / 61 by the time she’s gone I’ll probably be a little too old and a little too infirm, and it’s a long, grueling, expensive trip.

But it’s comforting to know that if I ever do find a way to get there, I’ll be greeted by a loving son who can show his old man around the place and point out all the sights to him.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 344, originally released on May 10, 2012 Download audio Read by Patrick Bazile Originally appeared in Asimov’s Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 62

Nominee for the 2012 Hugo Award, Best Short Story Movement By Nancy Fulda

It is sunset. The sky is splendid through the panes of my bedroom window; billowing layers of cumulous blazing with refracted oranges and reds. I think if only it weren’t for the glass, I could reach out and touch the cloudscape, perhaps leave my own trail of turbulence in the swirling patterns that will soon deepen to indigo.

But the window is there, and I feel trapped.

Behind me my parents and a specialist from the neurological research institute are sitting on folding chairs they’ve brought in from the kitchen, quietly discussing my future. They do not know I am listening. They think that, because I do not choose to respond, I do not notice they are there.

“Would there be side effects?” My father asks. In the oppressive heat of the evening, I hear the quiet Zzzapof his shoulder laser as it targets mosquitoes. The device is not as effective as it was two years ago: the mosquitoes are getting faster.

My father is a believer in technology, and that is why he contacted the research institute. He wants to fix me. He is certain there is a way.

“There would be no side effects in the traditional sense,”the specialist says. I like him even though his presence makes me uncomfortable. He chooses his words very precisely. “We’re talking about direct synaptic grafting, not drugs. The process is akin to bending a sapling to influence the shape of the grown tree. We boost the strength of key dendritic connections and allow brain development to continue naturally. Young neurons are very malleable.”

“And you’ve done this before?” I do not have to look to know my mother is frowning.

My mother does not trust technology. She has spent the last ten years trying to coax me into social behavior by gentler means. She loves me, but she does not understand me. She thinks I cannot be happy unless I am smiling and laughing and running along the beach with other teenagers.

“The procedure is still new, but our first subject was a young woman about the same age as your daughter. Afterwards, she integrated wonderfully. She was never an exceptional student, but she began speaking more and had an easier time following classroom procedure.”

“What about Hannah’s...talents?”my mother asks. I know she is thinking about my dancing; also the way I remember facts and numbers without trying. “Would she lose those?”

The specialist’s voice is very firm, and I like the way he delivers the facts without trying to cushion them. “It’s a matter of trade-offs, Mrs. Didier. The brain cannot be optimized for everything at once. Without treatment, some children like Hannah develop into extraordinary individuals. They become famous, change the world, learn to integrate their abilities into the structures of society. But only a very few are that lucky. The others never learn to make friends, hold a job, or live outside of institutions.” / SOUNDPROOF / 63

“And... with treatment?”

“I cannot promise anything, but the chances are very good that Hannah will lead a normal life.”

I have pressed my hand to the window. The glass feels cold and smooth beneath my palm. It appears motionless although I know at the molecular level it is flowing. Its atoms slide past each other slowly, so slowly; a transformation no less inevitable for its tempo. I like glass -- also stone -- because it does not change very quickly. I will be dead, and so will all of my relatives and their descendants, before the deformations will be visible without a microscope.

I feel my mother’s hands on my shoulders. She has come up behind me and now she turns me so that I must either look in her eyes or pull away. I look in her eyes because I love her and because I am calm enough right now to handle it. She speaks softly and slowly.

“Would you like that, Hannah? Would you like to be more like other teenagers?”

Neither yes nor no seems appropriate, so I do not say anything. Words are such fleeting, indefinite things. They slip through the spaces between my thoughts and are lost.

She keeps looking at me, and I consider giving her an answer I’ve been saving. Two weeks ago she asked me whether I would like a new pair of dancing shoes and if so, what color. I have collected the proper words in my mind, smooth and firm like pebbles, but I decide it is not worth speaking them. Usually by the time I answer a question, people have forgotten that they asked it.

The word they have made for my condition is temporal autism. I do not like it, both because it is a word and because I am not certain I have anything in common with autists beyond a disinclination for speech.

They are right about the temporal part, though.

My mother waits twelve-point-five seconds before releasing my shoulders and returning to sit on the folding chair. I can tell she is unhappy with me, so I climb down from the window ledge and reach for the paper sack I keep tucked under my bed. The handles are made of twine, rough and real against my fingers. I press the sack to my chest and slip past the people conversing in my bedroom.

Downstairs I open the front door and stare into the breathtaking sky. I know I am not supposed to leave the house on my own, but I do not want to stay inside, either. Above me the heavens are moving. The clouds swirl like leaves in a hurricane: billowing, vanishing, tumbling apart and restructuring themselves; a lethargic yet incontrovertible chaos.

I can almost feel the earth spinning beneath my feet. I am hurtling through space, a speck too small to resist the immensity of the forces that surround me. I tighten my fingers around the twine handles of the sack to keep myself from spinning away into the stratosphere. I wonder what it’s like to be cheerfully oblivious of the way time shapes our existence. I wonder what it’s like to be like everyone else.

# / SOUNDPROOF / 64

I am under the brilliant sky now, the thick paper of the sack crackling as it swings against my legs. I am holding the handles so tightly that the twine bites into my fingers.

At my feet the flytraps are opening, their spiny blossoms stretching upwards from chips and cracks in the pavement. They are a domestic variety gone wild, and they are thriving in the nurturing environment provided by this part of town. Our street hosts a flurry of sidewalk cafes, and the fist-sized blossoms open every evening to snare crumbs of baguettes or sausage fragments carried by the wind from nearby tables.

The flytraps make me nervous, although I doubt I could communicate to anyone why this is so. They feel very much like the clouds that stream overhead in glowing shades of orange and amber: always changing, always taking on new forms.

The plants have even outgrown their own name. They seldom feed on flies anymore. The game of out-evolving prey has become unrewarding, and so they have learned to survive by seeming pleasant to humanity. The speckled patterns along the blossoms grow more intricate each year. The spines snap closed so dramatically when a bit of protein or carbohydrate falls within their grasp that children giggle and hasten to fetch more.

One flytrap, in particular, catches my attention. It has a magnificent blossom, larger and more colorful than any I have seen before, but the ordinary stem is too spindly to support this innovation. The blossom lies crushed against the sidewalk, overshadowed by the smaller, sturdier plants that crowd above it.

It is a critical juncture in the evolutionary chain, and I want to watch and see whether the plant will live to pass on its genes. Although the flytraps as a whole disquiet me, this single plant is comforting. It is like the space between one section of music and another; something is about to happen, but no one knows exactly what. The plant may quietly extinguish, or it may live to spawn the next generation of flytraps; a generation more uniquely suited to survival than any that has come before.

I want the flytrap to survive, but I can tell from the sickly color of its leaves that this is unlikely. I wonder, if the plant had been offered the certainty of mediocrity rather than the chance of greatness, would it have accepted?

I start walking again because I am afraid I will start crying.

I am too young. It is not fair to ask me to make such a decision. It is also not fair if someone else makes it for me.

I do not know what I should want.

#

The old cathedral, when it appears at the end of the avenue, soothes me. It is like a stone in the midst of a swirling river, worn smooth at the edges but mostly immune to time’s capricious currents. Looking at it makes me think of Daniel Tammet. Tammet was an autistic savant in the twenty-first century who recognized every prime from 2 to 9,973 by the pebble- like quality they elicited in his mind. Historical architecture feels to me the way I think Tammet’s primes must have felt to him. / SOUNDPROOF / 65

The priest inside the building greets me kindly, but does not expect a response. He is used to me, and I am comfortable with him. He does not demand that I waste my effort on fleeting things -- pointless things -- like specks of conversation that are swept away by the great rush of time without leaving any lasting impact. I slip past him into the empty room where the colored windows cast shadows of light on the walls.

My footsteps echo as I pass through the doorway, and I feel suddenly alone.

I know that there are other people like me, most of them from the same ethnic background, which implies we are the result of a recent mutation. I have never asked to meet them. It has not seemed important. Now, as I sit against the dusty walls and remove my street shoes, I think maybe that has been a mistake.

The paper sack rustles as I pull from it a pair of dancing slippers. They are pointe shoes, reinforced for a type of dancing that human anatomy cannot achieve on its own. I slide my feet into position along the shank, my toes nestling into the familiar shape of the toe box. I wrap the ribbons carefully, making sure my foot is properly supported.

Other people do not see the shoes the same way I do. They see only the faded satin, battered so much that it has grown threadbare, and the rough wood of the toe box where it juts through the gaps. They do not see how the worn leather has matched itself to the shape of my foot. They do not know what it is like to dance in shoes that feel like a part of your body.

I begin to warm my muscles, keenly aware of the paths the shadows trace along the walls as sunset fades into darkness. When I have finished the last of my pliésand jetés, stars glimmer through the colored glass of the windows, dizzying me with their progress. I am hurtling through space, part of a solar system flung towards the outer rim of its galaxy. It is difficult to breathe.

Often, when the flow of time becomes too strong, I crawl into the dark space beneath my bed and run my fingers along the rough stones and jagged glass fragments that I have collected there. But today the pointe shoes are connecting me to the ground. I move to the center of the room, rise to full point...

And wait.

Time stretches and spins like molasses, pulling me in all directions at once. I am like the silence between one movement of music and the next, like a water droplet trapped halfway down a waterfall that stands frozen in time. Forces press against me, churning, swirling, roaring with the sound of reality changing. I hear my heart beating in the empty chamber. I wonder if this is how Daniel Tammet felt when he contemplated infinity.

Finally I find it; the pattern in the chaos. It is not music, precisely, but it is very like it. It unlocks the terror that has tightened my muscles and I am no longer a mote in a hurricane. I am the hurricane itself. My feet stir up dust along the floor. My body moves in concordance with my will. There are no words here. There is only me and the motion, whirling in patterns as complex as they are inconstant.

Life is not the only thing that evolves. My dancing changes every day, sometimes every second, each sequence repeating or extinguishing based on how well it pleases me. At a higher level in the fractal, forms of dance also mutate and die. People call ballet a timeless / SOUNDPROOF / 66 art, but the dance performed in modern theatres is very different from the ballet that originally emerged in Italy and France.

Mine is an endangered species in the performance hierarchy; a neoclassical variant that no one remembers, no one pays to watch, and only a few small groups of dancers ever mimic. It is solitary, beautiful, and doomed to destruction. I love it because its fate is certain. Time has no more hold on it.

When my muscles lose their strength I will relinquish the illusion of control and return to being yet another particle in the rushing chaos of the universe, a spectator to my own existence. But for now I am aware of nothing except my own movement and the energy rushing through my blood vessels. Were it not for physical limitations, I would keep dancing forever.

#

My brother is the one who finds me. He has often brought me here and waits with electronics flickering at his temples while I dance. I like my brother. I feel comfortable with him because he does not expect me to be anything other than what I am.

By the time I have knelt to unlace my dance shoes my parents have arrived also. They are not calm and quiet like my brother. They are sweaty from the night air and speak in tense sentences that all jumble on top of each other. If they would bother to wait I might find words to soothe their frantic babble. But they do not know how to speak on my time scale. Their conversations are paced in seconds, sometimes in minutes. It is like the buzzing of mosquitoes in my ears. I need days, sometimes weeks to sort my thoughts and find the perfect answer.

My mother is close to my face and seems distressed. I try to calm her with the answer I’ve been saving.

“No new shoes,”I say. “I couldn’t dance the same in new shoes.”

I can tell that these are not the words she was looking for, but she has stopped scolding me for leaving the house unaccompanied.

My father is also angry. Or perhaps he is afraid. His voice is too loud for me, and I tighten my fingers around the paper sack in my hands.

“Stars above, Hannah, do you have any idea how long we’ve been looking for you? Gina, we’re going to have to do something soon. She might have wandered into the Red District, or been hit by a car, or--”

“I don’t want to be rushed into this!”Mother’s voice is angry. “Dr. Renoit is starting a new therapy group next month. We should--”

“I don’t know why you’re so stubborn about this. We’re not talking about drugs or surgery. It’s a simple, noninvasive procedure.”

“One that hasn’t been tested yet! We’ve been seeing progress with the ABA program. I’m not / SOUNDPROOF / 67 willing to throw that away just because...”

I hear the Zzzap of father’s shoulder laser. Because I have not heard the whine of a mosquito, I know that it has targeted a spec of dust. This does not surprise me. In the years since father bought the laser the mosquitoes have changed, but the dust is the same as it was millennia ago.

A moment later I hear mother swear and swat at her shirt. The mosquito whizzes past my ear as it escapes. I have been keeping track of the statistics over the years. Mother’s traditional approach to mosquitoes is no more effective than Father’s hi-tech solution.

#

My brother takes me home while my parents argue about the future. I sit in his room while he lies down and activates the implants at his temples. Pinpricks of light gleam across his forehead, flickering because he’s connected to the Vastness. His mind is wide, now. Wide and broadening; horizons without end. Each pulse of his neurons flares across the thoughtnets to stimulate the neurons of others, just as theirs are stimulating his.

Forty minutes later my grandparents pause by the open doorway. My grandparents do not understand the Vastness. They do not know that the drool pools at his cheek because it is hard to perceive the faint messages from the body when the mind is ablaze with stimuli. They see the slackness of his face, the glassy eyes staring upwards, and they know only that he is far away from us, gone somewhere they cannot follow, and that they think must be evil.

“It isn’t right,” they mutter, “letting the mind decay like that. His parents shouldn’t let him spend so much time on that thing.”

“Remember how it was when we were young? The way we’d all crowd around the same game console? Everyone in the same room. Everyone seeing the same screen. Now that was bonding. That was healthy entertainment.”

They shake their heads. “It’s a shame young people don’t know how to connect with each other anymore.”

I do not want to listen to them talk, so I stand up and close the door in their faces. I know they will consider the action unprovoked, but I do not care. They know the words for temporal autism, but they do not understand what it means. Deep inside, they still believe that I am just bad mannered.

Faintly, beyond the door, I hear them telling each other how different young people are from the way they used to be. Their frustration mystifies me. I do not understand why old people expect the younger generations to hold still, why they think, in a world so full of tumult, children should play the same games their grandparents did.

I watch the lights flare at my brother’s temples, a stochastic pattern that reminds me of the birth and death of suns. Right now, he is using a higher percentage of his neural tissue than anyone born a hundred years ago could conceive of. He is communicating with more people than my father has met in his entire lifetime.

How was it, I wonder, when Homo habilis first uttered the noises that would lead to modern / SOUNDPROOF / 68 language? Were those odd-sounding infants considered defective, asocial, unsuitable to interact with their peers? How many genetic variations bordered on language before one found enough acceptance to perpetuate?

My grandparents say the Vastness is distorting my brother’s mind, but I think it is really the opposite. His mind is built to seek out the Vastness, just like mine is attuned to the dizzying flow of seconds and centuries.

#

Night collides into morning, and somewhere along the way I fall asleep. When I wake the sky beyond my brother’s window is bright with sunlight. If I bring my face close to the glass, I can just see the flytrap with the magnificent blossom and the crumpled stem. It is too early to tell whether it will survive the day.

Outside the neighbors greet each other; the elderly with polite nods or handshakes, the teenagers with shouts and gestured slang. I wonder which of the new greetings used this morning will entrench themselves into the vocabulary of tomorrow.

Social structures follow their own path of evolution -- variations infinitely emerging, competing, and fading into the tumult. The cathedral at the end of our street will one day host humans speaking a different language, with entirely different customs than ours.

Everything changes. Everything is always changing. To me, the process is very much like waves hitting the tidal rocks: Churn, swirl, splash, churn...Chaos, inevitable in its consistency.

It should not be surprising that, on the way from what we are to what we are becoming, there should be friction and false starts along the way. Noise is intrinsic to change. Progression is inherently chaotic.

Mother calls me for breakfast, then attempts to make conversation while I eat my buttered toast. She thinks that I do not answer because I haven’t heard her, or perhaps because I do not care. But it’s not that. I’m like my brother when he’s connected to the Vastness. How can I play the game of dredging up memorized answers to questions that have no meaning when the world is changing so rapidly? The heavens stream past outside the windows, the crustal plates are shifting beneath my feet. Everything around me is either growing or falling apart. Words feel flat and insignificant by comparison.

Mother and father have avoided discussing synaptic grafting with each other all morning, a clear indication that their communication strategies must once again evolve. Their conversations about me have always been strained. Disputed phrases have died out of our family vocabulary, and my parents must constantly invent new ones to fill the gaps.

I am evolving too, in my own small way. Connections within my brain are forming, surviving, and perishing, and with each choice I make I alter the genotype of my soul. This is the thing, I think, the my parents most fail to see. I am not static, no more than the large glass window that lights the breakfast table. Day by day I am learning to mold myself to a world that does not welcome me.

I press my hands to the window and feel its cool smoothness beneath my skin. If I close my / SOUNDPROOF / 69 eyes I can almost feel the molecules shifting. Let it continue long enough, and the pane will someday find its own shape, one constrained not by the hand of humans but by the laws of the universe, and by its own nature.

I find that I have decided something.

I do not want to live small. I do not want to be like everyone else, ignorant of the great rush of time, trapped in frantic racing sentences. I want something else, something that I cannot find a word for.

I pull on mother’s arm and tap at the glass, to show her that I am fluid inside. As usual, she does not understand what I am trying to tell her. I would like to clarify, but I cannot find the way. I pull my ballet slippers from the rustling paper bag and place them on top of the information packet left by the neuroscientist.

“I do not want new shoes,” I say. “I do not want new shoes.”

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 314, originally released on October 13, 2011 Download audio Read by Marguerite Kenner Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author

Special note: Originally appeared in Escape Pod 314, reposting here with permission for inclusion with other Hugo stories. / SOUNDPROOF / 70

Nominee for the 2012 Hugo Award, Best Short Story The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be soothed no matter what Mom and Dad tried.

Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen and sat me down at the breakfast table.

"Kan, kan," she said, as she pulled a sheet of wrapping paper from on top of the fridge. For years, Mom carefully sliced open the wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved them on top of the fridge in a thick stack.

She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began to fold it. I stopped crying and watched her, curious.

She turned the paper over and folded it again. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her cupped hands. Then she lifted the folded-up paper packet to her mouth and blew into it, like a balloon.

"Kan," she said. "Laohu." She put her hands down on the table and let go.

A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.

I reached out to Mom’s creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. "Rawrr-sa," it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.

I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.

"Zhe jiao zhezhi," Mom said. This is called origami.

I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom's kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.

#

Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog.

One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details. He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again.

He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of 1973. Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more than a few seconds on each page until he saw the picture of Mom.

I've never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the / SOUNDPROOF / 71 camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out at him with the eyes of a calm child.

"That was the last page of the catalog I saw," he said.

The catalog said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was from Hong Kong. None of these facts turned out to be true.

He wrote to her, and the company passed their messages back and forth. Finally, he flew to Hong Kong to meet her.

"The people at the company had been writing her responses. She didn't know any English other than 'hello' and 'goodbye.'"

What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be bought? The high school me thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wine.

Instead of storming into the office to demand his money back, he paid a waitress at the hotel restaurant to translate for them.

"She would look at me, her eyes halfway between scared and hopeful, while I spoke. And when the girl began translating what I said, she'd start to smile slowly."

He flew back to Connecticut and began to apply for the papers for her to come to him. I was born a year later, in the Year of the Tiger.

#

At my request, Mom also made a goat, a deer, and a water buffalo out of wrapping paper. They would run around the living room while Laohu chased after them, growling. When he caught them he would press down until the air went out of them and they became just flat, folded-up pieces of paper. I would then have to blow into them to re-inflate them so they could run around some more.

Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs. The sauce-softened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp. Mom eventually wrapped his legs in saran wrap so that he could wallow to his heart’s content (just not in soy sauce).

Also, Laohu liked to pounce at sparrows when he and I played in the backyard. But one time, a cornered bird struck back in desperation and tore his ear. He whimpered and winced as I held him and Mom patched his ear together with tape. He avoided birds after that.

And then one day, I saw a TV documentary about sharks and asked Mom for one of my own. She made the shark, but he flapped about on the table unhappily. I filled the sink with water, and put him in. He swam around and around happily. However, after a while he became soggy and translucent, and slowly sank to the bottom, the folds coming undone. I reached in / SOUNDPROOF / 72 to rescue him, and all I ended up with was a wet piece of paper.

Laohu put his front paws together at the edge of the sink and rested his head on them. Ears drooping, he made a low growl in his throat that made me feel guilty.

Mom made a new shark for me, this time out of tin foil. The shark lived happily in a large goldfish bowl. Laohu and I liked to sit next to the bowl to watch the tin foil shark chasing the goldfish, Laohu sticking his face up against the bowl on the other side so that I saw his eyes, magnified to the size of coffee cups, staring at me from across the bowl.

#

When I was ten, we moved to a new house across town. Two of the women neighbors came by to welcome us. Dad served them drinks and then apologized for having to run off to the utility company to straighten out the prior owner’s bills. "Make yourselves at home. My wife doesn't speak much English, so don't think she's being rude for not talking to you."

While I read in the dining room, Mom unpacked in the kitchen. The neighbors conversed in the living room, not trying to be particularly quiet.

"He seems like a normal enough man. Why did he do that?"

"Something about the mixing never seems right. The child looks unfinished. Slanty eyes, white face. A little monster."

"Do you think he can speak English?"

The women hushed. After a while they came into the dining room.

"Hello there! What's your name?"

"Jack," I said.

"That doesn't sound very Chinesey."

Mom came into the dining room then. She smiled at the women. The three of them stood in a triangle around me, smiling and nodding at each other, with nothing to say, until Dad came back.

#

Mark, one of the neighborhood boys, came over with his Star Wars action figures. Obi-Wan Kenobi's lightsaber lit up and he could swing his arms and say, in a tinny voice, "Use the Force!" I didn’t think the figure looked much like the real Obi-Wan at all.

Together, we watched him repeat this performance five times on the coffee table. "Can he do anything else?" I asked.

Mark was annoyed by my question. "Look at all the details," he said.

I looked at the details. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say. / SOUNDPROOF / 73

Mark was disappointed by my response. "Show me your toys."

I didn't have any toys except my paper menagerie. I brought Laohu out from my bedroom. By then he was very worn, patched all over with tape and glue, evidence of the years of repairs Mom and I had done on him. He was no longer as nimble and sure-footed as before. I sat him down on the coffee table. I could hear the skittering steps of the other animals behind in the hallway, timidly peeking into the living room.

"Xiao laohu," I said, and stopped. I switched to English. "This is Tiger." Cautiously, Laohu strode up and purred at Mark, sniffing his hands.

Mark examined the Christmas-wrap pattern of Laohu's skin. "That doesn't look like a tiger at all. Your Mom makes toys for you from trash?"

I had never thought of Laohu as trash. But looking at him now, he was really just a piece of wrapping paper.

Mark pushed Obi-Wan’s head again. The lightsaber flashed; he moved his arms up and down. "Use the Force!"

Laohu turned and pounced, knocking the plastic figure off the table. It hit the floor and broke, and Obi-Wan’s head rolled under the couch. “Rawwww,” Laohu laughed. I joined him.

Mark punched me, hard. "This was very expensive! You can’t even find it in the stores now. It probably cost more than what your dad paid for your mom!"

I stumbled and fell to the floor. Laohu growled and leapt at Mark's face.

Mark screamed, more out of fear and surprise than pain. Laohu was only made of paper, after all.

Mark grabbed Laohu and his snarl was choked off as Mark crumpled him in his hand and tore him in half. He balled up the two pieces of paper and threw them at me. "Here's your stupid cheap Chinese garbage."

After Mark left, I spent a long time trying, without success, to tape together the pieces, smooth out the paper, and follow the creases to refold Laohu. Slowly, the other animals came into the living room and gathered around us, me and the torn wrapping paper that used to be Laohu.

#

My fight with Mark didn’t end there. Mark was popular at school. I never want to think again about the two weeks that followed.

I came home that Friday at the end of the two weeks. "Xuexiao hao ma?" Mom asked. I said nothing and went to the bathroom. I looked into the mirror. I look nothing like her, nothing.

At dinner I asked Dad, "Do I have a chink face?"

Dad put down his chopsticks. Even though I had never told him what happened in school, he / SOUNDPROOF / 74 seemed to understand. He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "No, you don't."

Mom looked at Dad, not understanding. She looked back at me. "Sha jiao chink?"

"English," I said. "Speak English."

She tried. "What happen?"

I pushed the chopsticks and the bowl before me away: stir-fried green peppers with five-spice beef. "We should eat American food."

Dad tried to reason. “A lot of families cook Chinese sometimes.”

“We are not other families.” I looked at him. Other families don’t have moms who don’t belong.

He looked away. And then he put a hand on Mom’s shoulder. "I'll get you a cookbook."

Mom turned to me. "Bu haochi?"

"English," I said, raising my voice. "Speak English."

Mom reached out to touch my forehead, feeling for my temperature. "Fashao la?"

I brushed her hand away. "I'm fine. Speak English!" I was shouting.

"Speak English to him," Dad said to Mom. "You knew this was going to happen some day. What did you expect?"

Mom dropped her hands to her side. She sat, looking from Dad to me, and back to Dad again. She tried to speak, stopped, and tried again, and stopped again.

"You have to," Dad said. "I've been too easy on you. Jack needs to fit in."

Mom looked at him. "If I say 'love,' I feel here." She pointed to her lips. "If I say 'ai,' I feel here." She put her hand over her heart.

Dad shook his head. "You are in America."

Mom hunched down in her seat, looking like the water buffalo when Laohu used to pounce on him and squeeze the air of life out of him.

"And I want some real toys."

#

Dad bought me a full set of Star Wars action figures. I gave the Obi-Wan Kenobi to Mark.

I packed the paper menagerie in a large shoebox and put it under the bed.

The next morning, the animals had escaped and took over their old favorite spots in my room. I caught them all and put them back into the shoebox, taping the lid shut. But the animals made so much noise in the box that I finally shoved it into the corner of the attic as far away / SOUNDPROOF / 75 from my room as possible.

If Mom spoke to me in Chinese, I refused to answer her. After a while, she tried to use more English. But her accent and broken sentences embarrassed me. I tried to correct her. Eventually, she stopped speaking altogether if I were around.

Mom began to mime things if she needed to let me know something. She tried to hug me the way she saw American mothers did on TV. I thought her movements exaggerated, uncertain, ridiculous, graceless. She saw that I was annoyed, and stopped.

"You shouldn’t treat your mother that way," Dad said. But he couldn't look me in the eyes as he said it. Deep in his heart, he must have realized that it was a mistake to have tried to take a Chinese peasant girl and expect her to fit in the suburbs of Connecticut.

Mom learned to cook American style. I played video games and studied French.

Every once in a while, I would see her at the kitchen table studying the plain side of a sheet of wrapping paper. Later a new paper animal would appear on my nightstand and try to cuddle up to me. I caught them, squeezed them until the air went out of them, and then stuffed them away in the box in the attic.

Mom finally stopped making the animals when I was in high school. By then her English was much better, but I was already at that age when I wasn't interested in what she had to say whatever language she used.

Sometimes, when I came home and saw her tiny body busily moving about in the kitchen, singing a song in Chinese to herself, it was hard for me to believe that she gave birth to me. We had nothing in common. She might as well be from the moon. I would hurry on to my room, where I could continue my all-American pursuit of happiness.

#

Dad and I stood, one on each side of Mom, lying on the hospital bed. She was not yet even forty, but she looked much older.

For years she had refused to go to the doctor for the pain inside her that she said was no big deal. By the time an ambulance finally carried her in, the cancer had spread far beyond the limits of surgery.

My mind was not in the room. It was the middle of the on-campus recruiting season, and I was focused on resumes, transcripts, and strategically constructed interview schedules. I schemed about how to lie to the corporate recruiters most effectively so that they'll offer to buy me. I understood intellectually that it was terrible to think about this while your mother lay dying. But that understanding didn't mean I could change how I felt.

She was conscious. Dad held her left hand with both of his own. He leaned down to kiss her forehead. He seemed weak and old in a way that startled me. I realized that I knew almost as little about Dad as I did about Mom.

Mom smiled at him. “I’m fine.” / SOUNDPROOF / 76

She turned to me, still smiling. "I know you have to go back to school." Her voice was very weak and it was difficult to hear her over the hum of the machines hooked up to her. "Go. Don't worry about me. This is not a big deal. Just do well in school."

I reached out to touch her hand, because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I was relieved. I was already thinking about the flight back, and the bright California sunshine.

She whispered something to Dad. He nodded and left the room.

"Jack, if—" she was caught up in a fit of coughing, and could not speak for some time. "If I don't make it, don't be too sad and hurt your health. Focus on your life. Just keep that box you have in the attic with you, and every year, at Qingming, just take it out and think about me. I'll be with you always."

Qingming was the Chinese Festival for the Dead. When I was very young, Mom used to write a letter on Qingming to her dead parents back in China, telling them the good news about the past year of her life in America. She would read the letter out loud to me, and if I made a comment about something, she would write it down in the letter too. Then she would fold the letter into a paper crane, and release it, facing west. We would then watch, as the crane flapped its crisp wings on its long journey west, towards the Pacific, towards China, towards the graves of Mom's family.

It had been many years since I last did that with her.

"I don't know anything about the Chinese calendar," I said. "Just rest, Mom. "

"Just keep the box with you and open it once in a while. Just open—" she began to cough again.

"It's okay, Mom." I stroked her arm awkwardly.

"Haizi, mama ai ni—" Her cough took over again. An image from years ago flashed into my memory: Mom saying ai and then putting her hand over her heart.

"Alright, Mom. Stop talking."

Dad came back, and I said that I needed to get to the airport early because I didn't want to miss my flight.

She died when my plane was somewhere over Nevada.

#

Dad aged rapidly after Mom died. The house was too big for him and had to be sold. My girlfriend Susan and I went to help him pack and clean the place.

Susan found the shoebox in the attic. The paper menagerie, hidden in the uninsulated darkness of the attic for so long, had become brittle and the bright wrapping paper patterns had faded.

"I've never seen origami like this," Susan said. "Your Mom was an amazing artist." / SOUNDPROOF / 77

The paper animals did not move. Perhaps whatever magic had animated them stopped when Mom died. Or perhaps I had only imagined that these paper constructions were once alive. The memory of children could not be trusted.

#

It was the first weekend in April, two years after Mom’s death. Susan was out of town on one of her endless trips as a management consultant and I was home, lazily flipping through the TV channels.

I paused at a documentary about sharks. Suddenly I saw, in my mind, Mom’s hands, as they folded and refolded tin foil to make a shark for me, while Laohu and I watched.

A rustle. I looked up and saw that a ball of wrapping paper and torn tape was on the floor next to the bookshelf. I walked over to pick it up for the trash.

The ball of paper shifted, unfurled itself, and I saw that it was Laohu, who I hadn't thought about in a very long time. "Rawrr-sa." Mom must have put him back together after I had given up.

He was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe it was just that back then my fists were smaller.

Susan had put the paper animals around our apartment as decoration. She probably left Laohu in a pretty hidden corner because he looked so shabby.

I sat down on the floor, and reached out a finger. Laohu's tail twitched, and he pounced playfully. I laughed, stroking his back. Laohu purred under my hand.

“How’ve you been, old buddy?”

Laohu stopped playing. He got up, jumped with feline grace into my lap, and proceeded to unfold himself.

In my lap was a square of creased wrapping paper, the plain side up. It was filled with dense Chinese characters. I had never learned to read Chinese, but I knew the characters for son, and they were at the top, where you'd expect them in a letter addressed to you, written in Mom’s awkward, childish handwriting.

I went to the computer to check the Internet. Today was Qingming.

#

I took the letter with me downtown, where I knew the Chinese tour buses stopped. I stopped every tourist, asking, "Nin hui du zhongwen ma?" Can you read Chinese? I hadn't spoken Chinese in so long that I wasn't sure if they understood.

A young woman agreed to help. We sat down on a bench together, and she read the letter to me aloud. The language that I had tried to forget for years came back, and I felt the words sinking into me, through my skin, through my bones, until they squeezed tight around my heart. / SOUNDPROOF / 78

#

Son,

We haven't talked in a long time. You are so angry when I try to touch you that I'm afraid. And I think maybe this pain I feel all the time now is something serious.

So I decided to write to you. I’m going to write in the paper animals I made for you that you used to like so much.

The animals will stop moving when I stop breathing. But if I write to you with all my heart, I’ll leave a little of myself behind on this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on Qingming, when the spirits of the departed are allowed to visit their families, you’ll make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive too. The creatures I made for you will again leap and run and pounce, and maybe you’ll get to see these words then.

Because I have to write with all my heart, I need to write to you in Chinese.

All this time I still haven’t told you the story of my life. When you were little, I always thought I’d tell you the story when you were older, so you could understand. But somehow that chance never came up.

I was born in 1957, in Sigulu Village, Hebei Province. Your grandparents were both from very poor peasant families with few relatives. Only a few years after I was born, the Great Famines struck China, during which thirty million people died. The first memory I have was waking up to see my mother eating dirt so that she could fill her belly and leave the last bit of flour for me.

Things got better after that. Sigulu is famous for its zhezhi papercraft, and my mother taught me how to make paper animals and give them life. This was practical magic in the life of the village. We made paper birds to chase grasshoppers away from the fields, and paper tigers to keep away the mice. For Chinese New Year my friends and I made red paper dragons. I’ll never forget the sight of all those little dragons zooming across the sky overhead, holding up strings of exploding firecrackers to scare away all the bad memories of the past year. You would have loved it.

Then came the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Neighbor turned on neighbor, and brother against brother. Someone remembered that my mother’s brother, my uncle, had left for Hong Kong back in 1946, and became a merchant there. Having a relative in Hong Kong meant we were spies and enemies of the people, and we had to be struggled against in every way. Your poor grandmother -- she couldn’t take the abuse and threw herself down a well. Then some boys with hunting muskets dragged your grandfather away one day into the woods, and he never came back.

There I was, a ten-year-old orphan. The only relative I had in the world was my uncle in Hong Kong. I snuck away one night and climbed onto a freight train going south.

Down in Guangdong Province a few days later, some men caught me stealing food from a field. When they heard that I was trying to get to Hong Kong, they laughed. “It’s your lucky day. Our trade is to bring girls to Hong Kong.” / SOUNDPROOF / 79

They hid me in the bottom of a truck along with other girls, and smuggled us across the border.

We were taken to a basement and told to stand up and look healthy and intelligent for the buyers. Families paid the warehouse a fee and came by to look us over and select one of us to “adopt.”

