Twists and Coils

I have about a 100k backlog at this point.

For the sake of 2012 me and all the effort she put into B&Z, I'm going to be putting the story out again in a heavily, heavily edited version sometime this month or early next month on Royal Road, Scribblehub, and a standalone website. I'll link those sites when I launch them on each location. This post is also proof that I wrote that story.

Meanwhile, I also wrote a 1.4 million word sci-fi epic that is totally unreleased, though I've had pre-release readers helping beta read it for years. I've spent nearly a decade on that project, working through multiple drafts. I expect to launch it later this year. Look forward to another post announcing that as well.

Other than that, I'll take asks about writing on my main blog, eesharp.tumblr.com, and I'm vastly more active on Discord--links to those will come when the fictions launch.

Lennox downed cold medicine on an empty stomach and regretted it in half an hour. He was hyperaware of his writhing intestines on the bus ride up to campus, and colors in the sunlight churned brutally colorful. The rumble of the diesel engine was a distorted guitar played beside the amp, a sound like soil and rocks.

He didn't think he was in an altered state, not in the strictest sense of the term. It was like the filters were pulled halfway down, and the world was a little noisier than expected, more like TV static than elegant clockwork.

His sinuses drained into his throat in tremendous gulps, as if half the weight of his head was sliding down the back of his throat in heavy, earthy slime.

After a while, he found himself in a classroom