The Chin family picked me to take care of their two boys. I got up every morning at four to prepare breakfast. I fed and bathed the boys. I shopped for food. I did the laundry and swept the floors. I followed the boys around and did their bidding. At night I was locked into a cupboard in the kitchen to sleep. If I was slow or did anything wrong I was beaten. If the boys did anything wrong I was beaten. If I was caught trying to learn English I was beaten.

“Why do you want to learn English?” Mr. Chin asked. “You want to go to the police? We’ll tell the police that you are a mainlander illegally in Hong Kong. They’d love to have you in their prison.”

Six years I lived like this. One day, an old woman who sold fish to me in the morning market pulled me aside.

“I know girls like you. How old are you now, sixteen? One day, the man who owns you will get drunk, and he’ll look at you and pull you to him and you can’t stop him. The wife will find out, and then you will think you really have gone to hell. You have to get out of this life. I know someone who can help.”

She told me about American men who wanted Asian wives. If I can cook, clean, and take care of my American husband, he’ll give me a good life. It was the only hope I had. And that was how I got into the catalog with all those lies and met your father. It is not a very romantic story, but it is my story.

In the suburbs of Connecticut, I was lonely. Your father was kind and gentle with me, and I was very grateful to him. But no one understood me, and I understood nothing.

But then you were born! I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I hadn’t made them up.

Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost. When you said your first words to me, in Chinese that had the same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours. When I made the first zhezhi animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no worries in the world.

You grew up a little, and now you could even help your father and I talk to each other. I was really at home now. I finally found a good life. I wished my parents could be here, so that I could cook for them, and give them a good life too. But my parents were no longer around. You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.

Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very / SOUNDPROOF / 80 existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again.

Why won’t you talk to me, son? The pain makes it hard to write.

#

The young woman handed the paper back to me. I could not bear to look into her face.

Without looking up, I asked for her help in tracing out the character for ai on the paper below Mom’s letter. I wrote the character again and again on the paper, intertwining my pen strokes with her words.

The young woman reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. Then she got up and left, leaving me alone with my mother.

Following the creases, I refolded the paper back into Laohu. I cradled him in the crook of my arm, and as he purred, we began the walk home.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 345, originally released on May 17, 2012 Download audio Read by Rajan Khanna Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 81

Winner of the 1968 Hugo Award, Best Novella Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg

Barrett was the uncrowned King of Hawksbill Station. He had been there the longest; he had suffered the most; he had the deepest inner resources of strength. Before his accident, he had been able to whip any man in the place. Now he was a cripple, but he still had that aura of power that gave him command. When there were problems at the Station, they were brought to Barrett. That was axiomatic. He was the king.

He ruled over quite a kingdom, too. In effect it was the whole world, pole to pole, meridian to meridian. For what it was worth. It wasn’t worth very much.

Now it was raining again. Barrett shrugged himself to his feet in the quick, easy gesture that cost him an infinite amount of carefully concealed agony, and shuffled to the door of his hut. Rain made him impatient:. the pounding of those great greasy drops against the corrugated tin roof was enough even to drive a Jim Barrett loony. He nudged the door open. Standing in the doorway, Barrett looked out over his kingdom.

Barren rock, nearly to the horizon. A shield of raw dolomite going on and on. Raindrops danced and bounced on that continental slab of rock. No trees. No grass. Behind Barrett’s hut lay the sea, gray and vast. The sky was gray too, even when it wasn’t raining.

He hobbled out into the rain. Manipulating his crutch was getting to be a simple matter for him now. He leaned comfortably, letting his crushed left foot dangle. A rockslide had pinned him last year during a trip to the edge of the Inland Sea. Back home, Barrett would have been fitted with prosthetics and that would have been the end of it: a new ankle, a new instep, refurbished ligaments and tendons. But home was a billion years away, and home there’s no returning.

The rain hit him hard. Barrett was a big man, six and a half feet tall, with hooded dark eyes, a jutting nose, a chin that was a monarch among chins. He had weighed two hundred fifty pounds in his prime, in the good old agitating days when he had carried banners and pounded out manifestos. But now he was past sixty and beginning to shrink a little, the skin getting loose around the places where the mighty muscles used to be. It was hard to keep your weight in Hawksbill Station. The food was nutritious, but it lacked intensity. A man got to miss steak. Eating brachiopod stew and trilobite hash wasn’t the same thing at all. Barrett was past all bitterness, though. That was another reason why the men regarded him as the leader. He didn’t scowl. He didn’t rant. He was resigned to his fate, tolerant of eternal exile, and so he could help the others get over that difficult, heart-clawing period of transition.

A figure arrived, jogging through the rain: Norton. The doctrinaire Khrushchevist with the Trotskyite leanings. A small, excitable man who frequently appointed himself messenger whenever there was news at the Station. He sprinted toward Barrett’s hut, slipping and sliding over the naked rocks.

Barrett held up a meaty hand. “Whoa, Charley. Take it easy or you’ll break your neck!”

Norton halted in front of the hut. The rain had pasted the widely spaced strands of his brown / SOUNDPROOF / 82 hair to his skull. His eyes had the fixed, glossy look of fanaticism—or perhaps just astigmatism. He gasped for breath and staggered into the hut, shaking himself like a wet puppy. He obviously had run all the way from the main building of the Station, three hundred yards away—a long dash over rock that slippery.

“Why are you standing around in the rain?” Norton asked.

“To get wet,” said Barrett, following him inside. “What’s the news?”

“The Hammer’s glowing. We’re getting company.”

“How do you know it’s a live shipment?”

“It’s been glowing for half an hour. That means they’re taking precautions. They’re sending a new prisoner. Anyway, no supplies shipment is due.”

Barrett nodded. “Okay. I’ll come over. If it’s a new man, we’ll bunk him in with Latimer.”

Norton managed a rasping laugh. “Maybe he’s a materialist. Latimer will drive him crazy with all that mystic nonsense. We could put him with Altman instead.”

“And he’ll be raped in half an hour.”

“Altman’s off that kick now,” said Norton. “He’s trying to create a real woman, not looking for second-rate substitutes.”

“Maybe our new man doesn’t have any spare ribs.”

“Very funny, Jim.” Norton did not look amused. “You know what I want the new man to be? A conservative, that’s what. A black-souled reactionary straight out of Adam Smith. God, that’s what I want!”

“Wouldn’t you be happy with a fellow Bolshevik?”

“This place is full of Bolsheviks,” said Norton. “Of all shades from pale pink to flagrant scarlet. Don’t you think I’m sick of them? Sitting around fishing for trilobites and discussing the relative merits of Kerensky and Malenkov? I need somebody to talk to, Jim. Somebody I can fight with.”

“All right,” Barrett said, slipping into his rain gear. “I’ll see what I can do about hocusing a debating partner out of the Hammer for you. A rip-roaring Objectivist, okay?” He laughed. “You know something, maybe there’s been a revolution Up Front since we got our last man? Maybe the left is in and the right is out, and they’ll start shipping us nothing but reactionaries. How would you like that? Fifty or a hundred storm troopers, Charley? Plenty of material to debate economics with. And the place will fill up with more and more of them, until we’re outnumbered, and then maybe they’ll have a putsch and get rid of all the stinking leftists sent here by the old regime, and—”

Barrett stopped. Norton was staring at him in amazement, his faded eyes wide, his hand compulsively smoothing his thinning hair to hide his embarrassment. Barrett realized that he had just committed one of the most heinous crimes possible at Hawksbill Station: he had started to run off at the mouth. There hadn’t been any call for his little outburst. What made it / SOUNDPROOF / 83 more troublesome was the fact that he was the one who had permitted himself such a luxury. He was supposed to be the strong one of this place, the stabilizer, the man of absolute integrity and principle and sanity on whom the others could lean. And suddenly he had lost control. It was a bad sign. His dead foot was throbbing again; possibly that was the reason.

In a tight voice he said, “Let’s go. Maybe the new man is here already.”

They stepped outside. The rain was beginning to let up; the storm was moving out to sea. In the east, over what would one day be the Atlantic, the sky was still clotted with gray mist, but to the west a different grayness was emerging, the shade of normal gray that meant dry weather. Before he had come out here, Barrett had expected to find the sky practically black, because there’d be fewer dust particles to bounce the light around and turn things blue. But the sky seemed to be a weary beige. So much for a priori theories.

Through the thinning rain they walked toward the main building. Norton accommodated himself to Barrett’s limping pace, and Barrett, wielding his crutch furiously, did his damndest not to let his infirmity slow them up. He nearly lost his footing twice, and fought hard not to let Norton see.

Hawksbill Station spread out before them.

It covered about five hundred acres. In the center of everything was the main building, an ample dome that contained most of their equipment and supplies. At widely paced intervals, rising from the rock shield like grotesque giant green mushrooms, were the plastic blisters of the individual dwellings. Some, like Barrett’s, were shielded by tin sheeting salvaged from shipments from Up Front. Others stood unprotected, just as they had come from the mouth of the extruder.

The huts numbered about eighty. At that moment, there were 140 inmates in Hawksbill Station, pretty close to the all-time high. Up Front hadn’t sent back any hut-building materials for a long time, and so all the newer arrivals had to double up with bunkmates. Barrett and all those whose exile had begun before 2014 had the privilege of private dwellings, if they wanted them. (Some did not wish to live alone; Barrett, to preserve his own authority, felt that he was required to.) As new exiles arrived, they bunked in with those who currently lived alone, in reverse order of seniority. Most of the 2015 exiles had been forced to take roommates now. Another dozen deportees and the 2014 group would be doubling up. Of course, there were deaths all up and down the line, and there were plenty who were eager to have company in their huts.

Barrett felt, though, that a man who has to be sentenced to life imprisonment ought to have the privilege of privacy if he desires it. One of his biggest problems here was keeping people from cracking up because there was too little privacy. Propinquity could be intolerable in a place like this.

Norton pointed toward the big shiny-skinned green dome of the main building. “There’s Altman going in now. And Rudiger. And Hutchett. Something’s happening!”

Barrett stepped up his pace. Some of the men entering the building saw his bulky figure coming over the rise in the rock, and waved to him. Barrett lifted a massive hand in reply. He felt mounting excitement. It was a big event at the Station whenever a new man arrived. Nobody had come for six months, now. That was the longest gap he could remember. It had / SOUNDPROOF / 84 started to seem as though no one would ever come again.

That would be a catastrophe. New men were all that stood between the older inmates and insanity. New men brought news from the future, news from the world that was entirely left behind. They contributed new personalities to a group that always was in danger of going stale.

And, Barrett knew, some men—he was not one—lived in the deluded hope that the next arrival might just be a woman.

That was why they flocked to the main building when the Hammer began to glow. Barrett hobbled down the path. The rain died away just as he reached the entrance.

Within, sixty or seventy Station residents crowded the chamber of the Hammer—just about every man in the place who was able in body and mind, and still alert enough to show curiosity about a newcomer. They shouted their greetings to Barrett. He nodded, smiled, deflected their questions with amiable gestures.

“Who’s it going to be this time, Jim?”

“Maybe a girl, huh? Around nineteen years old, blonde, built like—”

“I hope he can play stochastic chess, anyway.”

“Look at the glow! It’s deepening!”

Barrett, like the others, stared at the Hammer. The complex, involuted collection of unfathomable instruments burned a bright cherry-red now, betokening the surge of who knew how many kilowatts being pumped in at the far end of the line. The glow had spread to the Anvil now, that broad aluminum bedplate on which all shipments from the future were dropped. In another moment—

“Condition Crimson!” somebody yelled. “Here he comes!”

Two

A billion years up the time-line, power was flooding into the real Hammer of which this was only the partial replica. A man—or something else—stood in the center of the real Anvil, waiting for the Hawksbill Field to unfold him and kick him back to the early Paleozoic. The effect of time travel was very much like being hit with a gigantic hammer and driven clear through the walls of the continuum: hence the governing metaphors for the parts of the machine.

Setting up Hawksbill Station had been a long, slow job. The Hammer had knocked a pathway and had sent back the nucleus of the receiving station first. Since there was no receiving station on hand to receive the receiving station, a certain amount of waste had occurred. It wasn’t necessary to have a Hammer and Anvil on the receiving end, except as a fine control to prevent temporal spread; without the equipment, the field wandered a little, and it was possible to scatter consecutive shipments over a span of twenty or thirty years. There was plenty of such temporal garbage all around Hawksbill Station: stuff that had been intended for the original installation, but which because of tuning imprecisions in the pre-Hammer / SOUNDPROOF / 85 days had landed a couple of decades (and a couple of hundred miles) away from the intended site.

Despite such difficulties, they had finally sent through enough components to the master temporal site to allow for the construction of a receiving station. Then the first prisoners had gone through: technicians who knew how to put the Hammer and Anvil together. Of course, it was their privilege to refuse to cooperate. But it was to their own advantage to assemble the receiving station, thus making it possible for them to be sure of getting further supplies from Up Front. They had done the job. After that, outfitting Hawksbill Station had been easy.

Now the Hammer glowed, meaning that they had activated the Hawksbill Field on the sending end, somewhere up around 2028 or 2030 A.D. All the sending was done there. All the receiving was done here. It didn’t work the other way. Nobody really knew why, although there was a lot of superficially profound talk about the rules of entropy.

There was a whining, hissing sound as the edges of the Hawksbill Field began to ionize the atmosphere in the room. Then came the expected thunderclap of implosion, caused by an imperfect overlapping of the quantity of air that was subtracted from this era and the quantity of air was being thrust into it. And then abruptly, a man dropped out of the Hammer and lay stunned and limp, on the gleaming Anvil.

He looked young, which surprised Barrett considerably. He seemed to be well under thirty. Generally, only middle-aged men were sent to Hawksbill Station. Incorrigibles, who had to be separated from humanity for the general good. The youngest man in the place now had been close to forty when he arrived. The sight of this lean, clean-cut boy drew a hiss of anguish from a couple of the men in the room, and Barrett understood the constellation of emotions that pained them.

The new man sat up. He stirred like a child coming out of a long, deep sleep. He looked around.

His face was very pale. His thin lips seemed bloodless. His blue eyes blinked rapidly. His jaws worked as though he wanted to say something, but could not find the words.

There were no physiological harmful effects to time travel, but it could be a rough jolt to the consciousness. The last moments before the Hammer descended were very much like the final moments beneath the guillotine, since exile to Hawksbill Station was tantamount to a sentence of death. The departing prisoner took his last look at the world of rocket transport and artificial organs, at the world in which he had lived and loved and agitated for a political cause, and then he was rammed into an inconceivably remote past on a one-way journey. It was a gloomy business, and it was not very surprising that the newcomers arrived in a state of emotional shock.

Barrett elbowed his way through the crowd. Automatically the others made way for him. He reached the lip of the Anvil and leaned over it, extending a hand to the new man. His broad smile was met by a look of blank bewilderment.

“I’m Jim Barrett. Welcome to Hawksbill Station. Here—get off that thing before a load of groceries lands on top of you.” Wincing a little as he shifted his weight, Barrett pulled the new man down from the Anvil. It was altogether likely for the idiots Up Front to shoot / SOUNDPROOF / 86 another shipment along a minute after sending a man.

Barrett beckoned to Mel Rudiger, and the plump anarchist handed the new man an alcohol capsule. He took it and pressed it to his arm without a word. Charley Norton offered him a candy bar. The man shook it off. He looked groggy—a real case of temporal shock, Barrett thought, possibly the worst he had ever seen. The newcomer hadn’t even spoken yet. Could the effect really be that extreme?

Barrett said, “We’ll go to the infirmary and check you out. Then I’ll assign you your quarters. There’s time for you to find your way around and meet everybody later on. What’s your name?”

“Hahn. Lew Hahn.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Hahn,” the man repeated, still only barely audible.

“When are you from, Lew?”

“2029.”

“You feel pretty sick?”

“I feel awful. I don’t even believe this is happening to me. There’s no such place as Hawksbill Station, is there?”

“I’m afraid there is,” Barrett said. “At least, for most of us. A few of the boys think it’s all an illusion induced by drugs. But I have my doubts of that. If it’s an illusion, it’s damned good. Look.”

He put one arm around Hahn’s shoulders and guided him through the press of prisoners, out of the Hammer chamber and toward the nearby infirmary. Although Hahn looked thin, even fragile, Barrett was surprised to feel the rippling muscles in those shoulders. He suspected that this man was a lot less helpless and ineffectual than he seemed to be right now. He had to be: he had earned banishment to Hawksbill Station.

They passed the open door of the building. “Look out there,” Barrett commanded.

Hahn looked. He passed a hand across his eyes as though to clear away unseen cobwebs, and looked again.

“A Late Cambrian landscape,” said Barrett quietly. “This view would be a geologist’s dream, except that geologists don’t tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front of you is what they call Appalachia. It’s a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, running from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we’ve got the Atlantic Ocean. A little way to the west we’ve got a thing called the Appalachian Geosyncline, which is a trough five hundred miles wide full of water. Somewhere about two thousand miles to the west there’s another trough that they call the Cordilleran Geosyncline. It’s full of water too, and at this particular stage of geological history the patch of land between the geosynclines is below sea level, so where Appalachia ends we’ve got the Inland / SOUNDPROOF / 87

Sea, currently, running way out to the west. On the far side of the Inland Sea is a narrow north-south land mass called Cascadia that’s going to be California and Oregon and Washington someday. Don’t hold your breath till it happens. I hope you like seafood, Lew.”

Hahn stared, and Barrett, standing beside him at the doorway, stared also. You never got used to the alienness of this place, not even after you had lived here twenty years, as Barrett had. It was Earth, and yet it was not really Earth at all, because it was somber and empty and unreal. The gray oceans swarmed with life, of course. But there was nothing on land except occasional patches of moss in the occasional patches of soil that had formed on the bare rock. Even a few cockroaches would be welcome; but insects, it seemed, were still a couple of geological periods in the future. To land dwellers, this was a dead world, a world unborn.

Shaking his head, Hahn moved away from the door. Barrett led him down the corridor and into the small, brightly lit room that served as the infirmary. Doc Quesada was waiting. Quesada wasn’t really a doctor, but he had been a medical technician once, and that was good enough. He was a compact, swarthy man with a look of complete self-assurance. He hadn’t lost too many patients, all things considered. Barrett had watched him removing appendixes with total aplomb. In his white smock, Quesada looked sufficiently medical to fit the role.

Barrett said, “Doc, this is Lew Hahn. He’s in temporal shock. Fix him up.”

Quesada nudged the newcomer onto a webfoam cradle and unzipped his blue jersey. Then he reached for his medical kit. Hawksbill Station was well equipped for most medical emergencies, now. The people Up Front had no wish to be inhumane, and they sent back all sorts of useful things, like anesthetics and surgical clamps and medicines and dermal probes. Barrett could remember a time at the beginning when there had been nothing much here but the empty huts, and a man who hurt himself was in real trouble.

“He’s had a drink already,” said Barrett.

“I see that,” Quesada murmured. He scratched at his short-cropped, bristly mustache. The little diagnostat in the cradle had gone rapidly to work, flashing information about Hahn’s blood pressure, potassium count, dilation index, and much else. Quesada seemed to comprehend the barrage of facts. After a moment he said to Hahn, “You aren’t really sick, are you? Just shaken up a little. I don’t blame you. Here—I’ll give you a quick jolt to calm your nerves, and you’ll be all right. As all right as any of us ever are.”

He put a tube to Hahn’s carotid and thumbed the snout. The subsonic whirred, and a tranquilizing compound slid into the man’s bloodstream. Hahn shivered.

Quesada said, “Let him rest for five minutes. Then he’ll be over the hump.”

They left Hahn in his cradle and went out of the infirmary. In the hall, Barrett looked down at the little medic and said, “What’s the report on Valdosto?”

Valdosto had gone into psychotic collapse several weeks before. Quesada was keeping him drugged and trying to bring him slowly back to the reality of Hawksbill Station. Shrugging, he replied, “The status is quo. I let him out from under the dream juice this morning and he was the same as he’s been.” / SOUNDPROOF / 88

“You don’t think he’ll come out of it?”

“I doubt it. He’s cracked for keeps. They could paste him together Up Front, but—”

“Yeah,” Barrett said. If he could get Up Front at all, Valdosto wouldn’t have cracked. “Keep him happy, then. If he can’t be sane, he can at least be comfortable. What about Altman? Still got the shakes?”

“He’s building a woman,” Quesada said.

“That’s what Charley Norton told me. What’s he using? A rag, a bone—”

“I gave him some surplus chemicals. Chosen for their color, mainly. He’s got some foul green copper compounds and a little bit of ethyl alcohol and six or seven other things, and he collected some soil and threw in a lot of dead shellfish, and he’s sculpting it all into what he claims is female shape and waiting for lightning to strike it.”

“In other words, he’s gone crazy,” Barrett said.

“I think that’s a safe assumption. But he’s not molesting his friends any more, anyway. You didn’t think his homosexual phase would last much longer, as I recall.”

“No, but I didn’t think he’d go off the deep end. If a man needs sex and he can find some consenting playmates here, that’s quite all right with me. But when he starts putting a woman together out of some dirt and rotten brachiopod meat it means we’ve lost him. It’s too bad.”

Quesada’s dark eyes flickered. “We’re all going to go that way sooner or later, Jim.”

“I haven’t. You haven’t.”

“Give us time. I’ve only been here eleven years.”

“Altman’s been here only eight. Valdosto even less.”

“Some shells crack faster than others,” said Quesada.

“Here’ s our new friend.”

Hahn had come out of the infirmary to join them. He still looked pale, but the fright was gone from his eyes. He was beginning to adjust to the unthinkable. He said, “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Is there a lot of mental illness here?”

“Some of the men haven’t been able to find anything meaningful to do here,” Barrett said. “It eats them away. Quesada here has his medical work. I’ve got administrative duties. A couple of the fellows are studying the sea life. We’ve got a newspaper to keep some busy. But there are always those who just let themselves slide into despair, and they crack up. I’d say we have thirty or forty certifiable maniacs here at the moment, out of 140 residents.”

“That’s not so bad,” Hahn said. “Considering the inherent instability of the men who get sent here, and the unusual conditions of life here.” / SOUNDPROOF / 89

Barrett laughed. “Hey, you’re suddenly pretty articulate, aren’t you? What was in the stuff Doc Quesada jolted you with?”

“I didn’t mean to sound superior,” Hahn said quickly. “Maybe that came out a little too smug. I mean—”

“Forget it. What did you do Up Front, anyway?”

“I was an economist.”

“Just what we need,” said Quesada. “He can help us solve our balance-of-payments problem.”

Barrett said, “If you were an economist, you’ll have plenty to discuss here. This place is full of economic theorists who’ll want to bounce their ideas off you. Some of them are almost sane, too. Come with me and I’ll show you where you’re going to stay.”

Three

The patio from the main building to the hut of Donald Latimer was mainly downhill, for which Barrett was grateful even though he knew that he’d have to negotiate the uphill return in a little while. Latimer’s hut was on the eastern side of the Station, looking out over the ocean. They walked slowly toward it. Hahn was solicitous of Barrett’s game leg, and Barrett was irritated by the exaggerated care the younger man took to keep pace with him.

He was puzzled by this Hahn. The man was full of seeming contradictions—showing up here with the worst case of arrival shock Barrett had ever seen, then snapping out of it with remarkable quickness; looking frail and shy, but hiding solid muscles inside his jersey; giving an outer appearance of incompetence, but speaking with calm control. Barrett wondered what this young man had done to earn him the trip to Hawksbill Station, but there was time for such inquiries later. All the time in the world.

Hahn said, “Is everything like this? Just rock and ocean?”

“That’s all. Land life hasn’t evolved yet. Everything’s wonderfully simple, isn’t it? No clutter. No urban sprawl. There’s some moss moving onto land, but not much.”

“And in the sea? Swimming dinosaurs?”

Barrett shook his head. “There won’t be any vertebrates for millions of years. We don’t even have fish yet, let alone reptiles out there. All we can offer is that which creepeth. Some shellfish, some big fellows that look like squids, and trilobites. Seven hundred billion different species of trilobites. We’ve got a man named Rudiger—he’s the one who gave you the drink—who’s making a collection of them. He’s writing the world’s definitive text on trilobites.”

“But nobody will ever read it in—in the future.”

“Up Front, we say.”

“Up Front.” / SOUNDPROOF / 90

“‘That’s the pity of it,” said Barrett. “We told Rudiger to inscribe his book on imperishable plates of gold and hope that it’s found by paleontologists. But he says the odds are against it. A billion years of geology will chew his plates to hell before they can be found.”

Hahn sniffed. “Why does the air smell so strange?”

“It’s a different mix,” Barrett said. “We’ve analyzed it. More nitrogen, a little less oxygen, hardly any CO2 at all. But that isn’t really why it smells odd to you. The thing is, it’s pure air, unpolluted by the exhalations of life. Nobody’s been respiring into it but us lads, and there aren’t enough of us to matter.”

Smiling, Hahn said, “ I feel a little cheated that it’s so empty. I expected lush jungles of weird plants, and pterodactyls swooping through the air, and maybe a tyrannosaur crashing into a fence around the Station.”

“No jungles. No pterodactyls. No tyrannosaurs. No fences. You didn’t do your homework.”

“Sorry.”

“This is the Late Cambrian. Sea life exclusively.”

“It was very kind of them to pick such a peaceful era as the dumping ground for political prisoners,” Hahn said. “I was afraid it would be all teeth and claws.”

“Kind, hell! They were looking for an era where we couldn’t do any harm. That meant tossing us back before the evolution of mammals, just in case we’d accidentally get hold of the ancestor of all humanity and snuff him out. And while they were at it, they decided to stash us so far in the past that we’d be beyond all land life, on the theory that maybe even if we slaughtered a baby dinosaur it might affect the entire course of the future.”

“They don’t mind if we catch a few trilobites?”

“Evidently they think it’s safe,” Barrett said. “It looks as though they were right. Hawksbill Station has been here for twenty-five years, and it doesn’t seem as though we’ve tampered with future history in any measurable way. Of course, they’re careful not to send us any women.”

“Why is that?”

“So we don’t start reproducing and perpetuating ourselves. Wouldn’t that mess up the time- lines? A successful human outpost in One Billion B.C., that’s had all that time to evolve and mutate and grow? By the time the twenty-first century came around, our descendants would be in charge and the other kind of human being would probably be in penal servitude, and there’d be more paradoxes created than you could shake a trilobite at. So they don’t send the women here. There’s a prison camp for women, too, but it’s a few hundred million years up the time line in the Late Silurian, and never the twain shall meet. That’s why Ned Altman’s trying to build a woman out of dust and garbage.”

“God made Adam out of less.”

“Altman isn’t God,” Barrett said. “That’s the root of his whole problem. Look, here’s the hut / SOUNDPROOF / 91 where you’re going to stay. I’m rooming you with Don Latimer. He’s a very sensitive, interesting, pleasant person. He used to be a physicist before he got into politics, and he’s been here about a dozen years, and I might as well warn you that he’s developed a strong and somewhat cockeyed mystic streak lately. The fellow he was rooming with killed himself last year, and since then he’s been trying to find some way out of here through extrasensory powers.”

“Is he serious?”

“I’m afraid he is. And we try to take him seriously. We all humor each other at Hawksbill Station; it’s the only way we avoid a mass psychosis. Latimer will probably try to get you to collaborate with him on his project. If you don’t like living with him, I can arrange a transfer for you. But I want to see how he reacts to someone new at the Station. I’d like you to give him a chance.”

“Maybe I’ll even help him find his psionic gateway.”

“If you do, take me along,” said Barrett. They both laughed. Then he rapped at Latimer’s door. There was no answer, and after a moment Barrett pushed the door open. Hawksbill Station had no locks.

Latimer sat in the middle of the bare rock floor, cross-legged, meditating. He was a slender, gentle-faced man just beginning to look old. Right now he seemed a million miles away, ignoring them completely. Hahn shrugged. Barrett put a finger to his lips. They waited in silence for a few minutes, and then Latimer showed signs of coming up from his trance.

He got to his feet in a single flowing motion, without using his hands. In a low, courteous voice he said to Hahn, “Have you just arrived?”

“Within the last hour. I’m Lew Hahn.”

“Donald Latimer. I regret that I have to make your acquaintance in these surroundings. But maybe we won’t have to tolerate this illegal imprisonment much longer.”

Barrett said, “Don, Lew is going to bunk with you. I think you’ll get along well. He was an economist in 2029 until they gave him the Hammer.”

“Where did you live?” Latimer asked, animation coming into his eyes.

“San Francisco.”

The glow faded. Latimer said, “Were you ever in Toronto? I’m from there. I had a daughter— she’d be twenty-three now, Nella Latimer—I wondered if you knew her.”

“No. I’m, sorry.”

“It wasn’t very likely. But I’d love to know what kind of a woman she became. She was a little girl when I last saw her. Now I guess she’s married. Or perhaps they’ve sent her to the other Station. Nella Latimer—you’re sure you didn’t know her?”

Barrett left them together. It looked as though they’d get along. He told Latimer to bring Hahn up to the main building at dinner for introductions, and went out. A chilly drizzle had / SOUNDPROOF / 92 begun again. Barrett made his way slowly, painfully up the hill. It had been sad to see the light flicker from Latimer’s eyes when Hahn said he didn’t know his daughter. Most of the time, men at Hawksbill Station tried not to speak about their families, preferring to keep those tormenting memories well repressed. But the arrival of newcomers generally stirred old ties. There was never any news of relatives, and no way to obtain any, because it was impossible for the Station to communicate with anyone Up Front. No way to ask for the photo of a loved one, no way to request specific medicines, no way to obtain a certain book or a coveted tape. In a mindless, impersonal way, Up Front sent periodic shipments to the Station of things thought useful—reading matter, medical supplies, technical equipment, food. Occasionally they were startling in their generosity, as when they sent a case of Burgundy, or a box of sensory spools, or a recharger for the power pack. Such gifts usually meant a brief thaw in the world situation, which customarily produced a short-lived desire to be kind to the boys in Hawksbill Station. But they had a policy about sending information about relatives. Or about contemporary newspapers. Fine wine, yes; a tridim of a daughter who would never be seen again, no.

For all Up Front knew, there was no one alive in Hawksbill Station. A plague could have killed every one off ten years ago, but there was no way of telling. That was why the shipments still came back. The government whirred and clicked with predictable continuity. The government, whatever else it might be, was not malicious. There were other kinds of totalitarianism beside bloody repressive tyranny.

Pausing at the top of the hill, Barrett caught his breath. Naturally, the alien air no longer smelled strange to him. He filled his lungs with it. Once again the rain ceased. Through the grayness came the sunshine, making the naked rocks sparkle. Barrett closed his eyes a moment and leaned on his crutch, and saw as though on an inner screen the creatures with many legs climbing up out of the sea, and the mossy carpets spreading, and the flowerless plants uncoiling and spreading their scaly branches, and the dull hides of eerie amphibians glistening on the shores, and the tropic heat of the coal-forming epoch descending like a glove over the world.

All that lay far in the future. Dinosaurs. Little chittering mammals. Pithecanthropus in the forests of Java. Sargon and Hannibal and Attila, and Orville Wright, and Thomas Edison, and Edmond Hawksbill. And finally a benign government that would find the thoughts of some men so intolerable that the only safe place to which they could be banished was a rock at the beginning of time. The government was too civilized to put men to death for subversive activities, and too cowardly to let them remain alive. The compromise was the living death of Hawksbill Station. A billion years of impassable time was suitable insulation even for the most nihilistic idea.

Grimacing, Barrett struggled the rest of the way back toward his hut. He had long since come to accept his exile, but accepting his ruined foot was another matter entirely. The idle wish to find a way to regain the freedom of his own time no longer possessed him; but he wished with all his soul that the blank-faced administrators Up Front would send back a kit that would allow him to rebuild his foot.

He entered his hut and flung his crutch aside, sinking down instantly on his cot. There had been no cots when he had come to Hawksbill Station. He had come here in the fourth year of the Station, when there were only a dozen buildings and little in the way of creature comforts. It had been a miserable / SOUNDPROOF / 93 place then, but the steady accretion of shipments from Up Front had made it relatively tolerable. Of the fifty or so prisoners who had preceded Barrett to Hawksbill, none remained alive. He had held highest seniority for almost ten years. Time moved here at a one-to-one correlation with time Up Front; the Hammer was locked on this point of time, so that Hahn, arriving here today more than twenty years after Barrett, had departed from a year Up Front more than twenty years after the time of Barrett’s expulsion. Barrett had not had the heart to begin pumping Hahn for news of 2029 so soon. He would learn all he needed to know, and small cheer it would be, anyway.

Barrett reached for a book. But the fatigue of hobbling around the Station had taken more out him than he realized. He looked at the page for a moment. Then he put it away, and closed his eyes and dozed.

Four

That evening, as every evening, the men of Hawksbill Station gathered in the main building for dinner and recreation. It was not mandatory, and some men chose to eat alone. But tonight nearly everyone who was in full possession of his faculties was there, because this was one of the infrequent occasions when a newcomer had arrived to be questioned about the world of men.

Hahn looked uneasy about his sudden notoriety. He seemed to be basically shy, unwilling to accept all the attention now being thrust upon him. There he sat in the middle of the group, while men twenty and thirty years his senior crowded in on him with their questions, and it was obvious that he wasn’t enjoying the session.

Sitting to one side, Barrett took little part in the discussion. His curiosity about Up Front’s ideological shifts had ebbed a long time ago. It was hard for him to realize that he had once been so passionately concerned about concepts like syndicalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat and the guaranteed annual wage that he had been willing to risk imprisonment over them. His concern for humanity had not waned, merely the degree of his involvement in the twenty-first cen- tury’s political problems. After twenty years at Hawksbill Station, Up Front had become unreal to Jim Barrett, and his energies centered around the crises and challenges of what he had come to think of as “his own” time—the late Cambrian.

So he listened, but more with an ear for what the talk revealed about Lew Hahn than for what it revealed about current events Up Front. And what it revealed about Lew Hahn was mainly a matter of what was not revealed.

Hahn didn’t say much. He seemed to be feinting and evading.

Charley Norton wanted to know, “Is there any sign of a weakening of the phony conservatism yet? I mean, they’ve been promising the end of big government for thirty years and it gets bigger all the time.”

Hahn moved restlessly in his chair. “They still promise. As soon as conditions become stabilized—” / SOUNDPROOF / 94

“Which is when?”

“I don’t know. I suppose they’re just making words.”

“What about the Martian Commune?” demanded Sid Hutchett. “Have they been infiltrating agents onto Earth?”

“I couldn’t really say.”

“How about the Gross Global Product?” Mel Rudiger wanted to know. “What’s its curve? Still holding level, or has it started to drop?”

Hahn tugged at his ear. “I think it’s slowly edging down.”

“Where does the index stand?” Rudiger asked. “The last figures we had, for ’25, it was at 909. But in four years—”

“It might be something like 875 now,” said Hahn.

It struck Barrett as a little odd that an economist would be so hazy about the basic economic statistic. Of course, he didn’t know how long Hahn had been imprisoned before getting the Hammer. Maybe he simply wasn’t up on recent figures. Barrett held his peace.

Charley Norton wanted to find out some things about the legal rights of citizens. Hahn couldn’t tell him. Rudiger asked about the impact of weather control—whether the supposedly conservative government of liberators was still ramming programmed weather down the mouths of the citizens—and Hahn wasn’t sure. Hahn couldn’t rightly say much about the functions of the judiciary, whether it had recovered any of the power stripped from it by the Enabling Act of ’18. He didn’t have any comments to offer on the tricky subject of population control. In fact, his performance was striking for its lack of hard information.

“He isn’t saying much at all,” Charley Norton grumbled to the silent Barrett. “He’s putting up a smokescreen. But either he’s not telling what he knows, or he doesn’t know.”

“Maybe he’s not very bright,” Barrett suggested.

“What did he do to get here? He must have had some kind of deep commitment. But it doesn’t show, Jim! He’s an intelligent kid, but he doesn’t seem plugged in to anything that ever mattered to any of us.”

Doc Quesada offered a thought. “Suppose he isn’t political at all. Suppose they’re sending a different kind of prisoner back here now. Axe murderers, or something. A quiet kid who very quietly chopped up sixteen people one Sunday morning. Naturally he isn’t interested in politics.”

Barrett shook his head. “I doubt that. I think he’s just clamming up because he’s shy or ill at ease. It’s his first night here, remember. He’s just been kicked out of his own world and there’s no going back. He may have left a wife and baby behind, you know. He may simply not give a damn tonight about sitting up there and spouting the latest word on abstract philosophical theory, when all he wants to do is go off and cry his eyes out. I say we ought to leave him alone.” / SOUNDPROOF / 95

Quesada and Norton looked convinced. They shook their heads in agreement; but Barrett didn’t voice his opinion to the room in general. He let the quizzing of Hahn continue until it petered out of its own accord. The men began to drift away. A couple of them went back to convert Hahn’s vague generalities into the lead story for the next handwritten edition of the Hawksbill Station Times. Rudiger stood on a table and shouted out that he was going night- fishing, and four men asked to join him. Charley Norton sought out his usual debating partner, the nihilist Ken Belardi, and reopened, like a festering wound, their discussion of planning versus chaos, which bored them both to the point of screaming. The nightly games of stochastic chess began. The loners who had made rare visits to the main building simply to see the new man went back to their huts to do whatever it was they did in them alone each night.

Hahn stood apart, fidgeting and uncertain.

Barrett went up to him. “I guess you didn’t really want to be quizzed tonight,” he said.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more informative. I’ve been out of circulation a while, you see.”

“But you were politically active, weren’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” Hahn said. “Of course.” He flicked his tongue over his lips. “What’s supposed to happen now?”

“Nothing in particular. We don’t have organized activities here. Doc and I are going out on sick call. Care to join us?”

“What does it involve?” asked Hahn.

“Visiting some of the worst cases. It can be grim, but you’ll get a panoramic view of Hawksbill Station in a hurry.”

“I’d like to go.”

Barrett gestured to Quesada and the three of them left the building. This was a nightly ritual for Barrett, difficult as it was since he had hurt his foot. Before turning in, he visited the goofy ones and the psycho ones and the catatonic ones, tucked them in, wish them a good night and a healed mind in the morning. Someone had to show them that he cared. Barrett did.

Outside, Hahn peered up at the moon. It was nearly full tonight, shining like a burnished coin, its face a pale salmon color and hardly pockmarked at all.

“It looks so different here,” Hahn said. “The craters—where are the craters?”

“Most of them haven’t been formed yet,” said Barrett. “A billion years is a long time even for the moon. Most of its upheavals are still ahead. We think it may still have an atmosphere, too. That’s why it looks pink to us. Of course, Up Front hasn’t bothered to send us much in the way of astronomical equipment. We can only guess.” / SOUNDPROOF / 96

Hahn started to say something. He cut himself off after one blurted syllable.

Quesada said, “Don’t hold it back. What were you about to suggest?”

Hahn laughed in self-mockery. “That you ought to fly up there and take a look. It struck me as odd that you’d spend all these years here theorizing about whether the moon’s got an atmosphere, and wouldn’t ever once go up to look. But I forgot.”

“It would be useful if we got a commute ship from Up Front,” Barrett said. “But it hasn’t occurred to them. All we can do is look. The moon’s a popular place in ’29, is it?”

“The biggest resort in the System,” said Hahn. “I was there on my honeymoon. Leah and I —”

He stopped again.

Barrett said hurriedly. “This is Bruce Valdosto’s hut. He cracked up a few weeks ago. When we go in, stand behind us so he doesn’t see you. He might be violent with a stranger. He’s unpredictable.”

Valdosto was a husky man in his late forties, with swarthy skin, coarse curling black hair, and the broadest shoulders any man had ever had. Sitting down, he looked even burlier than Jim Barrett, which was saying a great deal. But Valdosto had short, stumpy legs, the legs of a man of ordinary stature tacked to the trunk of a giant, which spoiled the effect completely. In his years Up Front he had totally refused any prosthesis. He believed in living with deformities. Right now he was strapped into a webfoam cradle. His domed forehead was flecked with beads of sweat, his eyes were glittering beadily in the darkness. He was a very sick man. Once he had been clear-minded enough to throw a sleet-bomb into a meeting of the Council of Syndics, giving a dozen of them a bad case of gamma poisoning, but now he scarcely knew up from down, right from left.

Barrett leaned over him and said, “How are you, Bruce?”

“Who’s that?”

“Jim. It’s a beautiful night, Bruce. How’d you like to come outside and get some fresh air? The moon’s almost full.”

“I’ve got to rest. The committee meeting tomorrow—”

“It’s been postponed.”

“But how can it? The Revolution—”

“That’s been postponed too. Indefinitely.”

“Are they disbanding the cells?” Valdosto asked harshly.

“We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for orders. Come outside, Bruce. The air will do you good.”

Muttering, Valdosto let himself be unlaced. Quesada and Barrett pulled him to his feet and / SOUNDPROOF / 97 propelled him through the door of the hut. Barrett caught sight of Hahn in the shadows, his face somber with shock.

They stood together outside the hut. Barrett pointed to the moon. “It’s got such a lovely color here. Not like the dead thing Up Front. And look, look down there, Bruce. The sea breaking on the rocky shore. Rudiger’s out fishing. I can see his boat by moonlight.”

“Striped bass,” said Valdosto. “Sunnies. Maybe he’ll catch some sunnies.”

“There aren’t any sunnies here. They haven’t evolved yet.” Barrett fished in his pocket and drew out something ridged and glossy, about two inches long. It was the exoskeleton of a small trilobite. He offered it to Valdosto, who shook his head.

“Don’t give me that cockeyed crab.”

“It’s a trilobite, Bruce. It’s extinct, but so are we. We’re a billion years in our own past.”

“You must be crazy,” Valdosto said in a calm, low voice that belied his wild-eyed appearance. He took the trilobite from Barrett and hurled it against the rocks. “Cockeyed crab,” he muttered.

Quesada shook his head sadly. He and Barrett led the sick man into the hut again. Valdosto did not protest as the medic gave him the sedative. His weary mind, rebelling entirely against the monstrous concept that he had been exiled to the inconceivably remote past, welcomed sleep.

When they went out Barrett saw Hahn holding the trilobite on his palm and staring at it in wonder. Hahn offered it to him, but Barrett brushed it away.

“Keep it if you like,” he said. “There are more where I got that one.”

They went on. They found Ned Altman beside his hut, crouching on his knees and patting his hands over the crude, lopsided form of what, from its exaggerated breasts and hips, appeared to be the image of a woman. He stood up when they appeared. Altman was a neat little man with yellow hair and nearly invisible white eyebrows. Unlike anyone else in the Station, he had actually been a government man once, fifteen years ago, before seeing through the myth of syndicalist capitalism and joining one of the underground factions. Eight years at Hawksbill Station had done things to him.

Altman pointed to his golem and said, “I hoped there’d be lightning in the rain today. That’ll do it, you know. But there isn’t much lightning this time of year. She’ll get up alive, and then I’ll need you, Doc, to give her shots and trim away some of the tough places.”

Quesada forced a smile. “I’ll be glad to do it, Ned. But you know the terms.”

“Sure. When I’m through with her, you get her. You think I’m a goddamn monopolist? I’ll share her. There’ll be a waiting list. Just so you don’t forget who made her, though. She’ll remain mine, whenever I need her.” He noticed Hahn. “Who are you?”

“He’s new,” Barrett said. “Lew Hahn. He came this afternoon.” / SOUNDPROOF / 98

“Ned Altman,” said Altman with a courtly bow. “Formerly in government service. You’re pretty young, aren’t you? How’s your sex orientation? Hetero?”

Hahn winced. “I’m afraid so.”

“It’s okay. I wouldn’t touch you. I’ve got a project going here. But I just want you to know, I’ll put you on my list. You’re young and you’ve probably got stronger needs than some of us. I won’t forget about you, even though you’re new here.”

Quesada coughed. “You ought to get some rest now, Ned. Maybe there’ll be lightning tomorrow.”

Altman did not resist. The doctor took him inside and put him to bed while Hahn and Barrett surveyed the man’s handiwork. Hahn pointed toward the figure’s middle.

“He’s left out something essential,” he said. “If he’s planning to make love to this girl after he’s finished creating her, he’d better—”

“It was there yesterday,” said Barrett. “He must be changing orientation again.” Quesada emerged from the hut. They went on, down the rocky path.

Barrett did not make the complete circuit that night. Ordinarily, he would have gone all the way down to Latimer’s hut overlooking the sea, for Latimer was on his list of sick ones. But Barrett had visited Latimer once that day, and he didn’t think his aching good leg was up to another hike that far. So after he and Quesada and Hahn had been to all of the easily accessible huts, and visited the man who prayed for alien beings to rescue him and the man who was trying to break into a parallel universe where everything was as it ought to be in the world and the man who lay on his cot sobbing for all his wakeful hours, Barrett said good night to his companions and allowed Quesada to escort Hahn back to his hut without him.

Alter observing Hahn for half a day, Barrett realized he did not know much more about him than when he had first dropped onto the Anvil. That was odd. But maybe Hahn would open up a little more after he’d been here a while. Barrett stared up at the salmon moon, and reached into his pocket to finger the little trilobite before he remembered that he had given it to Hahn. He shuffled into his hut. He wondered how long ago Hahn had taken that lunar honeymoon trip.

Five

Rudiger’s catch was spread out in front of the main building the next morning when Barrett came up for breakfast. He had had a good night’s fishing, obviously. He usually did. Rudiger went out three or four nights a week, in the little dinghy that he had cobbled together a few years ago from salvaged materials, and he took with him a team of friends whom he had trained in the deft use of the trawling nets.

It was an irony that Rudiger, the anarchist, the man who believed in individualism and the abolition of all political institutions, should be so good at leading a team of fishermen. Rudiger didn’t care for teamwork in the abstract. But it was hard to manipulate the nets alone, he had discovered. Hawksbill Station had many little ironies of that sort. Political theorists / SOUNDPROOF / 99 tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.

The prize of the catch was a cephalopod about a dozen feet long—a rigid conical tube out of which some limp squidlike tentacles dangled. Plenty of meat on that one, Barrett thought. Dozens of trilobites were arrayed around it, ranging in size from the inch-long kind to the three-footers with their baroquely involuted exo-skeletons. Rudiger fished both for food and for science; evidently these trilobites were discards— species that he already had studied, or he wouldn’t have left them here to go into the food hoppers. His hut was stacked ceiling-high with trilobites. It kept him sane to collect and analyze them, and no one begrudged him his hobby.

Near the heap of trilobites were some clusters of hinged brachiopods, looking like scallops that had gone awry, and a pile of snails. The warm, shallow waters just off the coastal shelf teemed with life, in striking contrast to the barren land. Rudiger had also brought in a mound of shiny black seaweed. Barrett hoped someone would gather all this stuff up and get it into their heat-sink cooler before it spoiled. The bacteria of decay worked a lot slower here than they did Up Front, but a few hours in the mild air would do Rudiger’s haul no good.

Today Barrett planned to recruit some men for the annual Inland Sea expedition. Traditionally, he led that trek himself, but his injury made it impossible for him even to consider going any more. Each year, a dozen or so able-bodied men went out on a wide- ranging reconnaissance that took them in a big circle, looping northwestward until they reached the sea, then coming around to the south and back to the Station. One purpose of the trip was to gather any temporal garbage that might have materialized in the vicinity of the Station during the past year. There was no way of knowing how wide a margin of error had been allowed during the early attempts to set up the Station, and the scattershot technique of hurling material into the past had been pretty unreliable. New stuff was turning up all the time that had been aimed for Minus One Billion, Two Thousand Oh Five A.D., but which didn’t get there until a few decades later. Hawksbill Station needed all the spare equipment it could get, and Barrett didn’t miss a chance to round up any of the debris.

There was another reason for the Inland Sea expeditions, though. They served as a focus for the year, an annual ritual, something to peg a custom to. It was a rite of spring here. The dozen strongest men, going on foot to the distant rock-rimmed shores of the tepid sea that drowned the middle of North America, were performing the closest thing Hawksbill Station had to a religious function, although they did nothing more mystical when they reached the Inland Sea than to net a few trilobites and eat them. The trip meant more to Barrett himself than he had even suspected, also. He realized that now, when he was unable to go. He had led every such expedition for twenty years.

But last year he had gone scrabbling over boulders loosened by the tireless action of the waves, venturing into risky territory for no rational reason that he could name, and his aging muscles had betrayed him. Often at night he woke sweating to escape from the dream in which he relived that ugly moment: slipping and sliding, clawing at the rocks, a mass of stone dislodged from somewhere and crashing down with improbably agonizing impact on his foot, pinning him, crushing him. He could not forget the sound of grinding bones. Nor was he likely to lose the memory of the homeward march, across hundreds of miles of bare rock, his bulky body slung between the bowed forms of his companions. He thought he would lose the foot, but Quesada had spared gun him from the amputation. He simply could not touch the foot to the ground and put weight on it now, or ever again. It might have been simpler to have / SOUNDPROOF / 100 the dead appendage sliced off. Quesada vetoed that, though. “Who knows,” he had said, “some day they might send us a transplant kit. I can’t` rebuild a leg that’s been amputated.” So Barrett had kept his crushed foot. But he had never been quite the same since, and now someone else would have to lead the march.

Who would it be, he asked himself?

Quesada was the likeliest. Next to Barrett, he was the strongest man here, in all the ways that it was important to be strong. But Quesada couldn’t be spared at the Station. It might be handy to have a medic along on the trip, but it was vital to have one here. After some reflection Barrett put down Charley Norton as the leader. He added Ken Belardi—someone for Norton to talk to. Rudiger? A tower of strength last year after Barrett had been injured; Barrett didn’t particularly want to let Rudiger leave the Station so long; he needed able men for the expedition, true, but he didn’t want to strip the home base down to invalids, crackpots, and psychotics. Rudiger stayed. Two of his fellow fishermen went on the list. So did Sid Hutchett and Arny Jean-Claude.

Barrett thought about putting Don Latimer in the group. Latimer was coming to be something of a borderline mental case, but he was rational enough except when he lapsed into his psionic meditations, and he’d pull his own weight on the expedition. On the other hand, Latimer was Lew Hahn’s roommate, and Barrett wanted Latimer around to observe Hahn at close range. He toyed with the idea of sending both of them out, but nixed it. Hahn was still an unknown quantity. It was too risky to let him go with the Inland Sea party this year. Probably he’d be in next spring’s group, though.

Finally Barrett had his dozen men chosen. He chalked their names on the slate in front of the mess hall, and found Charley Norton at breakfast to tell him he was in charge.

It felt strange to know that he’d have to stay home while the others went. It was an admission that he was beginning to abdicate after running this place so long. A crippled old man was what he was, whether he liked to admit it to himself or not, and that was something he’d have to come to terms with soon.

In the afternoon, the men of the Inland Sea expedition gathered to select their gear and plan their route. Barrett kept away from the meeting. This was Charley Norton’s show, now. He’d made eight or ten trips, and he knew what to do. Barrett didn’t want to interfere.

But some masochistic compulsion in him drove him to take a trek of his own. If he couldn’t see the western waters this year, the least he could do was pay a visit to the Atlantic, in his own back yard. Barrett stopped off in the infirmary and, finding Quesada elsewhere, helped himself to a tube of neural depressant. He scrambled along the eastern trail until he was a few hundred yards from the main building, dropped his trousers, and quickly gave each thigh a jolt of the drug, first the good leg, then the gimpy one. That would numb the muscles just enough so that he’d be able to take an extended hike without feeling the fire of fatigue in his protesting joints. He’d pay for it, he knew, eight hours from now, when the depressant wore off and the full impact of his exertion hit him like a million daggers. But he was willing to accept that price.

The road to the sea was a long, lonely one. Hawksbill Station was perched on the eastern rim of Appalachia, more than eight hundred feet above sea level. During the first half dozen years, the men of the Station had reached the ocean by a suicidal route across sheer rock / SOUNDPROOF / 101 faces, but Barrett had incited a ten-year project to carve a path. Now wide steps descended to the Atlantic. Chopping them out of the rock had kept a lot of men busy for a long time, too busy to worry or to slip into insanity. Barrett regretted that he couldn’t conceive some comparable works project to occupy them nowadays.

The steps formed a succession of shallow platforms that switchbacked to the edge of the water. Even for a healthy man it was a strenuous walk. For Barrett in his present condition it was an ordeal. It took him two hours to descend a distance that normally could be traversed in a quarter of that time. When he reached the bottom, he sank down exhaustedly on a flat rock licked by the waves, and dropped his crutch. The fingers of his left hand were cramped and gnarled from gripping the crutch, and his entire body was bathed in sweat.

The water looked gray and somehow oily. Barrett could not explain the prevailing colorlessness of the Late Cambrian world, with its somber sky and somber land and somber sea, but his heart quietly ached for a glimpse of green vegetation again. He missed chlorophyll. The dark wavelets lapped against his rock, pushing a mass of floating black seaweed back and forth. The sea stretched to infinity. He didn’t have the faintest idea how much of Europe, if any, was above water in this epoch. At the best of times most of the planet was submerged; here, only a few hundred million years after the white-hot rocks of the land had pushed into view, it was likely that all that was above water on Earth was a strip of territory here and there. Had the Himalayas been born yet? The Rockies? The Andes? He knew the approximate outlines of Late Cambrian North America, but the rest was a mystery. Blanks in knowledge were not easy to fill when the only link with Up Front was by one-way transport; Hawksbill Station had to rely on the random assortment of reading matter that came back in time, and it was furiously frustrating to lack information that any college geology text could supply.

As he watched, a big trilobite unexpectedly came scuttering up out of the water. It was the spike-tailed kind, about a yard long, with an eggplant-purple shell and a bristling arrangement of slender spines along the margins. There seemed to be a lot of legs underneath. The trilobite crawled up on the shore—no sand, no beach, just a shelf of rock—and advanced until it was eight or ten feet from the waves.

Good for you, Barrett thought. Maybe you’re the first one who ever came out on land to see what it was like. The pioneer. The trailblazer.

It occurred to him that this adventurous trilobite might well be the ancestor of all the land- dwelling creatures of the eons to come. It was biological nonsense, but Barrett’s weary mind conjured a picture of an evolutionary procession, with fish and amphibians and reptiles and mammals and man all stemming in unbroken sequence from this grotesque armored thing that moved in uncertain circles near his feet.

And if I were to step on you, he thought?

A quick motion—the sound of crunching chitin—the wild scrabbling of a host of little legs—

And the whole chain of life snapped in its first link. Evolution undone. No land creatures ever developed. With the descent of that heavy foot all the future would change and there would never have been any Hawksbill Station, no human race, no James Edward Barrett. In an / SOUNDPROOF / 102 instant he would have both revenge on those who had condemned him to live out his days in this place, and release from his sentence.

He did nothing. The trilobite completed its slow perambulation of the shoreline rocks and scattered back into the sea unharmed.

The soft voice of Don Latimer said, “I saw you sitting down here, Jim. Do you mind if I join you?”

Barrett swung around, momentarily surprised. Latimer had come down from his hilltop but so quietly that Barrett hadn’t heard a thing. He recovered and grinned and beckoned Latimer to an adjoining rock.

“You fishing?” Latimer asked.

“Just sitting. An old man sunning himself.”

“You took a hike like that just to sun yourself?” Latimer laughed. “Come off it. You’re trying to get away from it all, and you probably wish I hadn’t disturbed you.”

“That’s not so. Stay here. How’s your new roommate getting along?”

“It’s been strange,” said Latimer. “That’s one reason I came down here to talk to you.” He leaned forward and peered searchingly into Barrett’s eyes. “Jim, tell me: do you think I’m a madman?”

“Why should I?”

“The ESP-ing business. My attempt to break through to another realm of consciousness. I know you’re tough-minded and skeptical. You probably think it’s all a lot of nonsense.”

Barrett shrugged and said, “If you want the blunt truth, I do. I don’t have the remotest belief that you’re going to get us anywhere, Don. I think it’s a complete waste of time and energy for you to sit there for hours harnessing your psionic powers, or whatever it is you do. But no, I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re entitled to your obsession and that you’re going about a basically futile thing in a reasonably level-headed way. Fair enough?”

“More than fair. I don’t ask you to put any credence in my research, but I don’t want you to think I’m a total lunatic for trying it. It’s important that you regard me as sane, or else what I want to tell you about Hahn won’ t be valid to you.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“It’s this,” said Latimer. “On the basis of one evening’s acquaintance, I’ve formed an opinion about Hahn. It’s the kind of an opinion that might be formed by a garden-variety paranoid, and if you think I’m nuts you’re likely to discount my idea about Hahn.”

“I don’t think you’re nuts. What’s your idea?”

“That he’s spying on us.”

Barrett had to work hard to keep from emitting the guffaw that would shatter Latimer’s / SOUNDPROOF / 103 fragile self-esteem. “Spying?” he said casually. “You can’t mean that. How can anyone spy here? I mean, how can he report his findings?”

“I don’t know,” Latimer said. “But he asked me a million questions last night. About you, about Quesada, about some of the sick men. He wanted to know everything.”

“The normal curiosity of a new man.”

“Jim, he was taking notes. I saw him after he thought I was asleep. He sat up for two hours writing it all down in a little book.”

Barrett frowned. “Maybe he’s going to write a novel about us.”

“I’m serious,” Latimer said. “Questions—-notes. And he’s shifty. Try to get him to talk about himself!”

“I did. I didn’t learn much.”

“Do you know why he’s been sent here?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” said Latimer. “Political crimes, he said, but he was vague as hell. He hardly seemed to know what the present government was up to, let alone what his own opinions were toward it. I don’t detect any passionate philosophical convictions in Mr. Hahn. And you know as well as I do that Hawksbill Station is the refuse heap for revolutionaries and agitators and subversives and all sorts of similar trash, but that we’ve never had any other kind of prisoner here.”

“I agree that Hahn’s a puzzle. But who could he be spying for? He’s got no way to file a report, if he’s a government agent. He’s stranded here for keeps, same as the rest of us.”

“Maybe he was sent to keep an eye on us—to make sure we aren’t cooking up some way to escape. Maybe he’s a volunteer who willingly gave up his twenty-first-century life so he could come among us and thwart anything we might be hatching. Perhaps they’re afraid we’ve invented forward time travel. Or that we’ve become a threat to the sequence of the time-lines. Anything. So Hahn comes among us to snoop around and block any dangers before they arrive.”

Barrett felt a twinge of alarm. He saw how close to paranoia Latimer was hewing, now: in half a dozen sentences he had journeyed from the rational expression of some justifiable suspicions to the fretful fear that the men from Up Front were going to take steps to choke off the escape route that he was so close to perfecting.

He kept his voice level as he told Latimer, “I don’t think you need to worry, Don. Hahn’s an odd one, but he’s not here to make trouble for us. The fellows Up Front have already made all the trouble they ever will.”

“Would you keep an eye on him, anyway?”

“You know I will. And don’t hesitate to let me know if Hahn does anything else out of the / SOUNDPROOF / 104 ordinary. You’re in a better spot to notice than anyone else.”

“I’ll be watching,” Latimer said. “We can’t tolerate any spies from Up Front among us.” he got to his feet and gave Barrett a pleasant smile. “I’ll let you get back to your sunning now, Jim.”

Latimer went up the path. Barrett eyed him until he was close to the top, only a faint dot against the stony backdrop. After a long while Barrett seized his crutch and levered himself to his feet. He stood staring down at the surf, dipping the tip of his crutch into the water to send a couple of little crawling things scurrying away. At length he turned and began the long, slow climb back to the Station.

Six

A couple of days passed before Barrett had the chance to draw Lew Hahn aside for a spot of political discussion. The Inland Sea party had set out, and in a way that was too bad, for Barrett could have used Charley Norton’s services in penetrating Hahn’s armor. Norton was the most gifted theorist around, a man who could weave a tissue of dialectic from the least promising material. If anyone could find out the depth of Hahn’s Marxist commitment, if any, it was Norton. But Norton was leading the expedition, so Barrett had to do the interrogating him- self. His Marxism was a trifle rusty, and he couldn’t thread his path through the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyite, Khrushchevist, Maoist, Berenkovskyite and Mgumbweist schools with Charley Norton’s skills. Yet he knew what questions to ask.

He picked a rainy evening when Hahn seemed to be in a fairly outgoing mood. There had been an hour’s entertainment that night, an ingenious computer-composed film that Sid Hutchett had programmed last week. Up Front had been kind enough to ship back a modest computer, and Hutchett had rigged it to do animations by specifying line widths and lengths, shades of gray, and progression of raster units. It was a simple but remarkably clever business, and it brightened a dull night.

Afterward, sensing that Hahn was relaxed enough to lower his guard a bit, Barrett said, “Hutchett’s a rare one. Did you meet him before he went on the trip?”

“Tall fellow with a sharp nose and no chin?”

“That’s the one. A clever boy. He was the top computer man for the Continental Liberation Front until they caught him in ’19. He programmed that fake broadcast in which Chancellor Dantell denounced his own regime. Remember?”

“I’m not sure I do.” Hahn frowned. “How long ago was this?”

“The broadcast was in 2018. Would that be before your time? Only eleven years ago—”

“I was nineteen then,” said Hahn. “I guess I wasn’t very politically sophisticated.”

“Too busy studying economics, I guess.”

Hahn grinned. “That’s right. Deep in the dismal science.” / SOUNDPROOF / 105

“And you never heard that broadcast? Or even heard of it?”

“I must have forgotten.”

“The biggest hoax of the century,” Barrett said, “and you forgot it. You know the Continental Liberation Front, of course.”

“Of course.” Hahn looked uneasy.

“Which group did you say you were with?”

“The People’s Crusade for Liberty.”

“I don’t know it. One of the newer groups?”

“Less than five years old. It started in California.”

“What’s its program?”

“Oh, the usual,” Hahn said. “Free elections, representative government, an opening of the security files, restoration of civil liberties.”

“And the economic orientation? Pure Marxist or one of the offshoots?”

“Not really any, I guess. We believed in a kind of—well, capitalism with some government restraints.”

“A little to the right of state socialism, and a little to the left of laissez faire?” Barrett suggested.

“Something like that.”

“But that system was tried and failed, wasn’t it? It had its day. It led inevitably to total socialism, which produced the compensating backlash of syndicalist capitalism, and then we got a government that pretended to be libertarian while actually stifling all individual liberties in the name of freedom. So if your group simply wanted to turn the clock back to 1955, say, there couldn’t be much to its ideas.”

Hahn looked bored. “You’ve got to understand I wasn’t in the top ideological councils.”

“Just an economist?”

“That’s it. I drew up plans for the conversion to our system.”

“Basing your work on the modified liberalism of Ricardo?”

“Well, in a sense.”

“And avoiding the tendency to fascism that was found in the thinking of Keynes?”

“You could say so,” Hahn said. He stood up, flashing a quick, vague smile. “Look, Jim, I’d love to argue this further with you some other time, but I’ve really got to go now. Ned Altman / SOUNDPROOF / 106 talked me into coming around and helping him do a lightning-dance to bring that pile of dirt to life. So if you don’t mind—”

Hahn beat a hasty retreat.

Barrett was more perplexed then ever, now. Hahn hadn’t been “arguing” anything. He had been carrying on a lame and feeble conversation, letting himself be pushed hither and thither by Barrett’s questions. And he had spouted a lot of nonsense. He didn’t seem to know Keynes from Ricardo, nor to care about it, which was odd for a self-professed economist. He didn’t have a shred of an idea of what his own political party stood for. He had so little revolutionary background that he was unaware even of Hutchett’ s astonishing hoax of eleven years back.

He seemed phony from top to bottom.

How was it possible that this kid had been deemed worthy of exile to Hawksbill Station, anyhow? Only the top firebrands went there. Sentencing a man to Hawksbill was like sentencing him to death, and it wasn’t done lightly. Barrett couldn’t imagine why Hahn was here. He seemed genuinely distressed at being exiled, and evidently he had left a beloved young wife behind, but nothing else rang true about the man.

Was he as Latimer suggested—some kind of spy?

Barrett rejected the idea out of hand. He didn’t want Latimer’s paranoia infecting him. The government wasn’t likely to send anyone on a one-way trip to the Late Cambrian just to spy on a bunch of aging revolutionaries who could never make trouble again. But what was Hahn doing here, then?

He would bear further watching, Barrett thought.

Barrett took care of some of the watching himself. But he had plenty of assistance. Latimer. Altman. Six or seven others. Latimer had recruited most of the ambulatory psycho cases, the ones who were superficially functional but full of all kinds of fears and credulities.

They were keeping an eye on the new man.

On the fifth day after his arrival, Hahn went out fishing in Rudiger’s crew. Barrett stood for a long time on the edge of the world, watching the little boat bobbing in the surging Atlantic. Rudiger never went far from shore—eight hundred, a thousand yards out—but the water was rough even there. The waves came rolling in with X thousand miles of gathered impact behind them. A continental shelf sloped off at a wide angle, so that even at a substantial distance off shore the water wasn’t very deep. Rudiger had taken soundings up to a mile out, and had reported depths no greater than 160 feet. Nobody had gone past a mile.

It wasn’t that they were afraid of falling off the side of the world if they went too far east. It was simply that a mile was a long distance to row in an open boat, using stubby oars made from old packing cases. Up Front hadn’t thought to spare an outboard motor for them.

Looking toward the horizon, Barrett had an odd thought. He had been told that the women’s / SOUNDPROOF / 107 equivalent of Hawksbill Station was safely segregated out of reach, a couple of hundred million years up the time-line. But how did he know that? There could be another Station somewhere else in this very year, and they’d never know about it. A camp of women, say, living on the far side of the ocean, or even across the Inland Sea.

It wasn’t very likely, he knew. With the entire past to pick from, the edgy men Up Front wouldn’t take any chance that the two groups of exiles might get together and spawn a tribe of little subversives. They’d take every precaution to put an impenetrable barrier of epochs between them. Yet Barrett thought he could make it sound convincing to the other men. With a little effort he could get them to believe in the existence of several simultaneous Hawksbill Stations scattered on this level of time.

Which could be our salvation, he thought.

The instances of degenerative psychosis were beginning to snowball, now. Too many men had been here too long, and one crackup was starting to feed the next, in this blank lifeless world where humans were never meant to live. The men needed projects to keep them going. They were starting to slip off into harebrained projects, like Altman’s Frankenstein girlfriend and Latimer’s psi pursuit.

Suppose, Barrett thought, I could get them steamed up about reaching the other continents?

A round-the-world expedition. Maybe they could build some kind of big ship. That would keep a lot of men busy for a long time. And they’d need navigational equipment—compasses, sextants, chronometers, whatnot. Somebody would have to design an improvised radio, too. It was the kind of project that might take thirty or forty years. A focus for our energies, Barrett thought. Of course, I won’t live to see the ship set sail. But even so, it’s a way of staving off collapse. We’ve built our staircase to the sea. Now we need something bigger to do. Idle hands make for idle minds…sick minds….

He liked the idea he had hatched. For several weeks, now, Barrett had been worrying about the deteriorating state of affairs in the Station, and looking for some way to cope with it. Now he thought he had his way.

Turning, he saw Latimer and Altman standing behind him.

“How long have you been there?” he asked.

“Two minutes,” said Latimer. “We brought you something to look at.”

Altman nodded vigorously. “You ought to read it. We brought it for you to read.”

“What is it?”

Latimer handed over a folded sheaf of papers. “I found this tucked away in Hahn’s bunk after he went out with Rudiger. I know I’m not supposed to be invading his privacy, but I had to have a look at what he’s been writing. There it is. He’s a spy, all right.”

Barrett glanced at the papers in his hand. “I’ll read it a little later. What is it about?”

“It’s a description of the Station, and a profile of most of the men in it,” said Latimer. He / SOUNDPROOF / 108 smiled frostily. “Hahn’s private opinion of me is that I’ve gone mad. His private opinion of you is a little more flattering, but not much.”

Altman said, “He’s also been hanging around the Hammer.”

“What”

“I saw him going there late last night. He went into the building. I followed him. He was looking at the Hammer.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that right away?” Barrett snapped.

“I wasn’t sure it was important,” Altman said. “I had to talk it over with Don first. And I couldn’t do that until Hahn had gone out fishing.”

Sweat burst out on Barrett’s face. “Listen, Ned, if you ever catch Hahn going near the time- travel equipment again, you let me know in a hurry. Without consulting Don or anyone else. Clear?”

“Clear,” said Altman. He giggled. “You know what I think? They’ve decided to exterminate us Up Front. Hahn’s been sent here to check us out as a suicide volunteer. Then they’re going to send a bomb through the Hammer and blow the Station up. We ought to wreck the Hammer and Anvil before they get a chance.”

“But why would they send a suicide volunteer?” Latimer asked. “Unless they’ve got some way to rescue their spy—”

“In any case we shouldn’t take any chance,” Altman argued. “Wreck the Hammer. Make it impossible for them to bomb us from Up Front.”

“That might be a good idea. But—”

“Shut up, both of you,” Barrett growled. “Let me look at these papers.”

He walked a few steps away from them and sat down on a shelf of rock. He unfolded the sheaf. He began to read.

Seven

Hahn had a cramped, crabbed handwriting that packed a maximum of information into a minimum of space, as though he regarded it as a mortal sin to waste paper. Fair enough; paper was a scarce commodity here, and evidently Hahn had brought these sheets with him from Up Front. His script was clear, though. So were his opinions. Painfully so.

He had written an analysis of conditions at Hawksbill Station, setting forth in about five thousand words everything that Barrett knew was going sour here. He had neatly ticked off the men as aging revolutionaries in whom the old fervor had turned rancid; he listed the ones who were certifiably psycho, and the ones who were on the edge, and the ones who were hanging on, like Quesada and Norton and Rudiger. Barrett was interested to see that Hahn rated even those three as suffering from severe strain and likely to fly apart at any moment. To him, Quesada and Norton and Rudiger / SOUNDPROOF / 109 seemed just about as stable as when they had first dropped onto the Anvil of Hawksbill Station; but there was possibly the distorting effect of his own blurred perceptions. To an outsider like Hahn, the view was different and perhaps more accurate.

Barrett forced himself not to skip ahead to Hahn’s evaluation of him.

He wasn’t pleased when he came to it. “Barrett,” Hahn had written, “is like a mighty beam that’s been gnawed from within by termites. He looks solid, but one good push would break him apart. A recent injury to his foot has evidently had a bad effect on him. The other men say he used to be physically vigorous and derived much of his authority from his size and strength. Now he can hardly walk. But I feel the trouble with Barrett is inherent in the life of Hawksbill Station, and doesn’t have much to do with his lameness. He’s been cut off from normal human drives for too long. The exercise of power here has provided the illusion of stability for him, but it’s power in a vacuum, and things have happened within Barrett of which he’s totally unaware. He’s in bad need of therapy. He may be beyond help.”

Barrett read that several times. Gnawed from within by termites…one good push…things have happened within him…bad need of therapy… beyond help.

He was less angered than he thought he should have been. Hahn was entitled to his views. Barrett finally stopped rereading his profile and pushed his way to the last page of Hahn’s essay. It ended with the words, “Therefore I recommend prompt termination of the Hawksbill Station penal colony, and, where possible, the therapeutic rehabilitation of its inmates.”

What the hell was this?

It sounded like the report of a parole commissioner! But there was no parole from Hawksbill Station. That final sentence let all the viability of what had gone before bleed away. Hahn was pretending to be composing a report to the government Up Front, obviously. But a wall a billion years thick made filing of that report impossible. So Hahn was suffering from delusions, just like Altman and Valdosto and the others. In his fevered mind he believed he could send messages Up Front, pompous documents delineating the flaws and foibles of his fellow prisoners.

That raised a chilling prospect. Hahn might be crazy, but he hadn’t been in the Station long enough to have gone crazy here. He must have brought his insanity with him.

What if they had stopped using Hawksbill Station as a camp for political prisoners, Barrett asked himself, and were starting to use it as an insane asylum?

A cascade of psychos descending on them. Men who had gone honorably buggy under the stress of confinement would have to make room for ordinary bedlamites. Barrett shivered. He folded up Hahn’s papers and handed them to Latimer, who was sitting a few yards away, watching him intently.

“What did you think of that?” Latimer asked.

“I think it’s hard to evaluate. But possibly friend Hahn is emotionally disturbed. Put this stuff back exactly where you got it, Don. And don’t give Hahn the faintest inkling that you’ve read / SOUNDPROOF / 110 or removed it.”

“Right.”

“And come to me whenever you think there’s something I ought to know about him,” Barrett said. “He may be a very sick boy. He may need all the help we can give.”

The fishing expedition returned in early afternoon. Barrett saw that the dinghy was overflowing with the haul, and Hahn, coming into the camp with his arms full of gaffed trilobites, looked sunburned and pleased with his outing. Barrett came over to inspect the catch. Rudiger was in an effusive mood, and held up a bright red crustacean that might have been the great-great-grandfather of all boiled lobsters, except that it had no front claws and a wicked-looking triple spike where a tail should have been. It was about two feet long, and ugly.

“A new species!” Rudiger crowed. “There’s nothing like this in any museum. I wish I could put it where it would be found. Some mountaintop, maybe.”

“If it could be found, it would have been found,” Barrett reminded him. “Some paleontologist of the twentieth century would have dug it out. So forget it, Mel.”

Hahn said, “I’ve been wondering about that point. How is it nobody Up Front ever dug up the fossil remains of Hawksbill Station? Aren’t they worried that one of the early fossil hunters will find it in the Cambrian strata and raise a fuss?”

Barrett shook his head. “For one thing, no paleontologist from the beginning of the science to the founding of the Station in 2005 ever did dig up Hawksbill. That’s a matter of record, so there was nothing to worry about. If it came to light after 2005, why, everyone would know what it was. No paradox there.”

“Besides,” said Rudiger sadly, “in another billion years this whole strip of rock will be on the floor of the Atlantic, with a couple of miles of sediment over it. There’s not a chance we’ll be found. Or that anyone Up Front will ever see this guy I caught today. Not that I give a damn. I’ve seen him. I’ll dissect him. Their loss.”

“But you regret the fact that science will never know of this species,” Hahn said.

“Sure I do. But is it my fault? Science does know of this species. Me. I’m science. I’m the leading paleontologist of this epoch. Can I help it if I can’t publish my discoveries in the professional journals?” He scowled and walked away, carrying the big red crustacean.

Hahn and Barrett looked at each other. They smiled, in a natural mutual response to Rudiger’s grumbled outburst. Then Barrett’s smile faded.

…termites…one good push…therapy…

“Something wrong?” Hahn asked.

“Why?”

“You looked so bleak, all of a sudden.” / SOUNDPROOF / 111

“My foot gave me a twinge,” Barrett said. “It does that, you know. Here. I’ll give you a hand carrying those things. We’ll have fresh trilobite cocktail tonight.”

Eight

A little before midnight, Barrett was awakened by footsteps outside his hut. As he sat up, groping for the luminescence switch, Ned Altman came blundering through the door. Barrett blinked at him. “What’s the matter?”

“Hahn!” Altman rasped. “He’s fooling around with the Hammer again. We just saw him go into the building.”

Barrett shed his sleepiness like a seal bursting out of water. Ignoring the insistent throb in his left leg, he pulled himself from his bed and grabbed some clothing. He was more apprehensive than he wanted Altman to see. If Hahn, fooling around with the temporal mechanism, accidentally smashed the Hammer, they might never get replacement equipment from Up Front. Which would mean that all future shipments of supplies—if there were any— would come as random shoots that might land in any old year. What business did Hahn have with the machine, anyway?

Altman said, “Latimer’s up there keeping an eye on him. He got suspicious when Hahn didn’t come back to the hut, and he got me, and we went looking for him. And there he was, sniffing around the Hammer.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know. As soon as we saw him go in, I came down here to get you. Don’s watching.”

Barrett stumped his way out of the hut and did his best to run toward the main building. Pain shot like trails of hot acid up the lower half of his body. The crutch dug mercilessly into his left armpit as he leaned all his weight into it. His crippled foot, swinging freely, burned with a cold glow. His right leg, which was carrying most of the burden, creaked and popped. Altman ran breathlessly alongside him. The Station was terribly silent at this hour.

As they passed Quesada’s hut, Barrett considered waking the medic and taking him along. He decided against it. Whatever trouble Hahn might be up to, Barrett felt he could handle it himself. There was some strength left in the old gnawed beam, after all.

Latimer stood at the entrance to the main dome. He was right at the edge of panic, or perhaps over the edge. He seemed to be gibbering with fear and shock. Barrett had never seen a man gibber before.

He clamped a big paw on Latimer’s thin shoulder and said harshly, “Where is he? Where’s Hahn?”

“He—disappeared.”

“What do you mean? Where did he go?”

Latimer moaned. His face was fish-belly white. “He got onto the Anvil,” Latimer blurted. “The light came on—the glow. And then Hahn disappeared!” / SOUNDPROOF / 112

“No,” Barrett said. “It isn’t possible. You must be mistaken.”

“I saw him go!”

“He’s hiding somewhere in the building,” Barrett insisted. “Close that door! Search for him!”

Altman said, “He probably did disappear, Jim. If Don says he disappeared—”

“He climbed right on the Anvil. Then everything turned red and he was gone.”

Barrett clenched his fists. There was a white-hot blaze just behind his forehead that almost made him forget about his foot. He saw his mistake, now. He had depended for his espionage on two men who were patently and unmistakably insane, and that had been itself a not very sane thing to do. A man is known by his choice of lieutenants. Well, he had relied on Altman and Latimer, and now they were giving him the sort of information that such spies could be counted on to supply.

“You’re hallucinating,” he told Latimer curtly. “Ned, go wake Quesada and get him here right away. You, Don, you stand here by the entrance, and if Hahn shows up I want you to scream at the top of your lungs. I’m going to search the building for him.”

“Wait,” Latimer said. He seemed to be in control of himself again. “Jim, do you remember when I asked you if you thought I was crazy? You said you didn’t. You trusted me. Well, don’t stop trusting me now. I tell you I’m not hallucinating. I saw Hahn disappear. I can’t explain it, but I’m rational enough to know what I saw.”

In a milder tone Barrett said, “All right. Maybe so. Stay by the door, anyway. I’ll run a quick check.”

He started to make the circuit of the dome, beginning with the room where the Hammer was located. Everything seemed to be in order there. No Hawksbill Field glow was in evidence, and nothing had been disturbed. The room had no closets or cupboards in which Hahn could be hiding. When he had inspected it thoroughly, Barrett moved on, looking into the infirmary, the mess hall, the kitchen, the recreation room. He looked high and low. No Hahn. Of course, there were plenty of places in those rooms where Hahn might have secreted himself, but Barrett doubted that he was there. So it had all been some feverish fantasy of Latimer’s, then. He completed the route and found himself back at the main entrance. Latimer still stood guard there. He had been joined by a sleepy Quesada. Altman, pale and shaky-looking, was just outside the door.

“What’s happening?” Quesada asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Barrett. “Don and Ned had the idea they saw Lew Hahn fooling around with the time equipment. I’ve checked the building, and he’s not here, so maybe they made a little mistake. I suggest you take them both into the infirmary and give them a shot of something to settle their nerves, and we’ll all try to get back to sleep.”

Latimer said, “I tell you, I saw—”

“Shut up!” Altman broke in. “Listen! What’s the noise?” / SOUNDPROOF / 113

Barrett listened. The sound was clear and loud: the hissing whine of ionization. It was the sound produced by a functioning Hawksbill Field. Suddenly there were goose-pimples on his flesh. In a low voice he said, “The field’s on. We’re probably getting some supplies.”

“At this hour?” said Latimer.

“We don’t know what time it is Up Front. All of you stay here. I’ll check the Hammer.”

“Perhaps I ought to go with you,” Quesada suggested mildly.

“Stay here!” Barrett thundered. He paused, embarrassed at his own explosive show of wrath. “It only takes one of us. I’ll be right back.”

Without waiting for further dissent, he pivoted and limped down the hall to the Hammer room. He shouldered. the door open and looked in. There was no need for him to switch on the light. The red glow of the Hawksbill Field illuminated everything.

Barrett stationed himself just within the door. Hardly daring to breathe, he stared fixedly at the Hammer, watching as the glow deepened through various shades of pink toward crimson, and then spread until it enfolded the waiting Anvil beneath it. An endless moment passed.

Then came the implosive thunderclap, and Lew Hahn dropped out of nowhere and lay for a moment in temporal shock on the broad plate of the Anvil.

Nine

In the darkness, Hahn did not notice Barrett at first. He sat up slowly, shaking off the stunning effects of a trip through time. After a few seconds he pushed himself toward the lip of the Anvil and let his legs dangle over it. He swung them to get the circulation going. He took a series of deep breaths. Finally he slipped to the floor. The glow of the field had gone out in the moment of his arrival, and so he moved warily, as though not wanting to bump into anything.

Abruptly Barrett switched on the light and said, “What have you been up to, Hahn?”

The younger man recoiled as though he had been jabbed in the gut. He gasped, hopped backward a few steps, and flung up both hands in a defensive gesture.

“Answer me,” Barrett said.

Hahn regained his equilibrium. He shot a quick glance past Barrett’s bulky form toward the hallway and said, “Let me go, will you? I can’t explain now.”

“You’d better explain now.”

“It’ll be easier for everyone if I don’t,” said Hahn. “Please. Let me pass.”

Barrett continued to block the door. “I want to know where you’ve been. What have you been doing with the Hammer?”

“Nothing. Just studying it.” / SOUNDPROOF / 114

“You weren’t in this room a minute ago. Then you appeared. Where’d you come from, Hahn?”

“You’re mistaken. I was standing right behind the Hammer. I didn’t—”

“I saw you drop down on the Anvil. You took a time trip, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me! You’ve got some way of going forward in time, isn’t that so? You’ve been spying on us, and you just went somewhere to file your report—somewhere—and now you’re back.”

Hahn’s forehead was glistening. He said, “I warn you, don’t ask too many questions. You’ll know everything in due time. This isn’t the time. Please, now. Let me pass.”

“I want answers first,” Barrett said. He realized that he was trembling. He already knew the answers, and they were answers that shook him to the core of his soul. He knew where Hahn had been.

But Hahn had to admit it himself.

Hahn said nothing. He took a couple of hesitant steps toward Barrett, who did not move. He seemed to be gathering momentum for a rush at the doorway.

Barrett said, “You aren’t getting out of here until you tell me what I want to know.”

Hahn charged.

Barrett planted himself squarely, crutch braced against the doorframe, his good foot flat on the floor, and waited for the younger man to reach him. He figured he outweighed Hahn by eighty pounds. That might be enough to balance the fact that he was spotting Hahn thirty years and one leg. They came together, and Barrett drove his hands down onto Hahn’s shoulders, trying to hold him, to force him back into the room.

Hahn gave an inch or two. He looked up at Barrett without speaking and pushed forward again.

“Don’t—don’t—” Barrett grunted. “I won’t let you—”

“I don’t want to do this,” Hahn said.

He pushed again. Barrett felt himself buckling under the impact. He dug his hands as hard as he could into Hahn’s shoulders, and tried to shove the other man backward into the room, but Hahn held firm and all of Barrett’s energy was converted into a backward thrust rebounding on himself. He lost control of his crutch, and it slithered out from under his arm. For one agonizing moment Barrett’s full weight rested on the crushed uselessness of his left foot, and then, as though his limbs were melting away beneath him, he began to sink toward the floor. He landed with a reverberating crash.

Quesada, Altman, and Latimer came rushing in. Barrett writhed in pain on the floor. Hahn / SOUNDPROOF / 115 stood over him, looking unhappy, his hands locked together.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You shouldn’t have tried to muscle me like that.”

Barrett glowered at him. “You were traveling in time, weren’t you? You can answer me now!”

“Yes,” Hahn said at last. “I went Up Front.”

An hour later, after Quesada had pumped him with enough neural depressants to keep him from jumping out of his skin, Barrett got the full story. Hahn hadn’t wanted to reveal it so soon, but he had changed his mind after his little scuffle.

It was all very simple. Time travel now worked in both directions. The glib, impressive noises about the flow of entropy had turned out to be just noises.

“How long has this been known?” Barrett asked.

“At least five years. We aren’t sure yet exactly when the breakthrough came. After we’re finished going through all the suppressed records of the former government—”

“The former government?”

Hahn nodded. “The revolution came in January. Not really a violent one, either. The syndicalists just mildewed from within, and when they got the first push they fell over.”

“Was it mildew?” Barrett asked, coloring. “Or termites? Keep your metaphors straight.”

Hahn glanced away. “Anyway, the government fell. We’ve got a provisional liberal regime in office now. Don’t ask me much about it. I’m not a political theorist. I’m not even an economist. You guessed as much.”

“What are you; then?”

“A policeman,” Hahn said. “Part of the commission that’s investigating the prison system of the former government. Including this prison.”

Barrett looked at Quesada, then at Hahn. Thoughts were streaming turbulently through him, and he could not remember when he had last been so overwhelmed by events. He had to work hard to keep from breaking into the shakes again. His voice quavered a little as he said, “You came back to observe Hawksbill Station, right? And you went Up Front tonight to tell them what you saw here. You think we’re a pretty sad bunch, eh?”

“You’ve all been under heavy stress here,” Hahn said. “Considering the circumstances of your imprisonment—”

Quesada broke in. “If there’s a liberal government in power, now, and it’s possible to travel both ways in time, then am I right in assuming that the Hawksbill prisoners are going to be sent Up Front?”

“Of course,” said Hahn. “It’ll be done as soon as possible. That’s been the whole purpose of my reconnaissance mission. To find out if you people were still alive, first, and then to see / SOUNDPROOF / 116 what shape you’re in, how badly in need of treatment you are. You’ll be given every available benefit of modern therapy, naturally. No expense spared to—”

Barrett scarcely paid attention to Hahn’s words. He had been fearing something like this all night, ever since Altman had told him Hahn was monkeying with the Hammer, but he had never fully allowed himself to believe that it could really be possible.

He saw his kingdom crumbling, now.

He saw himself returned to a world he could not begin to comprehend—a lame Rip van Winkle, coming back after twenty years.

He saw himself leaving a place that had become his home.

Barrett said tiredly, “You know, some of the men aren’t going to be able to adapt to the shock of freedom. It might just kill them to be dumped into the real world again. I mean advanced psychos—Valdosto, and such.”

“Yes,” Hahn said. “I’ve mentioned them in my report.”

“It’ll be necessary to get them ready for a return in gradual stages. It might take several years to condition them to the idea. It might even take longer than that.”

“I’m no therapist,” said Hahn. “Whatever the doctors think is right for them is what’ll be done. Maybe it will be necessary to keep them here. I can see where it would be pretty potent to send them back, after they’ve spent all these years believing there’s no return.”

“More than that,” said Barrett. “There’s a lot of work that can be done here. Scientific works. Exploration. I don’t think Hawksbill Station ought to be closed down.”

“No one said it would be. We have every intention of keeping it going. But not as a prison. The prison concept is out.”

“Good,” Barrett said. He fumbled for his crutch, found it, and got heavily to his feet. Quesada moved toward him as though to steady him, but Barrett shook him off. “Let’s go outside,” he said.

They left the building. A gray mist had come in over the Station, and a fine drizzle had begun to fall. Barrett looked around at the scattering of huts. At the ocean, dimly visible to the east in the faint moonlight. He thought of Charley Norton and the party that had gone on the annual expedition to the Inland Sea. That bunch was going to be in for a real surprise, when they got back here in a few weeks and discovered that everybody was free to go home.

Very strangely, Barrett felt a sudden pressure forming around his eyelids, as of tears trying to force their way out into the open.

Then he turned to Hahn and Quesada. In a low voice he said, “Have you followed what I’ve been trying to tell you? Someone’s got to stay here and ease the transition for the sick men who won’t be able to stand the shock of return. Someone’s got to keep the base running. Someone’s got to explain things to the new men who’ll be coming back here, the scientists.” / SOUNDPROOF / 117

“Naturally,” Hahn said.

“The one who does that—the one who stays behind—I think it ought to be someone who knows the Station well, someone who’s fit to return Up Front, but who’s willing to make the sacrifice and stay. Do you follow me? A volunteer.” They were smiling at him now. Barrett wondered if there might not be something patronizing about those smiles. He wondered if he might not be a little too transparent. To hell with both of them, he thought. He sucked the Cambrian air into his lungs until his chest swelled grandly.

“I’m offering to stay,” Barrett said in a loud tone. He glared at them to keep them from objecting. But they wouldn’t dare object, he knew. In Hawksbill Station, he was the king. And he meant to keep it that way. “I’ll be the volunteer,” he said. “I’ll be the one who stays.”

He looked out over his kingdom from the top of the hill.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 346, originally released on May 24, 2012 Download audio Read by Paul Tevis Originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 118

Next Time, Scales By John Moran

"You're too restless," the lizard whispered into my brain.

"And you've been at the reactor fuel again."

Marla slapped her prehensile tail onto the table, cracking its surface with her paralysing stinger and rattling the chess pieces. The blow echoed through the control room.

"I hate it when you do that, Steven."

"Do what?"

"Think you can read me."

I smiled. "Your underarm scales are pale, which means a supercharged diet or zero-gravity. As we haven't been off-planet, it must be the food. Plus, your breath stinks of sulphur and your claws have white rings."

Marla pointed one crimson eye at the table, but kept the other on me.

"Your move,” she said.

"Give me time. Why do you think I'm restless?"

"Because you've spent the last three weeks researching Loris, and done each patrol fully armed."

I glanced through the window, as if by chance I might catch our thief creeping up in plain view, but all I saw were two huge moons glowering over the ruined planet, its civilisation long-dead, part-excavated and full of secrets.

I couldn't let Marla know the site had me spooked, though. Her people had been hunters for a thousand years, and, through a quirk of fate, she believed in me.

"Right." I said. "Let's patrol." I got most of the way to the door before I realised what the click behind me had meant. "And you can put that piece back."

"Damn," Marla said.

The night was darker than usual, but I left off my flashlight and navigated by the excavation's amber glow. After two months I'd learned the drill pretty well: walk three steps from the door before turning right, drop down through the first causeway, crunch my way over rubble and calcified ferns, pass beside three thousand year old shop windows, then into what people said were the temples of the spider-creatures that had once ruled Artemis. / SOUNDPROOF / 119

As I walked, Marla leapt from one wall to another like a shooting star. She looked beautiful, her scales shining like jewels.

"Why you care so much about an urban legend?" she asked.

"Because he's a mystery. For two hundred years, Loris has been stealing artifacts, leaving only the letter L engraved onto the wall. Who wouldn't be interested?"

"He's only human, Steven."

"I'm not sure. We didn't have the technology to grow new bodies two centuries ago, so if he's human, how has he lived so long?"

Marla was silent for a while, then she said, "however good he is, I bet you're better."

I walked away, unhappy with false praise. Instead, I ducked through the first arch, and stepped out below the huge, half-buried alien machine. Next to it, the laboratories and excavating machines looked forlorn and tiny. Forty archaeologists worked here in Artemis' summer, but none had yet figured out what the machine did.

"Perhaps you regret our melding?" Marla whispered, her voice quavering.

"Not for a moment."

"Then why do you seek out complications?"

"What do you mean?"

"Loris, for instance. He's just another hunt. So —"

"— Marla?"

"Yes?"

"The machine's active."

She appeared at my shoulder, scuttled up to the machine and crouched, eyes twitching in different directions. What had previously been a mountain of dark metal now held a tiny panel that shimmered like oil on water. As we watched, it faded to black.

“Intriguing,” Marla said.

"Still think Loris is a myth?"

"I think we need to be careful."

She left in a blur, dancing up the wall. I crept after her, gun ready, but stopped at the end of the avenue, just as the city opened into a plaza capped by a broken tower.

"What's up?" Marla asked. / SOUNDPROOF / 120

I sent my mind back through memories of other patrols, and compared them to the present. Some people have a photographic memory; I have video recall. It's rare, but it has saved my life more than once.

"The shadows are wrong."

"What do you mean?"

I ran through the images again, spotting a nearby lamp that had been smashed to put an area several metres square into darkness. Something was lying there, dark and still in the shadows, covered in thick cloth. Even as I dragged it into the light, I knew it was a body: an old man, sallow and grey, with slash marks down his face and a stab wound in his chest. His blood had not yet congealed.

"Loris is here," I said.

Marla appeared at my shoulder. "So who's that?"

"An accomplice, maybe?"

Her eyes swiveled upwards. "Steven?"

"What?"

"The lights are going out."

I stood. Segment by segment, darkness was falling over the excavations.

"He must be in the base," I said.

"About time we found something to hunt."

Marla's thoughts murmured low, then turned into alien chanting as she skipped ahead along the darkening walls. I chased after her, the sound of her death song filling my mind. It scared me when she was like this. She was too eager, too ready to put herself at risk.

When we reached the base I saw that the door had been forced, revealing two entrance corridors in a Y, their lights off.

"I'll go right," Marla said, her voice full of excitement.

"What if he's in my side?"

She laughed. "Then keep some for me."

She shivered and curled her tail like a scorpion, before speeding into the darkness. I gripped my weapon and followed.

"Corridor one clear," Marla said while I was only part-way down my own, my footsteps clanging along the metal floor despite my efforts to be silent. Every step threw moon- shadows crazing over the walls. When I reached the end, the connecting door opened itself. / SOUNDPROOF / 121

"Why remove lights but not the power?"

"Beats me. Reception room one clear, by the way."

My heart beat hard as I stepped into an echoing dome of titanium and plastic, turned on my light and scanned the walls. Our base was a hundred years old and built for far more spartan times. Now it echoed hollowly and something scraped in the distance.

"Sickbay clear," Marla said, though she seemed to be hurrying too much. Despite her confidence, I'd seen her get hurt before. Then I noticed something else.

"The floor's vibrating," I said, moving to the wall and activating the readout.

"What with?"

"The reactor's been set to self-destruct."

Disbelief filled her voice. "How is that even possible? What about fail-safes?"

"It was designed to stop other races getting our technology."

"You mean it's deliberate? What sort of idiot culture builds a bomb into a science base?"

"Who cares? Right now I have to shut it off."

"You know, if we hadn't melded, I'd still be hunting on Targol."

"You nearly died on Targol."

"Everybody dies, Steven. The aim is to make it glorious. There's nothing glorious about a bomb."

"There's nothing glorious about being stupid, either. Please be careful."

Gun held high, I slid into the reactor room with my back to the wall.

I didn't think there was anything wonderful about dying in any manner.

That was why I'd joined the Explorer's Service a hundred years earlier, to get the new bodies they'd offered. Old, young, male, female — I'd tried them all. Little had I known I'd end up having humanity's first contact with the Lizards.

I swept my flashlight from left to right, trying to be systematic.

Given the number of alcoves and chest-high machines, the room could have been full of people and I wouldn't have known. The reactor terminal stood exposed in the centre, but it was the only way to stop the countdown. Or to start it, I realised, which meant the intruder was probably in my side of the building.

I kept low, and began to relax only when I reached the terminal and managed to end the countdown. Then something skittered along the floor behind me. I tried to turn, but was far / SOUNDPROOF / 122 too late.

Ten years earlier I'd been late, too. I was still in the Service because of my rapport with the Lizards, and had been partnered with one on her first hunt. It was sold as a getting-to-know- you mission, but tradition said it should be done without technology. After showing lizard after lizard my fingernails, they'd finally allowed me one small knife.

Targol was hot that month, entering the nearest phase of its eccentric orbit, and after being in the jungle for three days I was glad I'd been argued down over body armour. Then my companion found the first traces of our prey and her naive eagerness took over. She sped after it, leaving me alone amongst the thin green trees and ankle-deep water, naked except for a knife pouch.

When the screaming began, I panicked and fled, only to find myself in the heart of the action regardless.

Someone was screaming when I woke this time, too, face-down on a cracked floor-tile in the flickering darkness of the reactor room. My head ached, pain between my shoulder blades prevented me breathing fully, and my throat burned with vomit. I heard a skittering noise, then more screaming.

I rolled over and saw it. Facing the wall, dark red scales shining, and eight legs skittering over the reactor room floor was a creature I'd only previously seen in drawings on the alien machine.

Although its front two legs looked adapted to tool-use and it carried a green bracelet high on one of them, it drew breath instead, and used some internal force to blow a stream of fine grit onto the wall, completing the letter L it had been etching.

Two thoughts filled my brain: first, that this couldn't be the same Loris who had left footprints on Beta-4. Second: was Marla okay?

She arrived in a blur, skipping off two walls and landing on the creature's back before plunging her stinger into its chitinous armour. Incredibly, she failed to penetrate, and instead the creature turned, grabbed and hurled her with such force that she snapped against the far wall and left a dint in the metal. She fell and did not get up.

The creature advanced, raising one of its second-row legs, tipped with barbs, for a killing blow.

"No," I shouted, grabbing a back leg — and immediately it turned and skittered towards me like an onrushing asteroid. Now I understood why the arches round the dig had been so broad. The spider was as high as my shoulder, but wider than three humans.

I kicked backwards along the floor, waving my hands to show I had no hostile intent.

"There's no need for violence. Take what you want."

It stopped, and its mouth clicked sideways before speaking. "I'm sorry, but I can't let you tell anyone about me." As the sentence progressed, I made out an Earth accent and realised how Loris had lived so long. Nowadays we use enormous hospital ships around the moons of / SOUNDPROOF / 123

Jupiter, but there's really no reason an alien couldn't make the technology smaller. A bracelet, for example.

"Was it the machine we’ve been excavating?” I asked, walking closer.

"Yes," Loris said. "Damn gene-banks. I turned it on thinking it was a technology store, but ended up bringing one of them to life, instead."

"You thought quickly, body-swapping like that."

"I am rather proud of myself, but, if you'll excuse me, I have to destroy the witnesses.”

I ducked, and he caught me high on one shoulder, my arm splintering in a flash of blood and pain that took me back to that fateful day in the jungle years earlier. This time I remained conscious, and as he lifted my impaled body off the floor, I groped for the alien bracelet, flipped back the cover and hit its only button.

I expected to wake looking at my own body through spider-eyes. I was even going to be gentle with Loris, take him into custody and confiscate the bracelet.

None of that happened.

Instead, I ended on my back, staring at the ceiling with my left side aching. When I tried to stand, I found it difficult because I now had legs where arms should have been. Also, I was seeing images in two places at once. Crazy, confused images, that —

— I focused both eyes to the front. Ahead, the alien spider threw my limp body at a wall before turning to face me. I was a half-metre off the floor, dark-green, and, something told me, possessed of a strong prehensile tail with a stinger at its end. Even if I lived, I had no idea if Marla would, as she was now trapped in my dying body. To save her, I would have to press the bracelet again, but it was still on the spider.

The spider charged, so I leapt for the wall like I'd seen Marla do. Pads miraculously flowered upon my fingers as I ran over the surface just ahead of its onrushing blows. They cracked nearer and nearer, so I leapt to the ceiling, re-oriented my eyes, and ran over its bellowing body.

The door yawned in front of me as I realised I was faster than it was. I could leave, and live to fight another day. The Service medics would raise an eyebrow but give me another body eventually.

That wouldn't save Marla, though. Reluctantly, tiny heart beating faster than I could believe, I turned back to face the thing. Behind it, I saw my body get up, try to follow, then fall over and throw up.

A scream that sounded terribly like Marla hit the air and my mind simultaneously.

"I'm sorry," I thought back to her. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

The spider didn't seem to notice as it attacked me at full speed, legs whipping and jaw wide. I spun off the door jamb, backflipped from the ceiling and scuttled down the corridor as the whisper of its barbs skimmed me. This body was amazing. Now I knew how Marla's people / SOUNDPROOF / 124 hunted so well, I didn't feel so bad about being poor in comparison.

"Come on," I shouted. "I can take you," but the noise came out as a series of clicks. Whatever magic Marla used to speak mind to mind remained a mystery. Ahead, my body rose, then collapsed.

"Steven," Marla's thoughts echoed. "If this is pain, make it stop."

Ten years earlier I'd turned the corner and ran headlong into a ghoul-like creature holding Marla down and throttling her. More by luck than judgement I'd plunged in my blade and saved her life. Though its dying blows had mortally shattered my ribcage, I'd won the fight and upheld the honour of humanity.

Now in this body, I knew I'd failed Marla when it mattered most, and anger drove me forwards. I felt exhilarated, too, and wanted only to leap for its face and take it on directly. Even if I died, this creature would pay for hurting her. As I feinted left, a barbed leg whipped past the spot I would have stood upon, but it was so hard emotionally to give ground.

It’s endorphins, I thought, suddenly realising just how much this body was pumped up for battle. No wonder Marla was so active, if she went through this each time we hunted.

Though it felt wrong, I forced myself to retreat, skipping from wall to wall and trying to think like a human — and as I dodged, I ran through the fight in my mind, searching for a weakness.

At last I remembered a spot between its plates that had opened up when it struck my human form. I turned, waited, and ducked down as the spider’s leg whistled over my back, ending up underneath the thing. I twisted my eyes frantically, feeling nauseous from the spinning images, but finally found the gap — struck hard, and, in the biggest surprise of the day, had something like an orgasm as poison pumped out of my stinger.

A minute later, and still quivering with excitement, I struggled out from Loris' still form, retrieved the transfer bracelet and went looking for Marla.

She lay in a pool of blood, and my heart trembled to see her spirit inside my dying eyes. Something white fell from her mouth; a tooth, perhaps.

"I never realised it was like this, being you," she said, in part mind-speak, part whisper.

As I held up the transfer bracelet, I finally realised something I'd refused to notice in the five years since she'd saved my life on Targol: whatever strange, wayward, naive spirit inhabited her, it was one I loved. Although I was going to die, I felt happy, knowing I could swap back and save her.

I pressed the switch. At first the pain was immense, but then, through some unexpected grace, I fell into utter blackness. When I woke I was completely numb and unable to move. I opened my eyes to find eight images of Marla dancing before me, all smiling in that slow lizard way of hers. / SOUNDPROOF / 125

"Welcome back, idiot," she said, her voice gentler than I’d ever heard it before.

"What happened?" I asked, finding words so hard to form I ended up just thinking them.

"I saved your life, as you would have done, had you thought it through."

My mind flicked back to that day in the jungle when a young lizard had made the decision to save my life by sharing her own life-force the only way she could, leaving us exquisitely and uniquely connected.

"By melding with me again?"

"We can only perform the mating ritual once, I'm afraid."

"Then what?"

She raised her tail and showed me the stinger. "This isn't lethal poison."

I looked down and saw my new body, already feeling the numbness recede. Eight jointed spider legs ran from the edge of my vision to the floor. Lost in wonder, I raised a long barbed leg and stared. "Loris?" I asked at last.

She looked away. "I put him in your body, Steven. I'm sorry I couldn't make his death glorious."

I extended one leg, then another; skittered sideways before leveling myself.

Marla spoke again. "Steven. When I was dying, you had certain ... thoughts about me."

"I'm sorry. I —"

Her skin paled in a ripple from her nose to the tip of her tail. "—I'd just like to say that it's about time."

I stared at her for a long time, then found myself saying, “I know.” Later, as we walked down the long corridor to the outside world together, the Spider and the Lizard, I was already wondering what to tell the Service about how I ended up in my current shape. And I had no idea at all what they were going to make of my next request for a body.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 347, originally released on May 31, 2012 Download audio Read by Josh Roseman An Escape Pod Original! Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 126

Nemesis by Nathaniel Lee

It was the middle of second-period Spanish when I felt my cell phone go off in my pocket. Three pulses, then two. That meant one of my alerts had hit paydirt. I've got newsfeeds filtered for keywords, pairing "emergency" and the names of every local school and business I could think of, plus I got Kenny from sixth period computer Science to cobble together a kind of hack on the actual first responders' radio channels. If my phone had gone off, then there was trouble.

If there was trouble, then the city needed Atom Boy.

So where was he?

Well, if I was in Spanish, then he was in History. No, wait, he'd dropped the AP course. Did he have some kind of math now instead? Crud. I had no idea. I'd lost our hero.

"Miss Ramsey?"

"Ahem!"

"Uh, um, I mean, uh, Señora Ramsey?"

" Sí, Quentin?"

"Yo, uh, yo poder uso el baño?"

"Puedo. Y sí, se puede. Andale."

I clapped a hand over my pocket to keep my phone-bulge hidden and ran out of the classroom, careful to turn to the right as if I were heading for the boy's room. A couple of months ago, that wouldn't have been a bad idea; I'd discovered Adam's secret when I walked in on him trying to get out of his tights at the end of fourth period. Which he'd missed, by the way, and I'd had to cover for him and pretend like I'd gotten a text from his mom about an emergency dental appointment.

Nowadays, I made him use the locked room in the old elementary school building, next door to the art room. I had a key because Mr. Adelaide trusted me to use it only to work on my project. I felt bad about abusing that trust, but I figure helping a superhero save the world every week counts as some sort of civic duty. I checked there first.

Adam was sitting at one of the old desks, his feet sticking out about a mile because it was designed for five-year-olds. He had his suit half on. His pale chest was bare, exposing those three wispy little curls that he was so proud of. He didn't look up when I came in.

"Adam? What's wrong?"

"I've lost my powers." His voice was dull, his eyes unfocused. He sounded grim and deadly serious. / SOUNDPROOF / 127

"Oh, for crying out loud, Adam, we've been over this. Remember, last month? You thought it was some kind of lingering effect from the Recluse's poison bite, but it was all psychosoma- whosit." I ran in and snatched up his backpack, rummaging for his pill-box. "Have you been taking your Paxil?"

"It made me gassy. I'm on a new one now. Starts with an 's,' I think."

"Well, whatever it is, have you been taking it?"

"No! I want to be me, not what some drug makes me."

I resisted the urge to punch him. It would be like hitting a steel wall, anyway. Instead, I found the box and opened it. The previous week's pills were all still in their slots. White pills, red pills, blue pills. Patriotic. "Which one is it?"

Adam shrugged.

"Argh!" I pulled out one of each, thought about it, then made it two of each. He had superpowers. He could take it. "Here. Take these and get a move on."

Adam picked the pills up. "I told you, I lost my powers."

"You did not."

"Did so."

I glared at him. This called for drastic measures. I turned, picked up a wooden dowel from the supply table, closed my eyes, and whacked him over the head. I used my right hand this time; my left is my drawing hand, and I didn't want to lose it for two weeks. The actinic flash was blinding even through my eyelids, and I felt myself hurled backwards and into the pile of paper rolls. Better than the chairs, at least. I opened my eyes to see Adam standing, fists raised over his head and crackling with azure energy. His eyes glowed, too, and his hair stood on end and shimmered blue like it was made of fiber optic cables.

"Ha ha!" he shouted. "I'm back. I'm back!" He turned to me and his face fell. "Oh, geez, Q. I'm sorry."

I glanced at my right hand. My fingertips were blackened, and soot from the incinerated rod reached up to my elbow. I didn't even feel anything yet. I tried to move my fingers. Oops. Bad idea.

"I'll be fine, I'll be fine," I said, gritting my teeth. I waved him on. "Just go get whatever it is." I heard footsteps approaching. "Hurry!"

Adam nodded and took off out the window, leaving a trail of sky-blue sparkles that faded gradually. I hauled myself upright and smacked my lips. His backwash tastes like Blue Razzberry slushie. I wonder if he knows.

Someone was rattling the doorknob. Not Mr. Adelaide, then, at least. I'd hate for him to be the one to discover me ruining his secret room. I decided I'd tell them I was messing around with fireworks and burned my hand. As long as the nurse didn't have a Geiger counter, they'd / SOUNDPROOF / 128 never know the difference.

I took a moment to look out the window. Adam was already out of sight, his trail hardly visible against the deeper blue of the sky. I turned and looked at my half-finished sculpture for Honors Art. I called it "Heroism." I'd miss working on it.

I went to open the door.

#

That evening, I decided to go to the fort. I had to wait for Mom and Dad to go to sleep; I was grounded for a month in addition to the three-day suspension I caught for creating a fire hazard, and the only reason it wasn't worse was because I'd managed to convince everyone I'd wanted to use the fireworks as part of an art project and not just as a prank. Not a bad idea, actually. I wish I'd thought of it before. At any rate, it's a good thing Adam didn't get superpowers until after I was already known as a "good kid." We'd both have been expelled by now if I didn't have that reputation to draw on. Even so, I was already on the last threads of trust with most of my teachers.

It was dark out in the woods. We'd had candles and flashlights and stuff stashed here for ages, though, and ever since I started taking Art class seriously, I've made sure I also had a good bright lamp and spare batteries. The fort itself was basically falling apart now. It had been falling apart when it was new, for that matter, just a couple of planks leaned together. We had a tent set up, though, and waterproof camping bags with all kinds of useful things. I know Adam kept his spare costume out here, for instance. And his porn stash.

My hand was all covered in ointment and bandaged up. They'd had to send me to the actual hospital because the nurse's office didn't have the right supplies. I still don't think it was that bad. It just stung, was all. I could have gotten worse at a regular old campfire. It's not like Adam hit me directly with one of his energy beams or something. I used my forearm to balance my sketchbook and kept my palm turned away. It itched, but I knew better than to try and scratch it. Being Adam's friend meant knowing a lot about burns.

The first few pages of my sketchbook had some abortive landscape drawings and a first attempt at a still life for last month's assignment. In the corners and the margins, though, were my anatomy studies. Mostly Adam, at least the recognizable ones. Adam laughing, Adam with his hair all glowy, Adam taking off from the barbecue pit at his house.

The others were all Belinda.

I never drew her in full. An eye, or a hand, or a shoulder; never enough that someone could recognize her. The stuff with Adam I could pass off as imagination, but when someone stole my sketchbook – and let's face it, in high school, that's a "when," not an "if" – I emphatically did not want them to be able to figure out I had a pathetic geek crush on Linda. She goes by Linda now; she used to prefer Bella, when we were all little, but she hates those stupid vampire books and says they ruined the name for her. For all I care, she could call herself Snot-Hog the Uglinator and I'd still draw her in my sketchbook. I'd broken my rule, now that we were coming up to Winter Break, and started work on a full portrait of her. I wanted to give it to her as a present, but I also wanted to be able to disappear for two weeks right afterward if it didn't go over well. / SOUNDPROOF / 129

I'd been drawing it for over a week, working on getting everything just right. It was hard to work mostly from memory, but it wasn't like I didn't know what she looked like. She stared up at me from the page, her eyes dark and a hint of a smile playing around her lips. The background wasn't filled in yet; that was what I'd come out here to work on. I'd decided on a vaguely Classical theme, so I started on the rough pencils for a set of columns and some curling vines. Maybe a fountain in the background. It was a relief to lose myself in my work for a while, like diving into a pool on a hot summer day, letting the stress and fatigue and pain drizzle away and leave me in peace. I decided my ego was bruised enough that I was allowed to indulge in a little fantasy, so I sketched myself in as a companion for Linda, off to one side. Very lightly, so I could erase it afterward; that would be more than a little presumptuous to give as a gift. It was only when I came to the face that I realized I'd drawn it wrong. This shape was tall, athletic, with a strong chin and pale hair.

I'd drawn Adam out of sheer habit.

Suddenly I didn't feel like drawing anymore.

With a buzz and a rush of air, Atom Boy landed in front of me. "Hey, Q!"

"Hey, stranger," I replied. "So what happened? The official news isn't too helpful."

"Oh, it was the Lizardtron again," Adam said breezily. "Marcus thinks that the Genegineer is back, but I recognized that hydraulic work; I think it's got to be Doktor Tektonic."

"Who's Marcus?" I turned off my lamp then closed my sketchbook and tucked it by my side.

"Huh?" Adam's hair faded back to its normal blond hue, and stopped waving around like an anemone. "Oh, didn't I tell you about him? He's this old guy, I think he used to be Mentat, but now he's a professor at some school for 'special' kids, if you know what I mean. He's been coaching me. You know, mentally." Adam tapped his head. "It's cool. I checked his story out, and the Dean of Admissions said they'd offer me a place if I wanted it."

"You're leaving? Before graduation?"

"Well, I didn't accept yet. I have to think about it, you know?"

I hesitated. This was a minefield. "You... haven't mentioned any of this."

"Oh, man, bro, it's just been so busy. Like, the Underground attacked, and then there was that whole trip to the alternate Earth, and Marcus' voice stopped when I went on that new medicine and I thought maybe it was all a hallucination and it was only today that he got through again. And then I lost my powers or I thought I did and you totally saved the day on that one, Q, Marcus said to tell you that you were cool about that with the thinking fast and stuff."

"Did he actually say that?"

"No, he said something about a 'level-headed young individual' and stuff, he talks like he's a hundred or something, but he would've said 'cool' if he knew any words later than like eighteen-twelve or whatever, and I think you gave me a little too much because I feel way hyper, do I seem hyper to you? Mom said it's a side effect and it's worse than farting in class / SOUNDPROOF / 130 but I can't really tell what do you think?"

"Your mom's usually right."

"Dude, I am not getting back on the fart pills. That was awful."

I managed a smile. "Oh, hey, I got your homework for tonight. I finished most of it, but I'm not in French so I couldn't do that part." I pulled the sheaf of papers out of my backpack and stood, careful of my burned hand.

"Q! You are the man, I swear to God." Adam plucked the papers out and leafed through them.

"I even got a few wrong so they won't figure out you didn't do it yourself."

Adam punched me lightly on the arm. It kind of hurt. "You doof." Unexpectedly, he grabbed me and pulled me into a rib-cracking hug. "Man, I don't know what I would do without you. You are my best friend, Q; I mean that."

"It's okay, Adam," I squeaked, barely able to breathe. "You'd do the same for me if you could. You saved my mom from that giant centipede, remember?"

"Yeah, but that's different." Adam released me and ducked into the tent to change out of his costume. It's amazing the difference clothing makes. No one's ever even commented how much Adam Baum looks like Atom Boy. Probably the glowing blue hair helps. It's really distracting. "Anyway, I have to get home. You want a ride?"

"Nah. You make everything taste blue for a week when you do that."

Adam laughed. "You're such a weirdo, Q. What does that even mean?"

"I'm serious! Have any supervillains ever complained about it?"

"Shut up. Oh, hey, by the way, be careful 'cause if it is Doktor Tektonic, then he knows my real identity and he might come around and cause trouble. Don't touch anything shiny that ticks, okay?"

I shrugged. "Sure."

And then he was gone, and the little clearing in the woods where we'd played together as little kids was suddenly darker and full of shadows.

#

The problem was that Adam really was such a nice guy. If he'd been arrogant about it, or if he'd expected me to do all this stuff for him and made a big deal about how busy he was with important stuff elsewhere, or if he'd rubbed my face in my nothing-specialness, I could have been resentful and angry and gotten it out of my system. Adam wasn't like that. He was honestly surprised whenever I did things to help him out, and he never tried to exclude me or lie to me. He forgot stuff, but that was Adam. He was like a giant, super-powered puppy, happy and cheerful and endlessly loyal. Completely unselfconscious. And completely thoughtless. As in literally without thought. It just never occurred to him that his powers were anything but awesome or that there were any other lives that could be lived, and if he'd had / SOUNDPROOF / 131 any idea that the sheer rotten unfairness of the whole situation upset me, he'd be even more miserable than I was.

I couldn't hate Adam for being Adam. All I could do was bottle it up, swallowing my resentment like a slimy toad that crouched in my gut, cold and clammy and undying. Every day, the toad would try to climb up and get out, to force my mouth open and croak bile at Adam and Mom and Dad and Mr. Adelaide and everyone, and my job was to keep him locked away. The toad was my nemesis, my own personal supervillain, and at least I could beat him if I couldn't beat anyone else. That was how I tried to think of it, anyway. It helped, a little.

I started skipping school to hide out at the fort and work on my drawings. Forged a note about strep throat; all that imitating Adam's handwriting meant I had lots of practice at that kind of thing. Why should I go? Adam was gone most days, and I hated every class except Art, which I couldn't enjoy anymore because Mr. Adelaide was mad at me for "abusing his trust," and what could I tell him? "I had to do it to help a superhero fight a giant robot dragon"?

What could I tell anyone, really? That I was mad at no one because my friend had superpowers and I was afraid to talk to a girl I liked because I didn't? Everyone around here tried to pretend like superheroes didn't exist and harrumphed about them whenever they showed up on TV. They'd sure as heck never believe that it was Adam the screwup, the "Baum kid, isn't it a shame," who'd saved the city all these times. And I didn't want to reveal Adam's secret; they'd make him stop if they knew who he was, make him get licensed and registered by the government and probably sent out to the Middle East or something. I'd promised to protect his identity, and I would keep that promise.

Adam wasn't around, though. He was off hunting for that person who'd rebuilt Lizardtron and doing stuff for that jerk Marcus and his stupid superhero school. Some kind of test or something. He said he'd found Doktor Tektonic, but even though the Doktor was defeated, the "Prismatic Matrix," whatever that was, was still missing. Adam didn't go into much detail, and what little he did say was kind of Adam-ish and therefore mostly unhelpful. I didn't pressure him. He'd tell me if he wanted to.

Or if his big new friends let him.

So I was alone. Some days I could see the flash and hear the distant rumble of Adam fighting some new monster, but mostly I saw and drew and tried to lose myself for a while. I finished the picture of Linda, but I didn't give it to her. I tried, once. Went to school and everything, but when I saw her, she was getting into some guy's car with a bunch of friends and they were all laughing and talking and basically every single person in that car was light-years out of my league, attractiveness-wise. So I left and swallowed the toad back down and went to the woods. I drew studies of everything in the clearing, one tree at a time.

That was how I found the artifact. It was buried in the ground, deep, as if it had impacted with a lot of force after traveling from far away. It glinted in the morning sun, and I had to dig for twenty minutes to get it out. When I did, I found that it was a little handle, like a set of brass knuckles. On the front, where there'd normally be the actual, you know, brass knuckles, there was just a glittery gem-looking thing. It was obviously superhero stuff. I should have called Adam immediately and had him or Marcus or whoever come and get it and contain it / SOUNDPROOF / 132 and make sure it was safe or whatever, but I felt the toad clawing up my throat and I didn't.

I put it on my hand instead.

The gem flashed, and the whole thing made a whirring, clattering sound and folded out in some way my eyes couldn't follow, and suddenly I was wearing a little gauntlet with all kinds of buttons and sliders on it. I tried to pull it off, but it wouldn't come. I figured it had to be turned off first, so I started trying the buttons and switches one at a time. I'm not an idiot; I kept the business end pointed off into the woods. The fourth switch I tried – a little slider thing at the wrist – made the whole gizmo retract back to its little handheld form. The third button I tried, though, the big green-and-purple one on top, made the gem in front flash and send out some kind of beam that turned a two-foot-thick tree into crystal and shattered it to dust.

I stood there for a while, holding the gizmo and looking at that pile of glittering shards. I felt my lips curl into a smile, and it seemed like they stretched wider and wider until my mouth must have looked like a toad's.

#

For the rest of that week and the weekend, I tinkered with the gizmo. I figured out how to do lots of things. It had dozens of different weapons, and a couple of them looked like they were means specifically to take on Adam, based on what I knew of his weaknesses. He can't deal with this one kind of alien crystal stuff – something about the molecular structure – that looked a lot like what the tree turned into, and his power gets borked if you can set up a feedback loop, which is hard because the stuff he puts out is kind of electrical and kind of laser-y at the same time. The glove could do it, though. It also had a force field, a couple of stealth modes, and – my personal favorite – it could fly, at least for a little bit. There's nothing like the feeling of wind in your face without tasting sour-sweet fizz for hours afterward. I figured out flight on Sunday.

I went back to school the next day. It is really amazing, the feeling you get from walking around with a weapon of mass destruction in the bottom of your backpack. I definitely recommend it if you're having self-esteem issues. I saw Dave and Deke, who used to take my lunch money every day when I was in third grade, and I waved like we were old friends. They looked at each other, confused, but something in the way I was walking must have told them it would be a bad idea to mess with me. My teachers were all angry about me being absent, especially when I told them I hadn't even checked on the website what the homework was. I got a lecture every period, but I just smiled and nodded and thought about how I could use my gizmo to destroy the whole school if I wanted.

Linda was there, too. I saw her talking with Adam in homeroom. When had he decided to come back to earth? They were laughing about something. The toad kicked hard at my diaphragm, and I turned my wince into a smile.

"Hey, guys!" I said, leaning in. They both glanced up at me and went quiet. "How's it going?" I asked. I winked at Adam, and he grinned his goofy Adam-grin, thinking everything was cool.

"It's great. My big project is almost done." Adam would make a terrible spy. Thank God he / SOUNDPROOF / 133 doesn't take Drama.

"Cool. So... I didn't know you and Linda still hung out." I kept my voice casual, icy-calm. I thought about the gizmo.

"Yeah. She's, uh, helping me with my French homework," said Adam, blushing a bit. I clenched my teeth.

"Jeez, Adam, you make it sound dirty," Linda rolled her eyes. "Just because I let you copy my papers doesn't mean we're dating or something."

"No, not like that. It's just... not really helping... if I don't... um..." Adam's blush deepened.

"It's cool. I just hadn't seen much of either of you lately. Other than, you know, like, Pre-Calc. I haven't talked to you since like last year, Linda."

"I tried to call you the other day," said Linda, not meeting my eyes. "Your mom said you were grounded. Did you really try to burn down the school?"

"You'll have to ask Adam about that one." I was smiling so hard it hurt my cheeks.

"I thought you went home early that day?" Linda asked Adam.

"Uh..."

See, this is why he needs me. His secret identity would be toast in a half-second if it was up to him. "Nah, Adam's just a total pyro. He burns things down like once a year at least. Hey, Linda, I need to talk to you. It's about Art. Do you mind?"

"I gotta go anyway," said Adam, looking grateful to escape. "See you around." He left as fast as I've ever seen him move without leaving those stupid blue sparkles behind.

"What's up?" asked Linda. She was biting her lip. Was I making her nervous? Maybe I was wound a little tight. I tried to remember that I was in control and totally all-powerful if I wanted to be. I forced myself to relax.

"I've been working on a secret art thing. You know, for the final project? It's out in the woods right now. I thought maybe you could come and, y'know, give me pointers and stuff? I want it to be awesome because Mister Adelaide is kinda peeved." There. That sounded totally natural.

Linda looked skeptical. "You mean out in that silly 'secret fort' you and Adam had in grade school?"

"Uh, yeah." Think about the gizmo, I told myself. You've got the power. "Yeah, out there. I know it's dumb, but it's a big secret and I can't reveal it until it's ready, you know?" I licked my lips. "Please? It really would mean a lot to me to have your opinion."

She met my eyes for the first name. I'd forgotten how blue they were. "Okay. Tomorrow, though, all right? I have cheer practice tonight. Around four?"

"Sure. It's not due until Friday. I can make changes if I have to, still." I stood up again. / SOUNDPROOF / 134

"Thank you."

"Sure," she said. When I glanced over my shoulder, she had her head down, staring at her notebook.

#

I spent Tuesday wavering between feeling like I was flying with the sun on my face and feeling like I was in the bottom of a muddy well. I tried to chase the toad away by focusing on warm and happy things like the gizmo and Linda's expression when she realized what I could do, but the toad kept coming back. Finally, I just resigned myself to the cycle. I have no idea what anyone said in any of my classes. The gizmo sat at the bottom of my backpack, and it was as if I could see it through my desk and the plastic and canvas, glowing like a tiny second sun, just for me.

After school, I ran to the woods and waited. What would I say to Linda? I tried playing out several scenarios while I waited for her to arrive. Maybe I'd just be hovering overhead when she got in and I'd call out and she'd look up, all dramatic and stuff. On second thought... flying with the gizmo is kind of awkward, and I didn't want her to see me looking like I was hanging from invisible monkey bars. Maybe I'd just casually activate it and shoot a tree. Except she might just get scared and run. But I could catch her, and then... yeah, okay, bad idea. I wished Linda smoked because I knew how to get a really thin little laser and I could be all, "Need a light?" But she didn't. I couldn't decide, and I got restless. I paced for a while, but then I started wondering why Linda wasn't here yet and maybe she got lost or maybe she wasn't coming at all. I felt vaguely nauseated. I sat down. I checked the time. Half past three. How was I going to kill a half-hour?

I pulled out my sketchbook and tried to clear my head. A charcoal pencil is like Pepto-Bismol for the soul. I drew a leaf. I drew my hand, encased in the gauntlet. I doodled a little stick- figure Adam and then drew a beam from the gauntlet that traveled across the page and scribbled him out, like I used to do when I was little and mad at someone.

Idly, I flipped the pages backwards and saw the drawing I'd finished, the portrait of Linda. Because I knew what to look for, I could just make out the remnants of the empty-faced Adam shape I'd drawn when what I wanted was to put myself in the picture. I imagined myself there now, with my gauntleted hand resting on Linda's shoulder. Would her expression still have that faint wryness to it? Or would she be biting her lip and glancing away to the side, towards where Adam had been until I erased him?

"Quentin?"

I glanced up, startled. Linda stood on the edge of the clearing, opposite the tent.

"What are you working on? Where's your art project?"

I didn't know what to say. I handed her my sketchbook. Her cheeks went pink. "That's beautiful," she said. "I wish I actually had a dress that nice. You should be a fashion designer."

My voice came back, but I used it like a moron. "I stole it from a magazine. The look of the / SOUNDPROOF / 135 dress, I mean."

She nodded, her eyes still on the picture. I hadn't really captured her, not properly. The liveliness of her eyes, the tiny crinkling at the corners of her eyes...

"Is this for me? Is this what you asked me out here to show me?" She looked up, and our eyes met again. I felt something flip-flop inside me that didn't feel toad-like at all.

"Yes. No. I mean, um. That's you. Yours. That picture is- I made it for you. But I..." I froze. Linda was looking at me, expectant. I couldn't think what to say. She was here, she was back out at the fort like when we were kids, and I hadn't talked to her in so long and she didn't know why, maybe she thought I didn't like her anymore but I did and... and...

"Adam is Atom Boy," I blurted.

The words hung in the air for a moment. Then Linda laughed. Not a disbelieving laugh, but real belly-shaking hilarity. She doubled over and laughed until she was out of breath.

"It's true! I'm not kidding! It's why-"

"No, no, I believe you," Linda waved a hand, not looking up. "God, no, it makes so much sense now. Of course he is. He thought that up himself, didn't he? Probably thought it was hilarious. Adam Boy!" She glanced up and burst into peals of laughter again. "Oh, God, no wonder he didn't want to come to the pizza party, if he's a superhero on the weekends." She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye and hiccupped, then looked up at me. "What about you?"

"Me?" I slipped my hand into my pocket and gripped the gizmo. "I'm nothing special. I'm just a normal kid." My other hand shook a little. I pulled my hand out of my pocket and clasped both hands together in front of me.

"No, no, I mean do you want to come to the party on Saturday? It's a holiday thing. Everyone from school is going to Gallagio's. Pizza and stuff."

"I, um..." I felt my cheeks burning.

Linda coughed and chuckled again, as if a laugh got stuck in her throat. "So why tell me about Adam? Did he ask you to tell me? Is he trying to impress me?"

"No, I just... I thought you should know. If you were going to hang out with him." I stared carefully into the distance over her left shoulder.

"'Hang out'?" Linda looked puzzled for a moment. "Oh. Oh! Quinnie, you are so silly sometimes, you know that?" She walked forward, still holding my sketchpad. "Adam's a sweetheart, but he's... he's kind of Adam. I don't think he's even noticed girls yet, honestly."

She was close enough to touch, close enough that I smelled her perfume. There was a moment of silence.

"Do you remember what you got for me for my eleventh birthday?" she asked abruptly. / SOUNDPROOF / 136

I responded instantly: "A pink Power Ranger zord and all the accessories."

She smiled. "I still have her, you know. She's on my dresser, right in front of the mirror. I see her there every morning. Sometimes my mom leaves notes for me in her hands, like she's waving a sign at a parade or something."

A high-tension wire was twanging in my innards. I felt like I should be paying attention, but I wasn't sure to what. "Why do you bring it up?"

"No reason." Linda leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. She pulled back, looked me in the eyes, and then kissed me again. On the lips, longer and deeper. By the time my brain caught up to what was happening, my body had already reacted, my hands coming up to rest on her back, my mouth opening, my eyes closing. She breathed out, I breathed in. There was no one else in the world. Somewhere far inside me, in the place where my thoughts ran dark and cold, something slick and green hopped in and disappeared without a ripple.

Then Linda pulled away. "So I'll see you on Saturday," she said, and it was a promise and a question all at once.

"Yeah..."

She handed me my sketchbook. "Keep my picture safe until I can find a frame for it, okay?"

"Okay." I felt as though I had just come out of a coma, a long lapse that left me blinking in a strange new day.

"Will you need a ride?"

"Yeah, probably." I thought of something else. "Um, I'll have to sneak out, so meet me down at the corner, okay? I'll be grounded still."

"Won't you get in more trouble?"

I shrugged. "It'll be worth it."

Linda smiled again, and the sun shone inside me. She began to walk away. "Oh," she said, turning back, "should I keep Adam's secret identity, um, secret?"

"Yeah," I said, rubbing at the back of my neck. "You, uh, probably shouldn't say anything to him either until I figure out how to warn him."

She giggled again. "Okay. I can't believe I didn't figure it out already. God, it is so obvious in retrospect." Her eyes twinkled. "You were a good secret-keeper up until just now. I never would have suspected you were involved. You're so respectable sometimes."

"Linda, I-" I blushed. I had no words left. I'd forgotten how to talk.

"Shh," Linda held up a finger. "Take your time. You'll figure it out eventually. I always said you were the smart one."

I watched her leave. I slipped my hand into my pocket and pulled out the gizmo. I could give it to Adam. One of his superhero friends or mentors would know what to do with it. I could / SOUNDPROOF / 137 keep it secret in my backpack for emergencies, just to know it was there. Or I could learn to use it better, maybe wait for Adam to need some help, a sidekick or a superhero partner, the start of a new team. I could do anything I wanted with it, really.

But I didn't need it anymore.

I found the hole where I'd unburied it weeks ago and dropped it in. I covered the hole with dirt and dragged a log over it to hide the scuffmarks. Adam would find it, eventually. Or he wouldn't. Maybe that was part of the test, to see if Atom Boy was worth inducting into the ranks of the real superheroes. I wondered if Adam would pass. I hoped he would; it's all he's ever really wanted.

"Good luck, Atom Boy," I said aloud. "And thank you."

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 348, originally released on June 7, 2012 Download audio Read by Mat Weller An Escape Pod Original Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 138

Origin By Ari Goelman

This is how I find out that I'm pregnant:

I wake up to find Carter standing next to my bed. The fire escape door is open behind him, so the rising sun silhouettes his body. A human silhouette, albeit a little crisper than it should be, as his body bends the light towards him, powering up. Always powering up.

"You're pregnant," he says. No particular emphasis on the words, which is as per usual, his voice being run through vocal cords that are not human, formed by lips that have blown hurricanes off course. It's not that he doesn't feel emotion, he tells me and anyone else who'll listen. It's just that he doesn't have the same biologically hardwired ways of showing it. Usually I believe him.

"What?" I rub my eyes, push up on one elbow. "That's not possible."

He leans over me, and touches my stomach. "I was flying by your apartment, thinking about you. I heard the heartbeat."

"You told me that was impossible," I say.

He frowns and asks, "I told you it was impossible for me to hear the . . ."

"Conceiving, Carter," I say. "You told me it was impossible for us to conceive."

"I thought it was. I was wrong." His frown deepens. "I could take care of it for you right now if you want."

I push Carter away from me and sit up. "For me, Carter?! You mean for us, right?"

"Right. That's what I meant." A pause, then. "You're freezing the bed, Margaret."

I glance down. Damn it. I've covered myself and the bed with a thin layer of ice. I take a deep breath and try to calm down before I do any permanent damage to my bed.

It strikes me that this whole thing smells of Dr. U. "Any idea where Dr. U is these days?" I say.

Carter shakes his head. "Ambrosius is reformed. This isn't one of his plots, Margaret. You— we—have to decide what we're going to do." He winces. "Shoot. Bank robbery in Chicago. I have to go."

He's gone before I can respond.

"I should never date other supers," I say, not for the first time. I put my hand on my stomach. Crap. I can barely keep a spider plant alive. There's no way I'm ready to be a mother.

I look back at the bed and wave my hand at it, heating the molecules surrounding it until the sheets are dry and warm. Then I call in sick to my norm-identity job at the advertising firm, / SOUNDPROOF / 139 and get back into bed. Of course I can't sleep.

After an hour of lying in bed, I get up and spend what's left of the morning surfing the Internet for information on pregnancy. My Battalion cell phone rings a few times, but I don't pick up. A few minutes before noon, I hear a tap on the window behind me and find Carter is hovering outside. "Come on in," I say.

A blur as he detours through the fire escape door in my bedroom and into my apartment. I know. It's weird—he lets himself in while I'm asleep, but if I'm awake, he'll always wait until I invite him in.

He runs his hands through his hair. "Why weren't you answering the phone?"

I roll my eyes. If he wants, Carter can fly faster than the signal on a phone. "What, did the bank robbery in Chicago hold you up?"

"It's a tough conversation. I thought it might be easier for you to have it from a distance."

"Easier for me?" I briefly consider incinerating Carter's costume. I'm pretty sure I could keep the heat contained, but if I'm wrong I'll end up having to evacuate the building and pay the fire damages. Again. Still, I'm thinking it might be worth the risk.

"Margaret . . ."

"You told me it was impossible."

"It is. I mean I thought it was. All the dimensions I've been through. I mean, for crying out loud, we're different species."

"You're telling me."

Carter frowns, but for once doesn't launch into his "Humanity is a matter of action" speech. "Neither of us want it," he says. "Right? I could take care of it right now." He looks at my stomach, and before I think about what I'm doing, I've thrown a wall of green ice between us, green being the color that stops Carter's nebulon rays.

My hardwood floors groan with the weight of the ice, not to mention the stress of having all the moisture sucked out of them. If Carter was anyone else he'd be shivering, as all the ambient heat in the room flows into me.

Instead he looks at me in that way. Even now, his eyes make me catch my breath. No iris, no pupil, just blue. As best I remember biology class, there's no way he should be able to see. Still, when Carter looks at you, you feel him look. I wonder if our child will get his eyes.

And that—that moment—is when I realize that I'm going to have the baby. Whatever Carter thinks, I'm going to have the baby. The thought makes me feel nauseous. Like my body is just catching up with the situation.

"You're not thinking of keeping it?" he says. Typical Carter. He can hear the faintest heartbeat of an embryo, but a wall of green ice and he has only the vaguest hint of my emotional state. He doesn't stay to hear my answer. A blur of motion, and he's gone. Which I'm tempted to say is also typical Carter. But it's not. Usually when we have an argument, he'll ignore anything / SOUNDPROOF / 140 short of a full scale alien invasion—and I don't just mean a few aliens, but the whole fleet / superpowered honor guard / mad empress deal. This time, though, he leaves me alone with the melting ice. But not really alone, I guess. I touch my stomach.

A few minutes later, I call Angie—my favorite teammate in the Battalion—to find out who delivers babies for people like us. She gives me the number, and I call and make an appointment for the following day. I don't say much to Angie, but she shows up on my fire escape a few minutes later with some Chinese takeout and a lot of chocolate.

The next morning I again wake up to find Carter standing over me. "Hi," I say.

"Hey." He sits on the edge of the bed, takes my hand between his. "You know. I've been giving the whole baby thing a lot of thought." He pauses, and for a moment I am flooded by affection for him. Then, he keeps talking. "It's not responsible of us. We risk our lives every day. What if we die?"

I roll away from him, pulling my hand from his. I stare at the wall, but that's no better. There's a framed picture of me and Carter kissing—the cover from last year's Valentine's Day issue of People. I close my eyes before responding. "Norms die all the time, Carter. They still have babies."

"I mean. Sure, I'd like to have a child," Carter says. Something in the way he's talking makes me think he's practiced this speech several times before trying it on me. "But it's selfish. What if one of my enemies—one of our enemies—tries to hurt us through the child?"

The thought makes me bolt upright in the bed, fists clenched. I feel myself absorbing heat, and I take a deep breath and release it. "If anyone tried that, we would kill them. I would kill them. And then I would incinerate their ashes. And then I would incinerate their ashes' ashes. . . ."

"Exactly," Carter says. "So what does that say—we don't kill mass murderers in Sudan— those people we leave to the international justice system—but we destroy anyone who threatens our child? Where's the morality there?"

He shakes his head. "The truth is we're not ready for this."

"You're not ready."

"And you are?"

"I don't know." I swing my legs out of bed and stand up. "I just don't know if I'll ever be more ready. I don't think you can plan these things out."

"Of course you can. The ability to put off childbirth . . ."

"Enough, Carter." It's not that I can't think of arguments. It's just that they don't matter. I want Carter to want the baby as much as me and he doesn't.

I walk away from Carter, go into the bathroom to wash up. When I leave the bathroom, Carter is gone. I sigh and call for a Battalion transporter. Looks like I'll be going to the doctor by myself. / SOUNDPROOF / 141

The doctor's office is on the top floor of a midtown skyscraper. There's an entrance from the roof, a clear sign that he's used to dealing with supers, and the exam room is the nicest room I've ever seen in a doctor's office. It's about twice the size of my apartment's bedroom, and has a spotless white leather couch facing a huge flat screen television. The only sign of the room's purpose is an examination table off to one side.

The doctor comes in a few minutes later. He's tall, with salt and pepper hair and an even, expensive-looking grin. "Ice and Fire," he says, extending his hand. "I'm Dr. Frank. Let me say what a big fan I am. You can be confident that I am fully qualified to deal with your particular—"

A baritone voice interrupts him. "Please, Doctor. All due respect, but you're not qualified to take the lady's temperature, let alone deliver her baby."

Dr. Frank looks at something behind me, and his eyes widen. His mouth works but no sound comes out.

"Now, Margaret," the voice says to me. "Hear me out. Please. That's all I ask."

I don't have to look to know what's behind me. Sure enough, when I turn around, I find that a shimmering green portal has appeared a few inches from the wall, and there, outlined in the bright green light, is Dr. Ambrosius Urbinski. Dr. U. As though I wasn't already having a crappy day.

He looks the same as usual—white linen suit, shoulder-length red hair. Bushy red eyebrows obscuring his beady little eyes.

Judging by the portal, he's got his damn E-Machine up and running again. He steps through the portal into the exam room, holding a stethoscope towards me like a peace offering.

"Give me one reason not to fry you, Ambrosius. And give it before you take another step towards me."

He freezes in mid-step, which I have to admit I like. "I'm here to help you, Margaret. You need a doctor."

I look at Dr. Frank, who has backed up until his back is against the door to the exam room.

"Seriously," Dr. U chuckles. Not his usual evil laugh, but just a normal chuckle. It creeps me out to hear it coming from him. "I mean a real doctor." He waves his hand at Dr. Frank. "Please. We need some privacy." Dr. Frank turns and lunges through the door, almost tripping himself in his desperation to get out of the room.

Dr. U steps closer, takes my hand, and puts the stethoscope on my wrist. "How are you feeling?"

I jerk my hand out of his grip, and set the soles of his loafers on fire.

He grimaces and does a little two-step. "Please. Think of what the fumes will do to your embryo." I hold my breath, but don't put out the fire. "Margaret. I'm reformed. The president forgave my crimes. Why can't you?" / SOUNDPROOF / 142

I just glare.

He holds up his hands palms out, wide-eyed with sincerity. Or as wide-eyed as that squinty little bastard could ever get. "Look. I don't blame you for not trusting me. I know I've hurt your feelings in the past."

"Ambrosius, you didn't hurt my feelings. You . . . you. Shit. Where do I start? You built a robot imitation of me to try to turn Carter against me. You tried brainwashing me into believing I had lost my powers. You animated the freaking Statue of Liberty and had her trash my apartm—"

"Margaret," he interrupts. "Holding onto your anger doesn't help anyone, including yourself. Trust me—I've learned the hard way. Forgiveness is the only path to recovery."

"Recovery."

"I'm a recovering supervillain. I forgive you and I want you to forgive me. I want us to move on."

"And I want you to get the hell away from me before I fry you like a frigging French fry," I say. Part of what's creeping me out is how convincing he is. I think he genuinely believes what he's saying.

"Hmm. About frying me. Or anyone else. Has anyone told you how using your powers will affect your embryo?"

I don't say anything and he says, "Even if they did, it doesn't much matter. Because no one knows but ME!" He roars with evil laughter, then quickly sobers, looking embarrassed. "Sorry. Um. Old reflex. What I meant to say was look—" He snaps his fingers, and a screen appears in the air next to him. There's a picture of a smiling pregnant woman with blue and red arrows surrounding her.

"Cold is fine, but unusual heat anywhere near your body is another story." The woman on the screen puts her hands to her cheeks and looks distressed. "The reverse entropy mechanism through which your bodily tissues produce heat may be extremely harmful to the embryo's replication, a problem which will be exacerbated by the elevated blood pressure that—"

"No extreme heat," I say. "I get it." Speaking of heat, his clothes must be coated with some kind of fire retardant, because it's taken me a few seconds to get them smoldering, too.

He edges back towards the E-portal. "All right. I'm going. But just think about it. We both know I'm the smartest man in the world. And even if you don't believe I've turned a new leaf —you know I don't break my word."

I'm about to let him cower back to his secret fortress. I think about how mad Carter will be when he finds out that Dr. U approached me. I think about how much angrier he'd be if I said yes.

"Screw it," I say. I cool off Dr. U's shoes. "Say it all, Ambrosius, and you have a deal."

It's true, by the way. Dr. U never breaks his word. That's how Carter used to stop his plots. / SOUNDPROOF / 143

They were usually too complicated for us to understand, let alone undo. Instead, Carter would just find Dr. U and dangle him upside down until Dr. U promised to undo whatever his latest scheme was and go to jail. Don't ask me why Carter never made him promise to stay in jail. The two of them have that classic "old friends/college roommates turned archenemies" dynamic. Not-so-submerged homoerotic if you ask me.

Dr. U puts his hand over his heart, like a six-year-old saying the Pledge of Allegiance. "I swear that I'll do no harm through action or inaction to you or your embryo or Carter."

"And no cloning my tissue or the embryo's tissue without my permission."

He hesitates. "Okay. Fair enough. No cloning. But you promise to leave me alone. No more setting my clothes on fire to make a point."

Now it's my turn to hesitate. I know he won't break his word, but I still feel like I'm missing something. "Okay. But the deal lasts until I say it does, and I can break it at any time."

"Five minutes' warning," he says. "Give me a chance to get away."

"Two minutes." I put out my hand.

He takes it. "Deal. You won't be sorry."

I'm already sorry. Still, I have to admit, after we shake, it's just like any other doctor's appointment. Well, like any other doctor's appointment that takes place in another doctor's commandeered office. He takes my pulse, and my blood pressure. Then he puts the stethoscope on my stomach. I start to ask him if he hears anything, and he shushes me. Then shakes his head. "Nothing. Don't worry. You're probably still a few weeks away from a heartbeat."

"Carter already heard one."

"No he didn't." Dr. U shakes his head wearily. "I published an article in Nature two years ago that made it crystal clear that Carter's whole super hearing/super vision thing is crap. It's clairvoyance, plain and simple. But psychic powers are too effeminate for your boyfriend's brand. No wonder he used to get so mad when I tested his abilities."

"Like when you blew up your dorm room when he was asleep?"

Dr. U pulls out a vial for a urine sample and hands it to me. "I feel really bad about that. You can tell Carter that."

The whole appointment is like that. Dr. U talking about how guilty he feels about everything. By the end of it, I almost miss the unreformed Dr. U. At least he wasn't so stinking boring.

A few days later a small chrome box shows up in my mailbox. I press a button and it projects a small hologram of what looks like a fish. A slip of paper emerges from one side of the box. "Embryo week 6, magnified 100 times. Test results all looking good. Drink a lot of fluids. Step away from the projection device (not yet patented). —U." I step away from the projection device and it dissolves into green flames.

And that's how it goes. I see Dr. U every few weeks. I take a leave of absence from the / SOUNDPROOF / 144

Battalion so I won't be tempted to use my powers. Of course, this also means I don't have to see Carter every day. I hear about him on the news, of course, although he's taking a pretty low profile, too. Early in my second trimester he makes a brief appearance to destroy an asteroid headed towards the Earth.

A few weeks later, Angie is over for dinner, and tells me that no one in the Battalion has seen Carter since the asteroid incident.

"Any idea where he might be?" she asks.

I hesitate. I swore never to tell anyone about his hideaway on the moon. I'm mad at Carter, but a secret's a secret.

Before I can decide, Angie says, "I've already checked his little moon fort." Angie sees my surprise and rolls her eyes. "Puh-leeze. You thought you were the first girl Mr. Perfect took to the moon? The Huntress spent a month there with Carter when you were still in grade school. Anyway, check this out." She has to squirm to get her Battalion cell phone out of the tight leather pants she's wearing. Angie is wearing what passes for her street clothes: black leather pants and a matching tank top, cut to allow a hint of cleavage in the front, and a wide range of motion for her wings in the back.

She shows me the screen. "Tell me this isn't weird even for Carter."

The pictures aren't great, but I get a sense that the whole place—previously a sort of super- charged bachelor pad, all big-screen televisions, hologram projectors, and trophies from various super battles—has been totally destroyed.

"What is that?" I say. "What's the blue stuff everywhere?" I'm thinking it's an alien species of some kind, but I can't get a good look on the little cell phone screen.

"Weird, eh?" Angela says. "The whole place is covered—floor, ceiling, walls. It's like being inside a blueberry."

"But what is it?"

Angela shrugs and slips the cell phone back in her pocket. "The big brains don't have any idea. It could be an alien symbiote, could be an interdimensional extrusion." She eyes me. "It could be a plot by your new doctor friend."

I shrug, then turn back to my dinner. I'm almost as hungry as Angie these days. Flying takes lots of calories, but so does pregnancy. I talk around a mouthful of barbeque chicken. "Thing is, Ambrosius couldn't resist bragging about it if it was him. Trust me. He talks so much, it's a wonder he had time to be a supervillain."

Angie leans back in her chair, resting her hands on her stomach, which I can't help but notice is about one quarter the size of mine. "I'd be happier if Carter were around, that's all."

"You and me both," I say. Figures. Like the pregnancy wasn't bad enough, I have to worry about Carter now, too.

Aside from that, the second trimester is better than the first. The morning sickness goes away, / SOUNDPROOF / 145 and I get my energy back. For the first time since I've had my norm-identity job, I even go a few weeks without missing any work.

Near the end of the second trimester I'm meeting Dr. U in a small house in Westchester for a regular checkup. It's a cold day for June—which is wonderful after sweltering in the city heat for days. We're sitting in the backyard with a hologram of the fetus floating in the air beneath the elm tree where I'm sitting. I have to admit it makes me a little teary. The fetus looks like a baby now. The body is finally the right size for the head, and you can see the fingers and toes and even traces of its tiny fingernails.

Dr. U is muttering measurements—either to himself or to a recorder—as he moves the sonogram tool over my distended belly. "Note to self—BPD of 73 millimeters, femoral leg length of 53. Note to self—fetal proportions appear to tend towards Earth norm rather than PM. Note to self—in modifying PM sperm's genetic footprint, I may have moved too far towards human norm. In follow-up experiment—"

"What?" I say. "What did you just say?"

He freezes, and I know.

"PM stands for Power Man. You did this, didn't you?" I say. "You somehow instigated this pregnancy."

His squint becomes so pronounced his bushy eyebrows entirely obscure his beady little eyes. "Now, Margaret. Let's not get into a blame game. Anyway, how could I be responsible for your pregnancy?"

"Huh." I force myself to smile. There are some tricks that never get old. In some ways Dr. U is pretty stupid. "You're right. It's impossible. There's no way to knock up a girl—especially a superheroine—without touching her."

"Exactly. It would be absolutely impossible." He tries to keep his mouth shut, but he just can't resist. "Or at least it would seem so. Of course, for someone as smart as me, it was trivial. I just inserted some modified sperm into your Carter's testes when I last had him in my power. This was before my recovery, of course."

"Whose sperm?" I'm almost afraid to ask. The thought of carrying Dr. U's baby literally sickens me.

"His own. It would have to be his own or his body would reject it." He flushes a little. "As it happened, I—um—had harvested his seed previously."

"You 'harvested' Carter's 'seed'? You were gay!" I say. "I knew it. I knew it. Angie and I—"

"Are completely wrong," Dr. U blushes a little darker. "Not that I wasn't open to experimenting, but God forbid Carter touch another man. Have you ever seen him as much as hug a male friend? Him and Captain Planet and their handshakes." He shrugs. "I took the tissue out of the garbage when we were roommates."

"You swore no cloning." I hope he did break his word. It would be such a pleasure to freeze / SOUNDPROOF / 146 him where he stands. Just a few degrees of cold can incapacitate almost any norm.

"I haven't cloned a thing since we made our agreement," Dr. U says primly. Averting his eyes, he mutters, "Our agreement said nothing about using the embryo's excess stem cells to help create a new class of killer robots that can regenerate and recombine with one another at will. A man has a right to his hobbies."

"What have you done with Carter?"

"What?! Nothing!" Dr. U says. "I've been looking for him for months to ask his forgiveness. I figured he was ignoring me." I stare at him and he meets my eyes. Still, he only promised that Carter would be safe from him, he didn't say anything about capturing him or stealing his memory or any of the rest of his usual crap.

"Okay," I say. "You have two minutes. Run."

"Why? I'm telling you I haven't touched Carter. And haven't I been a great doctor?"

"One hundred seconds," I say. "I'd run if I were you."

Dr. U just stands there. "Margaret, you're being really unfair." He glances down at his wrist communicator, and touches a few buttons. One of them activates a force field. "You're also making it really hard for me to maintain a caring and empathetic doctor/patient relationship."

I glance at my watch. "Seventy seconds."

"Margaret. I hear that you're feeling angry."

I nod. "Sixty seconds."

Dr. U swallows. He touches another switch on his wrist, and an E-portal appears behind him. He doesn't turn, though. Instead he closes his eyes and hums. Then, eyes still closed, he says, "I don't have to fight. I have everything I need to be happy already inside me." He hums again.

"Thirty seconds."

His eyes snap open. "Fine." He spins and climbs through the E-portal, muttering. "It's not evil if it's self-defense." The E-portal dwindles and disappears.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath and wait. In about five minutes I hear the distant whirring sounds I'm expecting. Without opening my eyes, I feel the little centers of heat approaching as Dr. U's robot fleet flies closer to me. I suck the heat of the engines right through the pathetic little heat shields that Dr. U has inserted around them. I'm careful not to let the heat come too close to me, funneling it right back towards the robots, melting their propellers away. I hear the far-off thuds as the robots hit the ground a few blocks away. A few seconds later, I hear the whirring resume.

I sigh and open my eyes in time to see about a hundred robots streaming over the horizon, no doubt using some secondary energy source that doesn't generate heat. Usually at this point, I would throw up a few walls of flame and ice to slow them down. Instead I focus on taking / SOUNDPROOF / 147 deep breaths, relaxing and looking vulnerable. As pregnant as I am, it's not hard.

In past encounters, I've been too busy destroying them to appreciate Dr. U's handiwork, but this time I just watch them approach. I have to admit it—his robots are beautiful. They are sleek and multicolored—silver and gold inlay shining from the green and gold siding. It's as though a fleet of luxury sports cars have sprouted weapons and learned to fly.

The robots are just a few dozen yards away, when a killer breeze seems to move through them, leaving a debris of robot limbs and hands in its wake. When it settles, Carter is standing there, giving me an angry look. "Why would you call off the truce now?" he says. "It was totally irresponsible, when you can't even fight."

Another robot approaches him from behind and without turning, Carter backhands it, breaking it into dozens of titanium pieces. Behind him, I watch all the pieces from the shattered robots begin to recombine.

"How else was I going to flush you out?" I say. "Where the hell have you been? And what happened to your moon fort?"

Carter looks blank.

"The blue stuff?" I prompt him.

"Child proofing," he says like it should have been obvious. "That place was all hard corners."

Once the robot is complete it brings its hands together and points at Carter. Carter casually uses his silver cape to deflect the energy beam the robot shoots at him. "I want you to know," Carter says, "that I still have a lot of doubts."

He casts a quick glance behind him and sighs as another nine giant robots fly over the horizon. He looks more tired than I've ever seen him.

"Where have you been?" I say again, this time a little softer.

"Working," he says. "Almost forty million babies have been born since we found out we were pregnant. I was protecting them. Trying to protect them."

The nine robots combine with the first one to make a staggeringly immense robot, the size of a medium-rise apartment building. Its face bears an eerie resemblance to Dr. U.

"Carter, that's impossible." I say. "Even for you."

He rubs his eyes. "I know," he says. "I know. Do you know that 3 out of every 1,000 infants die in the crib? No one knows why. It just happens."

"You can reduce the probability by half if you sleep them on their back." Dr. U's voice booms from the robot's mouth. The robot lurches towards us. "And, by the way, I view this as self- defense. Margaret's attitude was posing a real threat to my recovery process."

Carter catches the robot's giant foot as it approaches us. He flexes and—though this should be impossible given Carter's mass relative to the robot—the robot flies upwards further than I can see. "The point is," Carter says, "there's nothing you can do about it. It just happens. / SOUNDPROOF / 148

Likewise autism, allergy to wasp stings. Whatever. Even a flu can be deadly to an infant.

"Do you know—200 major banks have been robbed since I stopped caring about crime? Several large insurance companies are suing me for negligence. Our pregnancy has single- handedly sparked the largest run on banks since the 1930s."

"Our pregnancy?" I say. "Did I see you puking every morning for three months? Did I even see you anywhere nearby?"

Carter starts to answer, then glances up. His eyes widen. A few seconds later, I see the robot approaching. Very fast. "Damn it," Carter says. "I hope the fetus is okay with loud noises." He leaps into the air straight towards the robot. They collide, and it's like someone has struck a giant bell right next to my ear.

It turns out that the fetus is most emphatically not okay with loud noises. It feels like it's trying to kick its way out of my uterus, as it flails around in response to the still echoing sound of the collision. "Shh," I say, stroking my stomach. "It's okay. It's okay." I take a deep breath. "Don't . . . get . . . mad," I say to myself. The effort of not going supernova is giving me a headache. "Shh." I say again, as much to myself as to the fetus.

Carter lands a few feet away. "Are you okay?" he says.

"No . . . more . . . loud . . . noises," I say.

"Right," Carter says. "Sorry." He glances up. "Uh-oh."

The robot has split into hundreds of pieces. All of which are headed straight for us, moving very quickly. "Carter, why didn't you just tell me where you were?"

"Look," Carter says. "Forty million babies. I . . ." His voice tapers off. "I'm really sorry. No excuse."

He moves too fast for me to see, but I can feel the friction of his body moving through the air as he shreds the robots. As fast as he shreds them, though, they recombine into other forms, working their way closer and closer to me. And the baby.

I sigh. Do I have to do every stinking thing in this pregnancy? Fine. I drop the temperature around us to as close to absolute zero as possible. Then I expand the bubble of coldness until it covers every robot, while still creating little bubbles of warmth for the trees, squirrel and sparrows that happen to be within that sphere.

It makes my head hurt more, but at these temperatures the robots can't recombine fast enough. Carter is still moving too fast for me to see, but in a few seconds it's over. When he slows, he's shredded the robots into a kind of silvery dust except for a few frozen fragments —the base of a head here, a gauntlet there.

Carter grinds his heel on one of the fragments, and then looks at me full on. Oh, that gaze, I think. "I won't be able to protect her," he tells me. "Not totally and completely. Things will happen to her that I can't control."

One of the robot's speakers is still working, although Dr. U's voice sounds a little tinnier than / SOUNDPROOF / 149 it did. "Welcome to fatherhood," he says. "Good lu—"

I pull some of the leftover friction heat into the speaker, and hear the satisfying pop of nano- transistors overheating and breaking as the speaker falls silent.

Carter sits down next to me. It always surprises me how small he is. When he stops moving, Carter is just a few inches taller than me, and no broader than an athletic norm. "She will get hurt, and I won't be able to help."

Her, I think, but I don't say anything. After a second he tries to put his arm around me. After another second, I let him.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 349, originally released on June 14, 2012 Download audio Read by Veronica Giguere Originally appeared in Strange Horizons Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 150

Observer Effects By Tim Pratt

"Ubiquitous surveillance isn't the problem. Asymmetrical ubiquitous surveillance is the problem." The Liberator was playing Chinese checkers against himself and talking, talking, talking, like always. "Who watches the watchmen, after all?"

We were superheroes then. Celebrities, back when there were such things. It was a slow night at orbital headquarters, and Eye-Oh was sitting at the big screen, watching a couple of people fuck -- consensually, or we would have done something about it -- in an alleyway. The screen was green with night-vision enhancements, and Eye-Oh's strange complicated face was perfectly placid and empty as he observed.

"The problem is that we can watch ordinary people, and they can't watch us," the Liberator went on. He looked at me longingly, searchingly, and I thought it might be nice to tweak the inside of his brain and get rid of his earnestness, give him a little taste of what infamous brain-damage victim Phineas Gage got when that iron bar slammed through his frontal lobe, a total personality turnaround, from nice guy to sociopath. Let the Liberator be selfish and impulsive and violent and mercurial for a while, so he could appreciate the way normal avaricious sneaky hungry desperate needy people felt.

But that was supervillain thinking, and I'd gone straight and narrow. In those days I cured neurological damage instead of inflicting it. I fixed people. (Except bad people. Those, I was sometimes still allowed to play with with.) I'd refused to give up my supervillain name though. The Liberator had wanted to call me "Dr. Neuro" when I joined his little boys' club, but I'd insisted on keeping my maiden name, as it were. Doctor. Please. I was a high-school dropout.

"Do you see?" the Liberator said. "If ordinary people could see us, if everyone could see everyone else, it wouldn't matter if there were no privacy."

"Mmm," I said, and tried to keep reading my book, a physics textbook. I was deep into a chapter on Heisenberg. His big achievement was the uncertainty principle, which says you can't know both the position and the momentum of a given particle at the same time. (I know, you know that. But like I said, I didn't do much school. I had a lot of catching up to do if I was going to hang with the super-science types.) I always thought the uncertainty principle had something to do with observing, how just the act of looking at something changed its nature, but apparently that's a whole different thing, called the observer effect. That's the kind of confusion you get when your grasp of physics comes from made-for-TV science fiction movies named after the monster that eats the boyfriend in the second act. I wasn't too clear on the implications of the uncertainty principle, but I understood the observer effect. Me and the boys observed things all the time -- Eye-Oh observed _everything_ all the time -- and we sure as hell changed what we saw if we thought it needed changing.

"In cultures where many people live in the same house, or otherwise in close quarters, they develop coping mechanisms to deal with the lack of privacy," the Liberator said. "They are capable not just of ignoring one another, but of genuinely _not noticing_ certain actions or / SOUNDPROOF / 151 behaviors of a personal and intimate nature. If everyone in the world could see everyone else, at will, we would all surely develop those same skills, do you see? Selective blindness for the greater social good."

"Sure, sure," I said, and turned a page.

"But for now it's one-way. We can watch ordinary people, and see them commit crimes, yes, of course, and stop them, but we can also watch them masturbate. Cross-dress. Auto- asphyxiate. Read stolen library books in the bath. Drink too much. Ingest recreational drugs. Curl up into a ball in the shower and cry. Walk around naked scratching themselves. Despite its benefits, our program of super-surveillance is a gross invasion of privacy."

"So tell Eye-Oh to stop looking," I said. Eye-Oh didn't turn to look at me, but I could feel his attention. He could see everything -- not just into your bedroom, but into your bank account and your safety deposit boxes and your web browser history, too, and he could project whatever he saw as visual information on a screen. (He was one of those freaks born with weird brain powers -- like me -- but there was some super-science involved, too, boosting his natural abilities.) Eye-Oh wasn't all-knowing -- he couldn't see into your mind, or your heart -- but he was all-seeing.

If I'd had power like that, I might have kept on being a supervillain.

But if somebody made him stop looking... what would that be like for Eye-Oh? He'd probably go crazy. More crazy. It would be like going blind, times a million. Plus our super-team would lose all the money we made leasing Eye- Oh's data-mining skills to big business and the government, and from the occasional under-the-table spy job. That cash kept us in body armor and jumpjets and energy drinks.

The Liberator shook his head. "The benefits of watching are too great for us to stop the program. Terrorism and violent crime are finally under control, since Eye-Oh joined our team. But the drawbacks..." The Liberator's big earnest face looked troubled. He'd been a farmboy or something, apparently, before his powers manifested, and he wrestled with moral and ethical questions the way only someone who'd never missed a meal could afford to.

He went on. "If every person on Earth could watch any cop, or politician, or soldier, or CEO at will, it would be _fair_. The police wouldn't bother you about your bondage porn collection or make fun of your taste in sappy romance movies, because you'd have access to their private peccadilloes, too, and everyone would learn to be forgiving and turn a blind eye, to truly respect privacy. Ubiquitous surveillance is a fact, now. We are the guards watching prisoners in our Panopticon. The genie is out of the bottle. The opportunity for abuses of power are vast, profound, staggering. But if we could turn the cameras around-... It wouldn't matter if your employer could see what you did on your time off if you could also see what he did in the privacy of his gated mansion. The police cannot so freely abuse you when everyone can witness their abuses, too."

"What are you suggesting?" Eye-Oh spoke mildly, but blinked a couple of his eyes, the ones on top, which I thought betrayed some irritation.

"I'm suggesting we open our services to the public," the Liberator said. "To anyone, at will. / SOUNDPROOF / 152

I'm suggesting we set up kiosks at the mall and post offices, so anyone can see anyone else, at the press of a button."

Eye-Oh shook his head. "Ordinary people can't afford our services."

"We'll charge a sliding scale," the Liberator said. "We know how much money everyone really has, after all, so we don't have to worry about anyone cheating. It's not an invasion of privacy if it's universal. It's the _end_ of privacy, and good riddance."

"What do you think about our leader's idea, Lesion?" Eye-Oh asked me.

I sucked my teeth and mulled it over. "I don't want people seeing me when I'm alone," I said finally. I was thinking about all the things I'd done in the past, and all the things I thought I was still capable of doing. "I don't care about being able to see what other people do, either. I hate reality TV anyway, and peeping toms are creepy."

"Agreed," Eye-Oh said. He paused. "Not about the reality TV, obviously. But about not wanting people to watch me."

The Liberator sighed. "Alas, as you all know, I was chosen as leader of our group, because I was the only one deemed immune to bribery, intimidation, or influence. I do not require your approval. In fact, I've already set the plan into motion."

"I'll quit," Eye-Oh said. "You can't do it without me. You think I can't make a good living in the private sector? Don't get me wrong, I love the cape and all, but I won't be used. At the very lease we have to be excluded from surveillance --"

"No exclusions." The Liberator rolled a Chinese checker back and forth across the table. The tension between the big guy and Eye-Oh was thicker than the walls of our space station. I prepared to use my power, to lance into their brains and make microscopic telekinetic changes, to forestall any sudden violence. The Liberator was basically just an unstoppable killing machine shackled to a hyperactive conscience, but if I messed up his sense of proprioception and he couldn't tell where his arms and legs were, he'd have a hard time doing anything physically drastic. Apart from falling down.

But he took another tactic. "Eye-Oh, you know a great many state secrets. Without my protection, every government on this planet would seek your immediate death. I repel assassination attempts daily. I don't bother to tell you about it, because it's just part of my job. But if you'd like to leave..."

Eye-Oh blinked a few more eyes. "Right. So. Kiosks? Okay."

#

We enacted the plan. It was popular. Every person on Earth had chafed at the knowledge that their every move could be monitored by superheroes in the sky, but they leapt at the chance to wield that power on their own. Oh, people complained, from governments to civil liberties groups, but our space station was a sovereign nation -- long story, happened after we saved the world one time -- unbound by any other country's laws. We cut businesses and municipalities in on the profits, and eventually, greed won, like usual. / SOUNDPROOF / 153

We couldn't install the kiosks fast enough, and our house geek, the Solder Soldier, was kept busy building more day and night. Everyone wanted to see what their spouses, kids, cousins, employees, bosses, mother-in-laws, elected officials, and babysitters were doing. They wanted to watch movie stars have sex with each other in private. They wanted to see their high school sweethearts naked in the shower. They wanted to see what great chefs ate at home. And those were the relatively harmless desires. In addition to the public surveillance kiosks, the Liberator sold private home consoles, too, with a monthly subscription fee for unlimited use. Those were far more popular. People liked to watch their neighbors in private, even knowing they, too, could be watched.

It wasn't exactly the kind of unfettered clairvoyance Eye-Oh possessed, since home voyeurs had to specify a specific location they wanted to watch, but between GPS coordinates and the personal information about most people you could find on the Internet, few people could live in true privacy, and a hardcore distributed network of hackers and web-junkies went through the world one set of coordinates at a time and published websites detailing what they saw.

Needless to say, Utopia did not ensue. People did _not_ go through a period of acting weird and repressed in private and then just forgetting about the fact that anyone could watch them anytime, adopting a live-and-let-live mentality. It didn't go anything like the Liberator expected. He may be an impossibly powerful immortal, but despite his best efforts, he just doesn't understand human nature. He used to wear these stupid disguises -- all wigs and fake mustaches and false noses -- and go walking among the common people, observing them, trying to figure out what made him different from ordinary humans, besides his godlike powers. I tried to explain to him once that it's easy to be altruistic when you have everything, when you can do anything -- that being generous means less when you have infinite riches to give, and you won't even miss the goodies you hand out -- but he never seemed to get it.

After the kiosks debuted, the world went from having the lowest crime rate since the first hominid picked up a rock with murder in mind to a chaos of wartime proportions, but the war was among families, friends, acquaintances, citizens. It wasn't just people killing because they'd seen wrongs committed against them -- it was people killing to prevent others from seeing the wrongs they'd committed, and killing out of shame, and out of frustration, and pretty much any other motivation you could think of. Suicides skyrocketed. Everything was fucked.

"Turn it off," the Liberator said finally, as we watched cities burn from our orbital headquarters.

"Can't," Eye-Oh said. "The open-source movement hacked our consoles ages ago, so most of them can't be turned off remotely anymore, and people are making their own kiosks now. It's out of our control. All the surveillance capabilities are wirelessly connected directly into my nervous system. As long as I'm alive, people will be able to use this technology, and we can't do anything to stop them."

I sidled up to the Liberator. I whispered in his ear. "If you were a supervillain, the solution would be obvious." I made a pistol of my thumb and forefinger and pointed at the back of Eye-Oh's head, and saw him tense. / SOUNDPROOF / 154

The Liberator tensed, too, then shook his head. "No, Lesion. That's not our way. But it gives me an idea." He took me to the super-science lab.

#

"Prosopagnosia," the Liberator said. "Can you cause it?"

"Face blindness? Sure. If I screw around with the old fusiform gyrus in the frontal lobe, and I can make it so people don't recognize faces anymore. They can't tell their wife from their dog walker, the president from a grocery clerk. They can _see_ fine, their brain just doesn't make the connection that this face belongs with that person." It's great for hiding your identity. I used to do it with bank tellers and other witnesses when my crew robbed banks, but I didn't mention that.

"I want you to induce face blindness in every person on Earth," the Liberator said.

0I frowned. "Uh. What? So nobody will be able to recognize the people they're spying on?"

"Yes. Even if they know they're spying on the right person, I think the... emotional element... will be largely reduced if can't recognize their faces. It should reduce the violence. Once people calm down, we can give them back their senses."

"Okay," I said. Moral qualms were never much of an issue with me. "But doing that to six billion people is gonna take a little time, boss. Like, most of the rest of eternity. I'm good, but I'm not that good."

"This should speed things up." He showed me the power-boosting helmet the organization's former psychic used to wear, back before he blew his brains out from reading too many horrible innermost thoughts. (That whole situation should've been a warning for the Liberator, if you ask me, but the flying boy scout has his limitations.) "With this, you can change the brains of everyone at once."

"Everyone? Like, Eye-Oh? Solder Soldier? You, too?"

"All of us. It's only fair."

"Right." So I did it. Put on the helmet -- tight, and smelled like a dead guy's sweat, but it made me thrum with power. Then it was just tweak, tweak, tweak, and for the people of Earth, every face became impossible to recognize. "That's it," I said, and took off the helmet, my head pounding.

He squinted at me. "Your face... Well. It worked."

The Liberator put his hand on my shoulder and called me a good girl, and I wanted to give him aphasia and lots of other nasty brain glitches. Instead I just smiled at his face -- which I could still recognize, because I don't hack my own brain, that's rule one -- and said, "No problem, boss." He couldn't understand that I was smiling, of course, so I made it an especially nasty smile.

#

Three days later Eye-Oh jettisoned himself out an airlock into the hard vacuum of space, / SOUNDPROOF / 155 probably because obsessive voyeurism is a lot less fun when you can only tell people apart based on the clothes they're wearing. All the ubiquitous surveillance consoles quit working as soon as Eye-Oh was dead. The Liberator wanted me to fix everyone's brain after that, but by then I'd slipped into my civilian clothes and taken a teleport beam back to Earth. Why stay? Superheroing wasn't much different from supervillaining, it turned out, except it was more boring and my co-workers were more self-righteous.

Life is really easy when you're the only person who can identify individuals on sight. Sure, most folks started wearing particular clothes or jewelry or decorations so their loved ones could identify them, but there are lots of deception and falsehood and con games the bad guys play along those lines, too. I never wear the same outfit twice, and I change my hair and go through hats like most people go through toilet paper, so I'm basically invisible. The new children being born don't have the face-blindness flaw -- though I tweak the brains of any kids I encounter, to eventually freak people out into thinking the condition is hereditary, just for kicks -- but it'll be interesting to see how the young ones grow up when their parents can't even recognize them.

Screw physics. I was always more interested in sociology anyway. Social upheaval is all around now, and it's fascinating. Celebrity culture's a thing of the past. Advertising is totally weird now. Mirrors are out of style. One-night stands are on the rise. I might write a book about it all.

The Liberator, of course, was declared an enemy of the world for conspiring to alter the brains of everyone on Earth without consent, and to this day they shoot missiles at him whenever he flies across the sky. He's easy to recognize, because he still wears the same colorful suit whenever he flies. And, you know -- he's the only guy flying. But at least he doesn't have to bother much with disguises anymore.

He can just change out of his costume and walk around at will, taking a long look at the faceless world he made. I ran into him, once, on a crowded winter street, and he still had that same earnest expression, like the world is a problem he's just about figured out how to solve.

I took comfort in the fact that I'm the only one left who could recognize the look. I whispered "I _see_ you" in his ear, and if he'd caught me, it would have been bad -- he could have forced me to undo my work.

But as fast as he is, I was faster. I just slipped off my jacket and took off my hat and disappeared into the crowd.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 350, originally released on June 21, 2012 Download audio Read by A Kovacs Originally appeared in Diet Soap (2007) Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 156

113 Feet By Josh Roseman

"This is a really bad idea, Elle," Barry says.

"You didn't have to come."

"Don't be stupid," he snaps. "Phil would kill me if I didn't come with you."

Barry is fiftyish, portly and gray-haired. Seeing him take off his shirt is an experience I wish I'd never had.

"I have friends with certifications," I say. "It's not like I couldn't have asked one of them."

"How many of them have actually been down there?" It's almost a growl, and I'm actually cowed a little. "That's what I thought."

I sit on the hard bench, wood planks covered in thin, all-weather carpet, and fiddle with my regulator.

"How far away do you think we are?" he asks.

"Don't know. Ask the captain."

Barry looks up at the bridge, where Al -- the captain -- stands, driving the boat. Al is even older than Barry, narrow and hard and tanned almost leathery with decades of exposure to the sun. Instead of going up to talk to him, though, Barry goes around the cabin to stand by the bow, leaving me bouncing up and down on the bench as the boat zips across the water. The light chop makes the horizon rise and fall faster than is comfortable. I can take it, though, and if I get sick enough to throw up, at least I know enough to do it over the side.

My guess is that we're ten minutes from the dive site. Maybe fifteen.

After waiting seven years to get my answers, fifteen minutes isn't much of a wait at all.

#

I was seven when I first realized my dad was doing more than just studying the life cycle of coral reefs. I'd been in the ocean with Grandpa; I knew what they looked like. I knew there were natural ones and artificial ones; I knew that if you touched a reef, part of it could die, and that if you touched fire coral, you'd burn.

The big tank at Dad's office had plenty of coral inside. I separated myself from him -- it was easy; he was so focused on his work that when I said I had to go to the bathroom he didn't even notice -- and went off on my own.

No one watched me climb up on a chair. No one noticed my nose was so close to the water that all I could smell was salt. No one saw me reach in and brush the back of my hand on the bright-orange coral flower. / SOUNDPROOF / 157

The scream made Dad come running. He picked me up as I cried and shouted, carried me to a chair, and told me to hold out my arm. Then he poured clear liquid over my skin: vinegar, like what Mom used to clean the floor. It didn't make the burn stop hurting, but it helped, and after a few minutes I started to calm down.

"What happened?"

When I looked at Dad, it was through a blur of tears. "I reached in the tank," I said. "I touched the coral."

"Oh, come on!" Dad said -- almost yelled. "I've told you before: this isn't a game! It's not a place to play! This is my job, and if you can't behave, you can stay home with your brother next time. You got that?"

I stared at him for a second, then burst into fresh tears. Dad shook his head and crouched in front of me. "I'm sorry, Eleanora. I didn't mean to shout. You just... worried me. And you know you shouldn't have touched something that was going to hurt you, right?"

"I..." A hiccup. "I'm... I'm sorry, Daddy..."

He leaned forward and hugged me, rubbing my back. "Come on. I'll get my things, and we can go home."

"'Kay."

He asked me to sit in his desk chair and wait while he called Mom. He'd left his computer turned on, and I read some of what was on the screen. I didn't understand all the big words, but I was pretty sure it didn't have anything to do with coral reefs.

#

I come out of the cabin after exchanging my t-shirt and shorts for a wetsuit. Barry's on the bench, buckling his vest. Al is by the ladder to the bridge. "How long will we be out here?"

"We brought enough air for two dives," I tell him, checking my watch. "Figure a couple of hours."

"It's more than 100 feet down," Barry says. "Be real, Elle. How long do you think we'll be able to stay?"

I glare at him. "You can stay up here. I'll dive alone if I have to."

He mouths something nasty before going to work on his fins; I sit across from him and do the same. I'm faster than him, though; before he's even finished buckling on his vest I'm already on my feet, hanging onto the railing at the stern. I hold my mask to my face and, as the boat rises on a small wave, I step off and into the water.

#

I was ten the first time I got into Dad's files. He got fired the summer after second grade; we had to move, and I had to change schools. But Dad got a new job, and Mom did too, and we were doing okay. I was aware, I suppose, that our circumstances had changed, that we didn't / SOUNDPROOF / 158 have enough money to live like we used to, but I was a kid. I didn't really care about it the way an adult might.

Jason noticed. He was fifteen, moody and broody. My parents yelled at him a lot, and he yelled back. I tried to stay out of the way.

I also tried to stay out of sight when Mom and Dad went out and Jason had someone over. It wasn't hard; they'd sit in the living room and watch one of my parents' R-rated tapes, and I hid in my bedroom from the explosions and the adult stuff.

Dad usually locked his office door, but he must have forgotten this time. I always tried the door, just in case, just out of curiosity, and when it opened I couldn't help but go inside. Jason and I were never allowed in there when he wasn't around.

I clicked on the lamp and sat in Dad’s big leather chair. The desk was very neat, very organized, and I made sure to put his folders back when I finished reading them. Or, I should say, skimming them: I might have been good in school, but there were some big words -- like "transdimensionality" -- that I didn't understand. I stuck to sentences that said things like "portal", "rift", "coordinates", and so on.

Dad had been doing this research for a long time; there were notes dated before I was born. I remembered times when he'd been away for a week or longer, times he'd come home from those long trips with his arm in a sling, or limping, or bruised. How dangerous was this stuff?

The noises from the living room stopped after an hour, and I quickly cleaned up and ducked out, locking the door behind me and stealing off to my room to try and make sense of what I'd read. From what I could understand, Dad believed there were portals somewhere in the ocean. One was close to where we lived. He used to work for the government. He had a hypothesis -- I knew that word, thanks to Science Fair -- that the portals were "beyond our current level of technology." Dad's notes had wondered who made the portals. And, over and over, he'd written "where do they go?"

That had given me chills, enough that I'd tucked myself into bed and tried not to think about it.

Mom and Dad got home around midnight, and when Mom came to check on me, her touch on my shoulder was so reassuring that I "woke up" so I could get a hug.

Whatever it was Dad thought was at 113 feet, it gave me the creeps.

#

Barry leads the way, one hand around the line, a spiral of blue and white stripes. I follow his bubbles. The water grows cool at 30 feet, then colder at 60 and 90. I wish I'd gone with the dry suit, but they always make me feel clumsy. The wetsuit is thin and black and easy to move in, and I can handle the chill.

It's dimmer when we get to the bottom, the line attached to the wreck by a heavy metal ring. The tips of my fins touch the boat and I float there, taking a moment to turn on my mask- mounted light and another, brighter one in my vest pocket. Barry fiddles with his own light, / SOUNDPROOF / 159 looking at me.

I check my computer, then hold it up. We're only at 93 feet, and I've got plenty of air. Mark always said I seem to come up with more air than I bring down with me, and if I'm going to do this right, I'm going to need to regulate my breathing more strictly than ever.

Barry, on the other hand, has used a surprising amount of his supply. I want to pull out my slate and berate him, but that'll just waste time. Besides, he's already looking around, getting his bearings. He turns back to me and motions that I should follow. He's been down here before; he's the expert.

#

I was twelve when I got my dive license. Dad had been away more and more through third and fourth grade, long weekends and unexplained trips, and I guess when he saw how much I liked snorkeling during a family trip to the Keys, he tried to buy my forgiveness.

It worked, too. When I opened the long white envelope, I nearly hugged him to death.

The classes were held at a dive shop half an hour from home. After dinner, Mom drove me and I did boring school homework in the backseat. Naturally, I already would've finished my dive class homework the day it was assigned. I spent a month learning the rules, the equipment, how to clear my mask, how to put together and break down and clean a dive kit, buddy breathing, sign language, and moving while carrying a third of my weight in equipment.

My first dive wasn't much; we went down about 30 feet, knelt in a circle on the sand, and covered the basics. But it got better, and soon I had my PADI Open Water certification. The real problem was finding someone who would dive with me; I wanted to go every weekend, but Mom worked Saturdays and Dad wasn't home half the time. After months of just showing up and hoping there would be someone who needed a buddy, jumping into the water while Dad sat on the boat, reading or doing research or whatever, I finally found a good partner. Mark was a year older than me, but shy as a first-grader. Most divers weren't as young as us, and that didn't help him either.

Still, even though we didn't talk much about anything except diving, it was nice to have a friend my age on the boat. We dove together dozens of times, and though we didn't go to the same school, in ninth grade I asked him to Homecoming. He blushed and stammered and accepted. Of course, we spent most of the night just sitting at a table and talking about getting my advanced certification so I could join him on deeper dives. It beat the heck out of pretending I could dance.

#

The wreck is nothing like I've ever been in before. The boat looks like it was 300 feet long before it sank. Most of it is down another 60 feet or so, on its side, but there's a good 50 feet standing vertically, the bow just below a sandy shelf.

Barry has his slate out. He's written something. 10 mins left. Hurry up. I nod; he jams the slate back into his pocket and steps over the edge. I follow him down. / SOUNDPROOF / 160

There's a hole at 125 feet; Barry catches the edge of it and shines his light in, then swims through. I'm close behind.

I've never been inside a wreck like this. It's a constant effort to stay vertical without getting confused. Barry's looking back at me, waiting to catch my eye; when he does, he waves his light upward at a doorway. I have to turn my body sideways and roll up through it, but Barry stays outside, shaking his head and pointing to his stomach.

I probably don't have much more time than he does, not at this depth, but I spend a few precious seconds writing him a message. Which way? He points his light toward an even- narrower opening at the far end of the compartment. I clip my big light to my wrist; I'll need both hands to navigate. I take a deep breath, blow it out, and, regulator clenched tight in my teeth, I make for the doorway.

#

I was a week away from my fifteenth birthday when I ran into Dad on a dive boat. Mark had driven me to the dock -- he was going to do a wreck dive, then I would do a deep reef, then we'd all do a shallow reef. When we left my house, I'd noticed Dad's car already gone, but that was nothing new, and anyway, I didn't care. One more week and I could dive wrecks with Mark -- who I'd come to realize was actually pretty attractive. Those two things crowded Dad out of my mind.

Three years of lugging a dive kit had made me stronger than most girls my age; I rarely had to put my stuff down between the car and the boat. But everyone within fifty feet heard my scuffed red tanks clang on the pavement.

"Dad?"

My father was on the boat, talking animatedly to a short, fat man about his own age. But when he looked my way, he merely gave me a half-wave, suddenly all serious, before going back to his conversation.

He was wearing a wetsuit.

"Your dad dives?"

I dropped my bag and went after my tanks. "He never told me."

Mark shrugged and followed me onto the dock; we handed our equipment over the side and, as another diver stowed it, we crossed the threshold. I dropped one of my tanks into the storage area in the middle of the deck, then bungeed the other along the side. My bag went under the bench for now; I'd put my equipment together once we were out on the water.

Mark had gone up to the dive shop, probably to go to the bathroom -- he had a thing about going in the ocean -- and I went up to the bow.

"Dad, what are you doing here?"

"Diving," he said, his voice flat. "This is Barry Katz," he added. "Barry and I have been working together since... well, for a long time." / SOUNDPROOF / 161

I remembered Barry's name from Dad's ever-more-detailed notes -- Mom had a spare key to his office, and it'd been easy to borrow it and make a copy. I held out my hand and he shook it. "Hello, Barry."

"Hello." His voice was mild, not as deep as Dad's.

There was a heavy silence. Dad turned to me. "We have some things to discuss."

"You bet we do," I said. "When did you--"

He cut me off. "I meant with Barry. I'll talk to you later, if you want."

I didn't stomp off in a huff. I definitely wanted to, but stomping was immature, and Mark would be on his way back to the boat soon. I didn't want him to see that.

Twenty minutes later, we left the dock. Mark and I stood on the port side, watching the other boats as we passed them. Eventually we made it out to the open water; the boat sped up, bouncing only slightly on the clear, smooth ocean. I separated from Mark and tried to eavesdrop on Dad, but every time I got close, he frowned at me and moved away. I could tell he was trying to hide his excitement, but he only let his guard down with Barry, and that more than anything else pissed me off.

I did manage to grab his arm just before he began his dive. "Later, Eleanora," he said, smiling, and then was in and under and gone.

Mark gave me an apologetic look as he joined up with a couple of guys and followed Dad and Barry into the water.

I'd never been on a three-dive trip, and was unprepared for the sheer boredom of waiting for the advanced divers to get back. I put together my dive kit. Tested my air. Pored over my log book. Did calculations in my head to figure out when the others would get back. I even talked to one of the other divers still aboard until I realized all he was interested in was staring at my chest.

Clouds started gathering about ten minutes before the first of the advanced divers was set to surface. I climbed up to the bridge.

"What's going on, Elle?"

Steve owned the boat; he and I didn't talk much anymore now that Mark was around, but I'd been diving from this boat for years, and we were friendly enough. "This weather," I said. "Did they get the forecast wrong?"

"Not that I know of." Steve flipped on the little radio mounted behind the throttle levers. Nothing on the news station about severe storms. Still, the wind was whipping up and the boat was starting to rock, not so much that we were in any danger but it was a little worrying nonetheless.

I checked my watch again. Eight minutes left in the advanced dive.

Lightning flashed out of a sky that was suddenly dark; it hit close enough to the boat that I / SOUNDPROOF / 162 heard the snap of electricity.

"Shit!" Steve shouted, the word half-covered by a blast of thunder. "Get down!" he ordered. "Help anyone who comes up. They'll need it."

The boat was rocking more as I dropped down to the main deck, and I almost rolled my ankle trying to keep my feet. But I held onto the tanks, secured in place, until I was at the stern. I grabbed a rope out of one of the buckets on the deck, tied it to the railing, then tied it around my waist. I didn't plan to fall in, but better safe.

Rain began to fall, lightly at first but soon enough pouring onto the boat, the decking slippery under my sandals, clothes plastered to my body, hair in my eyes.

The next flash cut through the storm. I saw two heads bobbing in the choppy water, two hands waving.

It wasn't the okay sign.

It was the trouble sign.

One of the other junior divers, Shawn, joined me at the other ladder, mask around his neck, rope around his arm. "What the hell is going on?"

"No idea!" I pointed out over the water, yelling over the roaring of the storm. "Do we go help them?"

"I'll go! You stay here, hang onto the rope!" Shawn pulled up his mask and dove in, snorkel barely visible after only a few seconds. I braced my feet and fed rough plastic rope out through my hands. More heads broke the surface; I called Shawn's name, but he couldn't hear me.

A few seconds later Shawn waved to me; I began hauling in the rope, helping the divers make their way back to the boat. "What's going on?" I asked, still yelling, but a snap of lightning and another rolling boom smashed down the words. I shook my head to clear it and reached out, grabbing the first diver by the wrist and pulling him onto the rocking, bouncing deck. "Are you okay?"

He spat out his regulator. "I'm fine! But someone's missing!"

I nearly dropped the next diver, but recovered and pulled him onto the deck. "Who's missing?" I asked him, gasping.

The boat bounced up, then slapped down; I looked out, saw Shawn swimming toward a trio -- thank God, Mark was okay, I could breathe again. "Who's missing?" I shouted.

The diver wasn't listening. He and his partner were crawling along the deck, trying to get to a bench.

Mark and his partners were close enough now that I could help them aboard. More divers were with me now, working together to get everyone onto the boat.

Mark flopped onto the deck. I pushed him past, but not before I heard him try to tell me / SOUNDPROOF / 163 something.

"What?"

He yanked his mask down and heaved up onto a bench; one of the divers lunged across and bungeed Mark's tank in place. "Your dad!" Mark shouted over the wind. "That Barry guy, he can't find your dad!"

I dropped to my knees, nauseous. Barry was at the end of the ladder, and he was alone.

"Where's my dad?" I screamed in his face. "Where's my dad!"

Barry clung to the ladder; it rose in the water, smacking him in the face, knocking out his regulator. Two of us grabbed his arms and hauled; Barry's bulk splatted to the deck between us. "Where's my dad? Where's Phil Raymond?"

Barry couldn't catch his breath, but he could point, eyes wide behind the thick glass of his mask.

He was pointing at the water.

#

The doorway is too narrow even for me, and I only weigh 125 pounds. I try a few angles, but time and air is bubbling away, and I have to make a decision.

I unbuckle my vest, fully aware that it's a stupid thing to do, but I get through the opening, pulling the gear in behind me. I hold up the big light in my hand and look around: down, left, right, straight ahead, but I see nothing.

Then I look up.

At first I think it's just an air pocket. I've seen them on wreck dives: air collects in hollows and sealed places. But I notice after a few seconds that my air bubbles aren't collecting.

They're disappearing.

I check my gauge. 116 feet.

All of Dad's notes say that, whatever these portals are, they're all at exactly 113 feet. Three feet above me.

I take a deep breath, then give a gentle kick and float toward the silver surface. But a loud clanging makes me snap my head around.

Barry's banging his knife on his tank. He has his hand around his neck.

He's running out of air.

I check my computer, cursing. I could probably stay another five or six minutes before I'm in trouble, but Barry is already there. / SOUNDPROOF / 164

I have no choice. I pull back and make my way through the narrow doorway, spitting out my regulator so I can swim into my vest. I shove the regulator back into my mouth and purge it, teeth digging into the rubber grips, glaring at Barry as I move past him.

I feel him behind me as we head to the line. The current is picking up, and I snag Barry as he's nearly pulled away. I clip both of us together, then to the line; we empty our vests and begin swimming upward.

The trip takes longer in this direction; we have to stop twice to decompress. The line is jolting around during the second stop, and Barry's dark eyes are ringed with white. I pull out my slate. Whats wrong?

He takes it out of my hand, holding the pencil the way a two-year-old might hold a crayon. Storm. Like B4.

I've dived in bad weather before -- rain and wind just means a little adventure getting back on the boat. But I look up and realize with a jolt that the sun isn't out anymore.

I take the pencil. Let go b4 surface. Come up away from boat.

Current?

I can handle it.

My computer ticks down the seconds, then beeps when it's safe to continue. I unhook from the line and begin kicking, the muscles in my legs fighting the weight of my equipment. I glance back; Barry is behind me, but his kicks aren't going to be strong enough. I grab him by the tank valve and estimate the distance to the surface.

Ten feet.

I mumble another curse around my regulator and inflate my vest halfway, feeling it pull us upward. I know it's a risk, but I can't carry both of us.

We break the surface and inflate the rest of the way. A wave slaps me in the face, separating me from Barry; I turn and kick back toward him, legs burning. I get a hold of his vest, pull him close, and shout "swim!" around my regulator.

The next wave knocks his mask askew and, with a hand I can see shaking even as we're tossed around, he pushes it back in place.

It takes everything I have left to make it to the boat. Al's thrown out a life preserver; I make sure Barry's holding it before grabbing the ladder and dragging myself up onto the deck.

Al helps me up onto a bench, stringy muscular arms keeping me from crashing across the deck and into the cabin wall. I get myself bungeed and undo my fins, shoving them into an empty tank holder before unbuckling the vest and lurching to my feet. Together we pull Barry up onto the deck; he coughs and sputters and spits out his regulator, but he's able to let us help him to a bench. We get him secured and he yanks his mask down.

"It's happening again! Just like last time!" / SOUNDPROOF / 165

"What happened last time?" Al says, his voice sharp through the wind.

"Seven years ago," Barry says, a little stronger, "we were here! Her dad... we were on that wreck... we found... and her dad..."

"Shut up, Barry!" I yell. "He's not dead!"

"Goddammit, Eleanora!" He's hanging onto bungees on either side and I'm clutching the bridge ladder, but Al somehow is still on his feet, eyes narrowed. "Phil's dead! Phil's dead and this is insane! What the hell are you trying to prove?"

"He's not dead!" It's a scream to the sky, to the storm, to the rain and wind and lightning and thunder. They rip the words away but I just keep screaming it. "He's not dead! He's not dead!"

#

I was almost sixteen when they told me Dad was dead. Steve got us away from the storm, and the Coast Guard came, but I only remembered it in flashes. Mom met me at the dock, eyes red and puffy, and I threw myself into her arms, crying along with her. "They'll find him," I forced out between sobs. "They'll find him."

Mark drove us home. Mom and I huddled on the couch, watching the phone, waiting.

The call never came.

Mom and I kept checking with the Coast Guard, but they kept saying they hadn't found him. Mark stopped returning my calls; he'd had enough of me begging him to dive that wreck with me. But I never gave up, not even when a Coast Guard lieutenant came to our house, sat down in our living room, and told Mom and Jason and me that they'd officially declared my father dead.

Mom lost it, but I didn't react.

My father wasn't dead. Until I had proof, he wasn't dead.

#

Rain pours down. I loop my arm through a bungee and start changing my vest to my second tank.

"What the hell are you doing?" Al glares at me, holding the cabin doorway.

"I'm going back down there!" I get the vest off the first tank, then scoot down to the second. It nearly crashes to the deck when I unhook it, but I yank the vest onto it and bungee it back in place.

"No way!" Barry yells. "No way am I going down there again!" He points to Al. "Get us out of here!"

"No!" It's a scream, enough to make Al stop, halfway up the ladder. "I paid you," I snarl. "I paid you, and this is my boat for the day. We're not leaving!" / SOUNDPROOF / 166

"She's crazy!" The boat rocks, slams Barry against his empty tank, and he clutches his shoulder. It's a mistake; the boat skews back in the other direction and pitches him to the deck. "Elle, this is nuts!"

"He's not dead!" I screw my regulator onto the tank. "One hour! Then we're going again!"

Barry shakes his head, face white with pain, barely holding onto the railing in the middle of the deck. "I can't do it again, Elle," he says. I barely hear him over the storm. "I can't do it."

"Then I'll go alone."

#

I was seventeen when I stole Grandpa's boat and took it out to the wreck where I'd last seen my father. The radio squawked at me the whole way: Grandpa yelling at me to come back, to bring the boat back so we could talk about this.

I stayed there for hours, snorkeling along the smooth surface of the water, staring into the depths, trying to make out the wreck that I knew was down there. Dad's notes, his log book, everything in his computer said there was something down there. Barry Katz wouldn't talk about it no matter how hard I pushed him.

I would've gone down to the wreck, but there'd been no way for me to sneak my dive stuff onto the boat. I tried, though, swimming as far down as I could, until my lungs burned and my eyes were blurry with tears and fatigue.

There was no way I could get there. Not without air. Not without equipment.

Grandpa's voice on the radio kept yelling at me as I leaned over the side, the sun low on the horizon. "I love you, Dad," I whispered. "I'm not giving up."

That night I came up with a plan.

#

Barry is greenish-pale after twenty minutes in the wildly-rocking boat. Al's on the upper deck, strapped in, waiting. I manage to get to my cooler, stowed in the cabin, and down a bottle of water and a bag of mini-muffins.

Instantly I realize my mistake. Fortunately there's Dramamine in the cooler, as well as ginger ale. I dry-swallow the pills and bring the soda out to the deck, looping my arm through the ladder to stay upright. Barry's still on the bench, good arm threaded through a bungee. He hasn't moved since Al and I put him back up there. The sound of the storm is just background noise now, and though Barry keeps getting bumped against the empty tank holders, his voice is calm through the cacophony.

"I hate this."

I drink more of my soda, then lunge to where he's sitting and press the can into his hand.

He shakes his head. "I'm gonna lose it," he says. / SOUNDPROOF / 167

"If you barf, you barf."

"Not that." He looks down.

I nod. "Want some privacy?"

He doesn't answer, just turns away. I get back to the ladder, then move to the side of the boat, facing the bow, letting Barry pee himself in relative peace. At least the rain -- still coming down in sheets -- will wash it away.

My watch eventually beeps. Only ten minutes until I can go back. The adrenaline suddenly gives out; I lean over the side and throw up. The current carries it away and waves wash the side of the boat, as if it never happened.

I stare at the sky, breathing slow and deep. "I'm not leaving," I say quietly, ignoring the salt spray that makes my eyes burn and itch. "I'm going back, and I'm going to find my father.

I stay starboard until my watch beeps again, then work my way to the rear deck and struggle into my gear.

"I'm not going," Barry says. "I can't go back again."

I shrug as best I can with the vest tightened across my shoulders. "Then I'm going alone." I stare across the middle of the deck at Barry. "If..." I swallow hard. "If something happens..."

Barry sees that I can't finish. "You're crazy, Elle," he says. "Please don't do this."

I reach back and undo the bungee. The boat rocks; I plant my fins and slide to the end of the bench. "I have to, Barry. I have to know."

I look up to the bridge, see Al leaning over the railing. "Don't do it, girl," he calls.

I shake my head, then pull my regulator into my mouth. Normally I'd take a giant stride into the water, but in this weather, I just hold my mask and regulator to my face, twist around, and fall backward with a splash that I'm sure neither Al nor Barry can hear over the storm.

Ten feet down the line, the silence is louder than the noise on the surface. I block it out and, hand over hand, pull myself toward the ocean floor.

#

I was eighteen when I gave up on my plans to become a marine biologist -- like Dad. For two years I was a lackluster community college student, but I didn't care. I worked in a dive shop and as a lifeguard, saving money. I'd need the best equipment -- and I'd have to buy it myself -- and I'd also need to charter a boat.

Right after I turned twenty, I ran into Mark at the dive shop and convinced him to have dinner with me. But when I told him what I was planning, he shut down.

"I don't dive anymore," he said. / SOUNDPROOF / 168

"You're crazy," I told him. "You love diving."

"I loved it." Past tense.

"It was a one-in-a-million accident!" I snapped. "Come on, Mark. We used to... I mean..."

He shook his head. "I just... I can't. I'm sorry, Elle."

I slept with him that night, hoping it would change his mind, but even after that he still said no.

I left the next morning and didn't look back. Soon after, I got my two-year degree, then gave up on school and threw myself into my work and my plan. Mom and Jason confronted me, said I was obsessed, and I moved out. I spent more hours at the dive shop and on the beach. I even started teaching swim classes. Guys hit on me and I turned them down. Girls tried to befriend me but I played the bitch card. Parents hired me to babysit or give private lessons, and I did it for the money, but I detached myself from the people.

I had one purpose: find out what happened to my dad. Nothing was going to get in my way.

#

I stop at the end of the line and check my computer, noting the maximum safe depth and time -- depressingly short on the latter, depressingly shallow on the former -- and set my watch. I won't give up until I know the truth, but I don't want to die down here either.

I drop over the side of the wreck and swim into the dark opening. This time, without Barry to slow me down, I'm out of my vest and inches from 113 feet in no time.

I pull out my knife. The tip grazes the silvery surface.

A blinding flash knocks me back. My regulator falls out of my mouth and I grope for it blindly, holding my breath, my eyes a wall of blue afterimages. I finally shove it in my mouth and blow, purging the seawater. My second exhalation clears it completely and I dig my teeth into the grips. My jaw is tired, lips stretched and sore, but I'm not stopping.

I take a minute to think -- and to let my heart rate slow to normal -- then lock the knife back in its holster. No metal: seems simple enough.

I pull open the Velcro that holds my left glove closed and tug it off. My skin is very white in the glow from the lamp. I reach for the silvery surface and, in a quick motion, push through.

There's air on the other side. Cold, dry air. My hand starts to shake and I pull it back.

My skin looks okay. I check the sleeve of my wetsuit: no damage there. Whatever it is, it's safe to pass through.

I close my eyes tightly, looking away as I do, and extend my entire arm through the portal.

Nothing happens. Nothing bad, anyway.

I open my eyes, then check my air and my watch. Seven minutes to the point of no return, / SOUNDPROOF / 169 until I have no choice but to ascend.

But I have no choice in what I'm about to do now, either.

As quickly as I can, I strip off my dive equipment. I stick my watch into a vest pocket, hook my fins to the shoulder straps, then unzip my boots and tuck them into the fins’ foot holes.

Zippers. I consider for a couple of seconds, then open my wetsuit. I have to release the regulator to wiggle completely out of it. If the air I touched is any indication, I'm going to freeze my ass off on the other side -- my one-piece isn't made for warmth -- but I don't care. Besides, the coldness of the water is already numbing my fingers. It can't get much worse.

One more look at the computer. Five minutes. 113 feet. I'll never get all this stuff back on in time; I'll be lucky to get into my fins and drag my air supply back to the line. There's coral everywhere and I know it'll to rip me to pieces when I get out of here.

But I'll live.

A final check: no metal anywhere. I point myself toward the silver surface of the portal and pull my mask off, pushing it into a pocket in my vest. Seawater and particles tear at my eyes.

I take five deep breaths and, on the last one, release the regulator and kick forward, through the portal, and toward my father.

#

I was twenty-two when I found my father. He was declared dead by the Coast Guard when I was fifteen, but I never believed it. They never found a body. I spent seven years trying to get back to where he was lost, seven years trying to find him.

And fewer than seven minutes on the other side.

I found out what happened at 113 feet the moment I swam through that silver surface and landed hard on a metal platform, shivering in icy, dry air.

"Doctor Raymond! Doctor Raymond, you'd better get out here!"

I blinked hard and tried to stand, but I was so cold that I couldn't do more than wrap my arms around my chest.

I heard clanging, felt the metal vibrate, and then the lights above me were blocked off. Someone draped a light sheet of cloth over my body and I was instantly so warm that I almost passed out. Someone else pulled me to my feet.

"Doc..." I cleared my throat and spat out a gob of saltwater-tinged phlegm. "Doctor... Raymond?" I blinked a couple more times, but I wasn't hallucinating.

"Hello, Eleanora."

"Dad?" He wasn't dead. I was staring right at him. "Dad!"

I was on him in an instant, arms around him, and he was hugging me back. But tentatively, / SOUNDPROOF / 170 almost as if he was afraid of me. "I missed you, Eleanora."

I looked up at him. He seemed older than he should have been, as if more than seven years had passed. "What happened, Dad?"

Instead of answering, he looked over my head. "How long?" he called.

The answer came through a P.A. System. "Four minutes, Doctor."

Dad nodded, then guided me to a bench. "Here. Sit."

I did as he said, wrapping the sheet around my body. My ears and toes were freezing, but I didn't care. He was alive. My father was alive.

"I only have a little time to explain," he said, his arm around me.

"Explain what? Aren't you coming back?"

He laughed. Not angry, not exasperated, just amused. "I've been here almost forty years. Why leave now? Besides, how would I come back?" He raised an eyebrow. "Do you have enough air in your tank to get me to the surface? I haven't been diving in..." His voice faltered, and he smiled. "Well, it's been a while."

"Don't they have tanks here?" I looked around, but didn't recognize anything except the silver oval of the portal. "Where the hell are we, Dad?"

"Actually, Elle, the right question is 'when are we'."

"Damn it, Dad, stop wasting time!" I pushed his arm off and glared at him. "If I only have a few minutes, then tell me what happened!" My throat went tight, but I wouldn't cry. There wasn't time to cry. "Dad, please!"

He sighed. "The short version is this: about 150 years in your future, scientists discovered a way to go back in time. The system is overpowered in case something goes wrong, and that energy has to go somewhere."

"The storms."

"Yes. The storms. At least, over the ocean, fewer people are at risk." A young woman in a blue jumpsuit gave Dad a handheld computer. He scanned it, nodded, and handed it back. "Time’s running out. Come on." We went back to the portal, standing in front of it. "It takes about an hour for the storms to clear when someone goes through. They tried it closer to sea level, but the storms were so strong that the man they sent through was ripped apart."

"But how come they started when I got close? I didn't touch the... portal?" He nodded, and I continued. "I didn't come through."

Dad gave me a look I remembered perfectly, a look that said I should've figured it out for myself. "How do you think we knew you were coming?"

I had no response to that, and even if I had, Dad was already watching a technician aim / SOUNDPROOF / 171 something at the portal. "Anyone there?"

"No, Doctor." Like everyone else except Dad, the technician was wearing a blue jumpsuit. Dad looked normal: slacks and a burgundy sweater. "Mr. Katz will arrive in 81 seconds."

Dad nodded. "Come on, Eleanora. It's almost time."

I slung the cloth to the floor. Somehow I was dry, and though it was still chilly in the lab or hangar or whatever this place was, I could handle it for another minute. Besides, I didn't care. I had to ask before it was too late.

"Why didn't you come back, Dad?"

He didn't answer; he just pulled me into a hug.

"Sixty seconds." It was the person on the P.A.

"Dad, please! Why didn't you come back?"

He was smiling again. I wanted to wipe it off his face, but I couldn't. Not when I saw tears in his eyes. "I'm a scientist, Elle. How could I turn down an opportunity like this?"

My fists balled and I wrenched away. I wanted to hit him. Hard. "How dare you! How dare you leave us for that?"

"Forty-five seconds."

"How could I not? It was the chance of a lifetime! The chance to study history by actually being there. Things you only know in books... I've seen them!" His bright blue eyes were wide.

"Then let me stay with you," I pleaded. "I've got nothing back home! Please, Dad, let me stay!"

But he shook his head. "I can't, Elle. Things have changed these past few years. We have to be careful, or..." He cleared his throat. "I'm breaking all kinds of rules by even talking to you, and when you get there, you can't tell anyone."

"Twenty seconds."

I stared at him. "You've got to be kidding. I'm not keeping this a secret."

"Fifteen seconds." Red lights began to glow around the portal.

"Come on, Elle." He reached out as if to hug me again, but I moved closer to the portal. "Promise me!"

"Ten seconds."

I shook my head. The technicians were already well back. Dad took a couple of steps away, his eyes sad. I could barely bear to look at him. / SOUNDPROOF / 172

"Five seconds."

"Good-bye Eleanora. I love you."

"Fuck you, Dad."

A sharp beep. I took a deep breath and jumped through the portal.

#

I'm warm.

I'm warm, and I'm on my back.

I'm warm, and I'm on my back, and I'm laying on something hard.

I open my eyes, blinking against the harsh brightness of the sun.

"You made it."

Barry's voice.

I wheeze, then start coughing. He cradles my head in his arm, brings a bottle of water to my lips. I sip some of it. "Barry?"

My vision starts to clear. His hair is as wild as mine is after a dive. He smiles. "Glad you're back."

"Wh..."

"Couple of minutes after you left, Al helped me get my stuff on. I followed you."

"Why?"

The smile goes away. "I couldn't leave you alone down there. Not after... not after Phil..."

I feel my eyes well up with tears, but I fight them down. I have to know. "How long until the storm ended?"

"About an hour after I got to you. Why?"

"No reason."

#

A category-one hurricane blew through two weeks later. I spent the day at Mom's. When I got back to my apartment that night, I found an envelope on my pillow. My name was on it. The handwriting was my father's.

I threw it away unopened.

# / SOUNDPROOF / 173

Mark's living in Virginia now. It takes me almost a whole day to drive to his house.

"Hi, Elle."

I slide past him, into the living room, and drop onto the couch. He sits in a chair beside me.

"I'm not diving. Ever again."

He leans forward, touches my knee. I cover his hand with mine. I know my face is blank.

"I found him."

Mark blinks. "You..."

I nod. "I found my father." A pause. "He's not dead."

"Wh... what?"

I meet Mark's eyes. "He left me. Me, and Jason, and Mom. I'm done with him."

"But where is he?"

I shake my head. "It doesn't matter. And I don't care."

Mark pushes me for more, but I don't tell him. To the rest of the world, my father's been dead for seven years.

Time for me to join the rest of the world.

<<<>>>

Escape Pod 351, originally released on June 28, 2012 Download audio Read by Mur Lafferty An Escape Pod Original! Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the author / SOUNDPROOF / 174

Book Review: Hunter and Fox by Philippa Ballantine

Some months ago, I spoke rather eloquently* on Geist and Spectyr, the first two Books of the Order by Philippa Ballantine. One of the things I praised was Ballantine's ability to give the reader just enough information without making a fantasy novel into a doorstop.

Her latest tale, Hunter and Fox -- the first of the Shifted World series -- is similar in nature, in that a huge world is revealed in small chunks without turning the novel into a gigantic tome. Clocking in at 280 pages (according to my e-reader), it's definitely not an intimidating read.

But I can't say I put the book down feeling really satisfied, either.

Unlike the Order books, Hunter and Fox follows several characters and character groups (as opposed to three main characters) through the world of Conhaero. The main character (the Hunter) is Talyn the Dark, one of a race of persecuted beings called the Vaerli. The current ruler of Conhaero, the Caisah, took away most of the powers of the Vaerli, although some have retained a few abilities. Talyn has been retained by the Caisah -- who she hates, since he did after all bring her entire race low -- as a sort of bounty hunter, although instead of bounties, each successful mission gives her a piece of the Golden Puzzle, which Talyn would like to see completed. Talyn is a powerful, dangerous warrior who rides a water-going creature called a nykur whose mane is made of razor-sharp hair. (I'm guessing the picture on the cover is supposed to be a nykur, but that's not the image I got in my head while reading.)

The second main character is Finnbarr the Fox (also called Finn), a tale-spinner. This character class is used mostly to drop information on the reader, especially in the beginning, especially about exactly how the Vaerli came to be. His initial goal is to tell the true story of / SOUNDPROOF / 175 the Vaerli to the Caisah's inner circle, which of course brings him to the attention of Talyn. But, as we find out later, there's more history between the two of them than even Talyn knows.

In addition to Finn and Talyn, we also meet Talyn's brother Byre, a persecuted Vaerli just trying to make his way through the world. He is used to address the more active methods the Vaerli are wronged. Then there's Varlesh, Equo, and Si, friends of Finn's who have a secret of their own. And Pelanor the blood-witch whose first task is to take down Talyn. And Nyree. And several other characters and races, including the Kindred -- the ones who gave the Vaerli their power. And the Shifted World itself, Conhaero, which seems out to get the other characters from time to time.

The writing style of Ballantine's Order novels is clearly replicated here -- there aren't very many overlong paragraphs full of annoying exposition or declamatory dialogue. My electronic version had very small type, which made me thankful Ballantine's style doesn't include gigantic chunks o' text. There's less of the "participial phrase comma simple sentence" that I complained about in earlier reviews, which was nice. Her dialogue remains up to the task as well.

However, the task in this novel is much greater than the task in the Order books. The world revealed through Hunter and Fox is not only massive but also complex; there are more races, more political issues, and more plans-within-plans. I'm not saying I don't enjoy a good piece of political intrigue, but I honestly found my mind wandering sometimes while I was trying to read the novel. I'm not sure why that is -- maybe it's because this is more standard fantasy than urban or contemporary; maybe it's because there were so many characters; maybe it's because I recognized some of the tropes and decided "well, I just don't care about these characters at the moment, but I still have to read the words".

One thing that did bother me about the book is that it ends on a cliffhanger. Not a literal one, per se -- the characters don't actually dangle from a ledge or anything -- but the book doesn't seem to end so much as stop. More than one of the Amazon reviewers specifically call that out, but I wasn't expecting it to be quite as jarring as it was. I was left feeling unsatisfied when the book ended -- I guess I just don't agree with the place the author chose to stop.

Fans of huge, sweeping fantasy epics who don't want to slog through a thousand-page tome that weighs more than an extra-large sack of dog food will probably enjoy this novel, as will fans of Ballantine's other works and readers who like epic fantasy -- although they might be put off by the fact that Ballantine can write a good fantasy novel in 30 percent of the words that it takes someone like George R.R. Martin or Robert Jordan. However, I'm not sure if this was the right book for me. Lately I've been in the mood for more contemporary works, and works that are more humorous than serious, and maybe that's why I found it so difficult to finish the novel in the first place.

Plus, I guess I was expecting something a little narrower in scope, such as the Order books, and this book is the exact opposite of narrow scope. And then there's the ending, as I mentioned.

Still, I'm interested in finding out what happens next -- especially given the novel's stopping point -- and the only way to do that is to wait for the follow-up. At least Ballantine puts out books at reasonable intervals, unlike some other authors we might name. And, hey, while / SOUNDPROOF / 176 we're waiting for the next Shifted World novel, I'm thinking there's a Book of the Order in the offing, and I'm really looking forward to that.

#

Thanks to the novel's publisher -- Pyr Books, the sci-fi/fantasy imprint of Prometheus Books -- for providing a review copy.

#

* For certain values of eloquent.

<<<>>>

Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as on the Dunesteef and the Drabblecast. He also has a decade of news and feature writing experience. Visit his website at roseplusman.com, or find him on twitter @listener42. / SOUNDPROOF / 177

Film Review: “Highlander: Endgame”

The following review contains spoilers for the first three Highlander films and the television series.

#

What do you do after your 1986 movie achieves cult status? Well, if you're lucky, you get to make a sequel. When that sequel bombs, you get to make another sequel. If the third film bombs, maybe you'll be lucky enough to get your intellectual property turned into a TV series that gets passable ratings and hangs around for six years -- long enough to justify a fourth film in the series.

In other words... someone made Highlander: Endgame, the fourth movie in the series. And I watched it. More than once.

Although set in 2002*, four years after the end of Highlander: The Series, the film actually begins in 1992, when Connor MacLeod arrives at his New York shop/apartment just in time to see it blown up, taking the life of Rachel Ellenstein, the young girl he adopted during (I believe) World War II. Devastated that he's lost everyone he loves, Connor joins up with the Watchers, a group dedicated to chronicling the lives of the immortals, and agrees to go into the Sanctuary. There, the Watchers keep several immortals out of The Game (the worldwide headhunting competition with a nebulous "prize" to go to the last survivor) so that no one can be the last.

Now, in 2002, Duncan MacLeod (Connor's cousin and friend) is still secluded, meditating, trying to find himself after (in the series) killing his protege Richie and getting the It's a / SOUNDPROOF / 178

Wonderful Life treatment from Roger Daltrey**. He has a prophetic dream and visits his friend Methos, the oldest Immortal on the planet, before heading to New York to see if he can figure out what happened to Connor ten years ago. Way to wait around, my friend.

Meanwhile, the villain of the piece, Jacob Kell, goes to the Sanctuary and kills all the immortals there with the exception of Connor -- I'm still not sure how he escaped, or who let him free. Kell is powerful and ruthless, and he hates Connor for killing his mentor, while Connor hates him for killing his mother. Kell and his guys go to New York and face off against Duncan, but the only death is from Kell, who kills one of his henchmen. Shortly after, Duncan is sent to the Sanctuary, only to be rescued by Methos and his (Duncan's) Watcher, Joe Dawson. They explain that Kell has killed 661 Immortals, more than Duncan and Connor combined.

Eventually it's revealed that Connor is still alive. We see several adventures of Connor and Duncan in the past, including when Connor taught Duncan the "unbeatable move" -- one would think he'd have used that at some point in the last three films. But anyway. Things come to a head between the MacLeods and Kell, and as we know, there can be only one.

In addition to a spectacularly-ancient-looking Christopher Lambert as the supposedly- immortal Connor MacLeod, Shelia Gish and Beatie Edney reprise their roles (however brief) as Rachel and Heather (the latter being Connor's first wife, from the 1500s). However, top billing goes to Adrian Paul, star of the Highlander television series, now sporting short hair. Paul is as good in the film as he is in the series -- a sort of cardboard boy-scout good-guy character with very little darkness in him despite everything he's done. Kell is portrayed by Bruce Payne (great name there) and unlike the villains of the previous two films he's not a cutout. He actually has a good reason for hating Connor. He's also kind of nuts.

There's quite a supporting cast in this film, which is topped by Lisa Barbuscia, a model and musician. She plays Kate, who, in the 1700s, was Duncan's wife. However, she was also a pre-Immortal. Now, in 2000, she is fashion designer Faith and she is wicked pissed at Duncan for making her Immortal and depriving her of children. Good motivation. Donnie Yen is the most honorable of Kell's henchmen, Jin Ke. Peter Wingfield and Jim Byrnes reprise their roles from the series as Methos and Joe Dawson, and there's a special appearance by Adam Copeland, better known as the WWE's "Edge". Interestingly, "Edge" got a "special guest star" mention in the credits, because as we all know that sort of thing will bring in all the wrestling fans.

For what it's worth, he didn't suck in his brief role, although one wonders why a Canadian- speaking rogue was hanging out in Kildare, Ireland.

Oh, and one other weird piece of casting -- June Watson, who played Connor's mother, looked an awful lot like Stanley Tucci's weird cohost in The Hunger Games. It was distracting.

If you take Highlander: Endgame as a straightforward action film and don't care about the plot, I think you'll be satisfied. Unlike Lambert, Paul is actually capable of moving in the way martial artists have to (he's a dancer), and he also spent six years doing martial arts and swordplay on the TV show. Plus, Donnie Yen choreographed the martial arts for the film. The fights in this movie are faster and crisper, and the cinematography is better; in this alone the film is elevated above the previous three. However, Connor still gets his moment as awesome / SOUNDPROOF / 179 swordsman dude by teaching Duncan the unblockable attack I mentioned earlier. Now, I'm not a swordsman by any stretch of the imagination, but I can think of at least three ways to get out of the move, not the least of which is to duck, you idiots!

But I digress.

One thing I did like about the fighting was the contrast between Connor's and Duncan's styles -- Connor, while a good swordsman, is definitely a dirtier fighter; Duncan prefers to keep it clean. We do get the fight between the two of them that people have been waiting for since the pilot of the TV show, though.

The writing was about as good as an episode of the television show -- Connor got the good quips; Duncan didn't. Duncan never really struck me as a quippy kind of guy anyway. In what was supposed to make the viewer go "ah-ha-HA, indeed!", Kell had 661 kills at the start of the film. Which meant he almost had 666. Given that he was trained as a seminarian, it's supposed to be ironic. But it wasn't.

Because this was a Highlander movie, we had to have at least one sex scene with nudity. This time, it was awarded to Paul and Barbuscia. I'm not quite sure of Faith's motivation to sleep with him after she lays into him with a wicked tongue-lashing***.

Set design and music were again about average, although I really got tired of the Scotland Enya-style music -- it always makes me think of this song from the Toys soundtrack. The original ending had a really bad composite shot of one of the heroes standing at a grave before walking off into what was supposed to be the moors of Scotland, and I wasn't thrilled to be leaving the movie with that shot -- which is why I'm glad there was a director's cut released with a slightly better ending.

Highlander: Endgame was in development hell for a while, and it shows. It went through several cuts and rewrites, leading to a subpar finished product in pretty much everything except the fight scenes that featured Duncan, and the conclusion of the Connor/Duncan battle. Christopher Lambert was getting too old for the role, and anyway he'd passed the torch in the TV series. This was not a good movie, and if you're not a Highlander fan, you probably won't like it. Even if you are, make sure you see the director's cut so you can get the better ending and a few more scenes that make the plot work better.

I remember being pretty disappointed in the movie when I finally saw it (on DVD). It felt more like a two-parter from the series, and really, that's what it should have been. It completely ignores the second and third films**** in favor of the TV show's mythos -- which is good, but not if you've never seen the show. It's written without explanation of the Watchers or how Joe and Methos are Duncan's friends, and there's no time in the film to give anyone a really decent character arc except Kate/Faith. At least we could all take heart that this would be the last of the...

Oh, wait? It... it wasn't?

Looks like it's time to dig up my digital copy of Highlander: The Source, then.

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Note to Parents: As with the other Highlander films, this movie contains violence (including / SOUNDPROOF / 180 decapitations), nudity, adult language, and adult situations. At least in this one the sex scenes actually flow with what little plot there is, whereas in the last one it was just indulgence on the part of the director and star. I think this could be handled by most older teens, as long as they don't get all tittery***** about nude women on film. Of course, you should use your own best judgment when it comes to your children.

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* The first present-day scene in the film actually happens "ten years ago". If Connor and Duncan last saw each other in the pilot of the series, which was 1992, then the earliest the film could possibly occur was 2002. Since the technology was pretty much present-day for the film's release, I'm saying it's in 2002. You can dispute me if you like.

** It actually makes sense on the show. Don't try to figure it out right now.

*** No pun intended. This was the 00s; heroes in film didn't regularly engage in oral sex at the time. That didn't come -- oh, shut up -- until a few years later.

**** With the exception of some good bits from Sean Connery, everyone should ignore the second film.

***** See what I did there?

<<<>>>

Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as on the Dunesteef and the Drabblecast. He also has a decade of news and feature writing experience. Visit his website at roseplusman.com, or find him on twitter @listener42. / SOUNDPROOF / 181

Film Review: “Highlander III: The Sorcerer”

This review contains major spoilers for Highlander and mild-to-moderate spoilers for Highlander III.

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One of the things I love about my job is that, as long as we get our work done, we can occupy the free bandwidth in our brains however we like. Some of us listen to music, some of us watch Netflix, and some of us just work. Usually I listen to music, but recently I was walking into work and whistling the theme from Snoopy, Come Home* and decided I wanted to watch it on YouTube (which I've done before) while I worked.

Then I decided to branch out. First I found Armageddon**. Then I found Highlander II***. That led me to Highlander III: The Sorcerer, which originally hit theaters as Highlander III: The Final Dimension.

I think we all remember the tragedy that was the second Highlander film. I certainly do. I mean, I'd just seen it two days prior. When the third film came out, I decided I liked the story enough to see H3 in theaters. Yeah, that's right, I spent my hard-earned $6 on a ticket to the movie.

And I enjoyed it****.

For those of you living under a rock, Highlander is the story of Connor MacLeod, an immortal Scotsman who, like others of his kind, fights with a blade and can only be killed by decapitation. Otherwise, he doesn't age and can't be hurt. In the first film, he thought he won / SOUNDPROOF / 182

"The Prize" by defeating Kurgan, the man who killed his best friend Ramirez and then raped his wife, back in the 1500s. Now, eight years later, MacLeod is living in Morocco with his friend Jack and his adopted son John. He feels a disturbance in the Force and realizes that, although he won The Prize, he hasn't killed all the immortals on the planet.

In the 1600s, after his wife's natural death due to old age, MacLeod wandered the world, eventually ending up in Japan, the home of the legendary sorcerer and swordmaker Nakano. MacLeod trained with Nakano and earned the power of illusion (which for some reason he didn't use in the first two films -- go figure, right?), but when the evil immortal Kane and his two henchmen arrived, Nakano sacrificed himself to save MacLeod's immortal life. Nakano used his power to trap Kane and his henchmen for 300 years, until an archaeological expedition unearthed Nakano's cavern. Kane escaped and came after MacLeod.

As with the first (and fourth) Highlander film, MacLeod's story is told twice -- first in the present, and also in the past. This time, it's the French Revolution, when MacLeod is introduced to Sara, a free-spirited young woman who he is sent to "tame". Sara bears more than a passing resemblance to Dr. Alex Johnson, the archaeologist who found Nakano's tomb. MacLeod deeply loved Sara, and in the present, he falls in love with Alex. However, Kane's thirst for vengeance leads to death and destruction in New York City, and both Sara and John (MacLeod's son) are placed in great peril.

I think you can figure out how the movie ends.

Christopher Lambert returns to portray MacLeod. Of French descent, Lambert's accents are meandering at best -- he's an okay Scotsman, but otherwise he speaks in what I assume is his normal voice. He does a good job with the swordfighting and action sequences, and he delivers the requisite quips as any good 90s actor should. Plus, at the time he was still young enough to convincingly portray someone who hadn't aged a day in eight years. Makeup probably helped. His foil, Kane, was played by Mario Van Peebles. Highlander villains tended to overact, and I get the feeling the director told Van Peebles to emulate Clancy Brown (the villain in the first film) as much as he could. Gravelly voice, leering expression, strange tongue movements, the whole bit. If that was the direction, then he pulled it off admirably. As a teenager, I bought him as a villain, but watching the film 20-ish years later, I need more from my Big Bads. For starters, they need to have better motivation than "I've hated you for 400 years". Deborah Unger, who's in Combat Hospital but otherwise I didn't really recognize, is both Alex and Sara, and she, like Bonnie Bedelia [NB: Roxanne Hart, not Bonnie Bedelia. Sorry about that.] in the first film, does a fine job as The Girl.

I think the best adjective for this film, overall, is "passable". The music was passable; the plot was passable, the acting was passable, the obligatory montage***** was passable, the special effects were passable (for the time)... the sets and production design were cool, and the swordfighting was as good as to be expected in the Highlander films, but nothing else really jumped out at me as being exceptional. I wasn't terribly invested in the love story (either of them), the villain, the historical sequences (it was the bloody French Revolution; I expect they could've done a lot more with that part), or MacLeod's adopted son. And, I mean, as a 16-year-old, the nudity was awesome, but these days I don't really need it, and as a 30- something, I've seen it already.

But, y'know what? I think that's all okay. Because if you go into this film expecting a great movie, you'll be sorely disappointed. There's a lot of overacting, some silliness with magic / SOUNDPROOF / 183 and illusions (humans turning into birds, anyone?), and the requisite "asshat policeman" villain. But if you liked the first Highlander film and you can put aside the fact that it was set up to be a single film with no sequels, you'll enjoy this movie too. I got what I came for when I went to the theater, and watching it in the background while I worked gave me what I came for as well -- a film I've seen enough times that I didn't have to actively watch it, and something going on in the background to fill my mental bandwidth.

I know some people say there should have been only one, but if there had to be a sequel... I think this was pretty decent.

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Note to Parents: This film contains violence -- including decapitations -- as well as adult language and sexual situations. Compared to today's films, it's not that graphic, and if it wasn't for the nudity, this film would probably get a PG-13, not an R. I kind of think Lambert has it in his contract that all Highlander films have to have at least one over-long sex scene, and this film definitely has that too. The sex scene is what pushes this past the limit of "allowable content" for teens, in my opinion. Of course, you should use your own best judgment when it comes to your children.

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* You can watch the whole thing on YouTube here.

** Don't laugh. If you go into it with low expectations for plot and high expectations for one- lines and explosions, you get exactly what you are looking for.

*** Oh, shut up.

**** Hey, I was 16, and it had nudity. Don't judge.

***** In this case, sword-making, set to Loreena McKennitt, because that just screams Scotland, doesn't it?

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Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as on the Dunesteef and the Drabblecast. He also has a decade of news and feature writing experience. Visit his website at roseplusman.com, or find him on twitter @listener42. / SOUNDPROOF / 184

Film Review: “Another Earth”

Imagine that, a year or so ago, you saw a trailer for a film in which humanity discovered another planet Earth growing slowly closer. Humanity made contact with Earth Two, as they called it, and realized that each and every person on the planet could have a duplicate up there.

Then there's some cuts of a young blond woman, a car accident, a relationship, and the chance for Our Heroine to win a trip to Earth Two. She seems all introspective; a Coldplay- like song runs in the background; the trailer ends.

Watch it yourself, if you like.

The problem, though, is that the movie I saw wasn't quite the movie I was advertised.

Released in 2011, Another Earth is the story of Rhoda Williams. At the start of the film, she's 17 years old, just been accepted to MIT, and is on her way home from a party when DJ Flava says on the radio that a habitable planet has been discovered, closer than any found before. Rhoda looks out the window, sees the planet in the sky, and slams her car into one owned by John Burroughs. John, a college professor and composer with a five-year-old and a pregnant wife, falls into a coma due to his injuries; the rest of his family is killed. Rhoda goes to prison for four years, is released at age 21, and that's when the movie really starts.

Still wracked with guilt over what she did, Rhoda attempts to approach John at his home, to apologize, but backs out at the very last minute and lies about being from a cleaning service. John, who is depressed, borderline alcoholic, and suffering from brain issues due to his injuries, agrees to let her clean his house. And, over the next few weeks and months, Rhoda and John grow close.

At the same time, Earth Two is growing ever closer, and Rhoda has applied to be part of the crew, citing her status as a felon and the kinds of people who were on Columbus's three ships. / SOUNDPROOF / 185

The tension in the story is pretty much "will Rhoda tell John who she really is" and "will Rhoda win the trip to Earth Two". Because Another Earth is an independent film, you're never quite sure of the first, but the second is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

The film stars Brit Marling as Rhoda; she also co-wrote it with director Mike Cahill. William Mapother (Lost) plays John. The only characters of import are Dr. Richard Berendzen, playing himself, who is well-known for his work as a professor in the space sciences, and Kumar Pallana as Purdeep, Rhoda's supervisor at her job (she's a janitor at the local high school -- by choice). The acting was generally decent, although some of the lines seemed a bit forced -- especially those from Rhoda's family.

Cahill's direction bothered me a bit. It was somewhat reminiscent of Gary Ross's quick-zoom and shaky-cam from The Hunger Games -- there were several scenes where I actually said aloud "could the director not have sprung for a dolly, or even a tripod with wheels?" I think the style distracted from the story; instead of paying attention to what was going on, I found myself trying to keep track of what the camera was doing and why -- since this is, after all, an independent film, the director was probably trying to catch little details on purpose. Either that, or he was trying to make it seem like a very slowly-developing movie was more exciting than it actually was. Whichever it was, it annoyed me.

Musical duo Will Bates and Phil Mossman, as Fall On Your Sword, provided the soundtrack for the film. I tend to watch movies with the captions on so I don't wake my daughter at night, and much of the soundtrack was too understated for me to really appreciate it. I did like the final theme, though.

The only other really odd thing about this movie was the font used for the credits and the time jumps. I work with fonts and text every day, and it's often my job to make sure kerning looks natural. Well, the kerning didn't look very natural in this film, and the font seemed to me to be an odd and unnecessarily-straightforward one. Compared to the font used in the trailer, I found the one in the film to be lacking. I know it's a small thing, but it's the kind of thing I notice.

So. I went into Another Earth expecting one thing. I removed it from my DVR having gotten something completely different. I expected a story about a girl who goes to another planet; I got a story about a girl who falls in love with the man whose family she killed while another Earth looms ever closer to our own. I think that, in the end, the film suffered from trying to be something it wasn't -- instead of just being a story about a girl who tries to earn forgiveness from the person whose life she destroyed, it's told as a lightly sci-fi tale where the genre pieces are either a backdrop or a secondary story to whatever it is the director and writers were trying to say.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy the film; I don't think I wasted my time, and I don't think I wasted my DVR space. The ending did give me a couple of good questions, but they weren't the kind of MIND BLOWN takeaways like I got from Primer and Pi. Nor were they the satisfaction of a story well-told with the good guys triumphing over evil as in Ink (a great independent film with truly-disturbing villains and a phenomenal soundtrack; you really ought to see it).

For this next part, to de-cypher the spoiler-riffic text, paste it into rot13.com. But it is very spoilery, so if you don't want to know what happens at the end of the film, don't decrypt this / SOUNDPROOF / 186 text.

V qb jnag gb xabj vs Rnegu Gjb'f Eubqn jnf gurer fvzcyl orpnhfr fur qvqa'g tvir gur gvpxrg gb Wbua, be vs fur jnf gurer orpnhfr fur qvqa'g xvyy uvf snzvyl va gur svefg cynpr. Naq, vs vg'f gur sbezre, jnf uvf snzvyl fgvyy nyvir ba Rnegu Gjb? Ubj qvq gurl pbcr jvgu uvf neeviny?

If you like slow films, independent films, films with just a touch of sci-fi, or films about the possibility of other planets where you might exist, only slightly different than you are now, I would recommend catching Another Earth. And even if you aren't into those things, you might like it anyway. Just be warned: it's not quite what the trailer makes it out to be.

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Note to Parents: This film contains adult language and situations, as well as one scene of graphic violence and one attempted suicide. There's a sex scene, but it's not explicit, and the only nudity in the film is shot so nothing is revealed. The film is only rated PG-13, so I think most teens can handle it. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

<<<>>>

Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as on the Dunesteef and the Drabblecast. He also has a decade of news and feature writing experience. Visit his website at roseplusman.com, or find him on twitter @listener42. / SOUNDPROOF / 187

Book Review: Railsea by China Mieville

This review contains minor spoilers for Railsea, but does not spoil the ending.

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The review you're reading now will be the third review I've written of a China Mieville novel. I've read all his books except for King Rat & Looking for Jake. Most of them have similar themes & tropes -- the love of home, phantasmagoric settings & creatures, some form of transportation that's central to the story, & an ending that leaves you wondering why you read the book if you're going to be left empty when you're done.

Note that I said empty. Not unsatisfied.

Well, Railsea broke the trend on at least one of them: I wasn't empty at the end. But otherwise, we're looking at pretty standard Mieville here.

Railsea is primarily the story of Sham Yes ap Soorap, a young man* who works as the doctor's assistant on a moletrain called the Medes. What is a moletrain? It's a train that sails the railsea, hunting moles & other Mieville-style creatures much in the same way that a whaling boat hunts whales. & what's the railsea? Well, imagine you don't have very much surface water, & you have to go long distances. You might choose to lay down rail lines from here to there. & then you might add more & more rails over time until finally you've got a literal ocean of rails for all sorts of different types of trains. You could walk, I suppose, but not with the kinds of fauna that populate the world.

What kind of world has a railsea? One that, years or centuries or epochs ago, was visited by / SOUNDPROOF / 188 aliens. One that became so polluted that the "upsky" has levels to it, all of which are toxic, all of which are home to strange & horrible creatures. One that used to be earth.

Okay. Now that we've got that settled: Sham is the doctor's assistant on the moletrain Medes, under Captain Naphi, who leads a ragtag crew of interesting fellows (& fellow-ettes) including Sham's friend Vurinam, Doctor Fremlo, Mbenday, & others. Naphi's mission is to find the great moldywarpe called Mocker-Jack & defeat him, thereby securing a place in history as someone who found her philosophy**. If this sounds like Moby-Dick to you, well... you're not alone. Naphi's part of the story is that of Ahab & Moby-Dick, although the book is about more than that.

While hunting Mocker-Jack, the Medes comes across a wrecked train & salvages some photographs that Sham & Naphi bring to the city of Manihiki. While there, their investigations draw the attention of some unsavory characters. Sham meets Caldera & Dero Shroake, children of the people whose wrecked train they salvaged, & with the photos they invite him on their mission to figure out just what their parents were looking for. Sham declines, but when he's kidnapped by pirates who seek the Shroakes' riches, he finds himself headed their way anyway.

& that's about all the plot I can give you without ruining the last half of the book.

As with most of Mieville's stories, the love-of-one's-home theme is strong here. Although Sham doesn't love the Medes, he cares about the people on it & respects his captain. He does show affection for Streggye, his hometown, although we never see it. But other than that, Sham is pretty much the disaffected youth that we've all seen on Instagram: he's got a decent job as a doctor's assistant, but it doesn't make him happy. He thinks being a salvor (salvage train person) will make him happy, but he doesn't have the gumption to quit the Medes to pursue his dreams. Up until his kidnapping, things just happen to him. It makes it hard to like him. He does redeem himself in the end, growing up a bit as the story progresses, but he isn't my favorite young-person Mieville character***.

In fact, come to think of it, with the exception of Sirocco the salvor & some occasional moments with the Shroakes, I really didn't like any of the characters in this book. I think that's what made it so hard for me to read. See, I've read a lot of Mieville, & while the writing is as good as it's ever been, there wasn't anyone for me to latch onto & say "I want to keep reading because I want to know what happens to this person." There were times I wanted to stop reading the book, & it took me an awfully long time to read it not because I am a slow reader (I'm not) but because I was so disinterested with the characters that I went off to read graphic novels just to cleanse my palate.

But I knew I'd have to finish the book because early on Mieville sets up the ultimate goal: find out what the Shroakes' parents were doing when they found a part of the railsea with only one rail on it. I really wanted to know the answer to that, & that's why I kept reading. &, unlike other Mieville novels, I wasn't disappointed. I suppose I should've seen it coming, but I thought it would be too easy. The thing is, this novel is ostensibly for all ages, so it couldn't be too much of a downer ending.

The book does feature some pretty good action sequences -- Mieville uses punctuation & spacing to control how quickly or slowly a reader experiences the battle scenes, especially the ones where the Medes is doing its thing & the final battle at the end. But what gets distracting / SOUNDPROOF / 189 is the use of the ampersand. When I first downloaded the book, I thought there was something wrong with my copy, so I went over to Amazon & checked the first chapter. Nope, it was that way on purpose. In fact, one of the shorter chapters in the book is devoted to explaining why the ampersand is used instead of the word "and". Unfortunately, this little contrivance got annoying the further I read. Maybe that was one of Mieville's techniques to control reading speed -- you read faster by recognizing the shapes of words, & if you aren't used to seeing & where an "and" should be, you're forced to slow down.

Overall I found this to be a good book in terms of setting, style, & technical word usage. I don't think it was one of Mieville's best, & I wouldn't put it up on the same level as The Scar & Embassytown, but if you like Mieville, dystopias, trains, phantasmagoric creatures, or ampersands, this is definitely the book for you. & it does have a good ending -- the last thirty chapters or so (each one is no more than 12 pages, & some are much fewer) really do get quite good. You just have to get there.

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Note to Parents: As this is a novel for all ages -- what I guess they're calling YA these days -- the book doesn't contain anything too terribly objectionable. The violence & language are no worse than a TV-PG show, & there's no nudity, sex, or adult situations beyond the discussion of a polyamorous triad. Of course, you should use your own best judgment when it comes to your children.

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* I'd put him in his early twenties. Between eighteen & twenty-three. I don't recall it ever actually being said.

** Don't ask. Too complicated to explain here.

*** That probably goes to Shekel from The Scar.

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Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as on the Dunesteef and the Drabblecast. He also has a decade of news and feature writing experience. Visit his website at roseplusman.com, or find him on twitter @listener42. / SOUNDPROOF / 190

Book Review: Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion

This book contains spoilers for all films and television shows Joss Whedon has written, and therefore the review shall consider such material fair game. Reader discretion is advised.

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It doesn't take an astute student of my Twitter feed or my blog to know that I've been on one hell of a Joss Whedon kick over the course of the past year. From full viewings of Buffy and Angel to my opinions on Cabin in the Woods (excellent) and The Avengers (waiting for the DVD), you must know by now that I'm a fan of the man's work.

So when Amazon's algorithm suggested I purchase PopMatters's Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion, I figured it would be something I'd enjoy.

Perhaps I should've thought a little more about the purchase first.

Edited by Mary Alice Money, who lives just a short drive from me and teaches at nearby Gordon College in Barnesville, Ga., The Complete Companion is a... well, a compendium of articles taken mostly from PopMatters's April 2011 celebration of Joss Whedon. Organized in order, from Buffy through The Avengers and containing no fewer than three articles on each of Whedon's works, Money has assembled a true tour-de-force of information on any Whedony project readers could consider.

Buffy (and, by extension, many of Whedon's other projects) have become topics of academic study at universities around the nation. There's an academic journal (Slayage, the online Journal of Whedon Studies) and an associated conference. Whedon's work shows up in / SOUNDPROOF / 191 academic culture, pop culture, and even the linguistic vernacular -- and all of these are addressed in the book.

To excess.

This is all well and good, but it's not what I signed up for.

What did I want from The Complete Companion? Well, I'm not an academic. Not anymore. I was, once, but now I'm nothing but a fan with an academic background and a master's degree. While it's important that studies of feminism, popular culture, and linguistics are important, that's not what I'm interested in reading.

I'm not saying there was nothing for me in The Complete Companion. There are interviews with Alexis Denisof ("Wesley", "Senator Perrin"), Brian Lynch (from the Angel comics), and Tim Minear (from many Whedon projects); there are framing pieces on each of Whedon's works, which were certainly interesting; and there were several pieces on fan culture and the "sausage-making" process of several of them. I was really hoping for more of that -- not necessarily tell-all, behind-the-scenes content (although that would certainly be cool to read), but more about what the authors and auteurs were thinking when they wrote and created the shows and comics I enjoyed so much.

There just wasn't enough of that.

One of the problems with an essay compendium is that each essay is a stand-alone piece -- either written independently for PopMatters or adapted for this volume from the academic journals in which they first appeared. That means each writer has to frame the work with an introductory section about the media being examined. This gets repetitive. Quickly. In the section about Buffy, which spans sixteen essays, I read way too much introduction and I found myself skimming.

And then I found myself skimming articles as well.

I also haven't finished watching Angel yet, and a lot of the second part -- which focused on that show -- covered the fifth season. It's not like I didn't know what happened at the end of the show*, but now I've seen the finale examined in several different ways. It's not so much a spoiler as a "okay, there's really no surprise left at all" -- academia has that effect. And then, in the section about comics (probably my favorite section because it contained the most sausage-making), Angel: After the Fall (Whedon's canonical continuation of the television series) was completely summarized and dissected. I do have digital versions of the comic, and I'll still read them after I finish the show (I have about 13 episodes to go), but some of the mystery has been taken out. Again, I knew more or less what happened, but now I know everything.

I suppose that's my fault.

So, if you're interested in the academic interpretations of Whedon's work -- feminist themes in Buffy, Dollhouse-as-metaphor-for-network-television, parallels between Alien Resurrection and Buffy, and similar articles, you'll be thrilled. But if you're looking for the kind of articles you might read on io9 or collected by WhedonQueen101 (formerly BuffyQuotes101 until yesterday or so), you won't find them in The Complete Companion. It's just not that kind of book. There's definitely a place for the articles in this book, and also a definite place for / SOUNDPROOF / 192 books like this one.

Maybe the place for them is on your digital bookshelf. Unfortunately, you won't find a place for them on mine.

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Note to Parents: This book is a work of non-fiction and generally contains very little objectionable material outside of occasional quotes containing strong language from the various Whedon shows and films. It is safe to read for almost anyone over the age of eleven, although younger teens might be bored by it. Of course, you should use your own best judgment when it comes to your children.

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* Mostly through fanfic. Stop laughing.

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Josh Roseman (not the trombonist, the other one) is a writer and web developer. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Fusion Fragment, Port Iris, and Big Pulp, as well as on the Dunesteef and the Drabblecast. He also has a decade of news and feature writing experience. Visit his website at roseplusman.com, or find him on twitter @listener42.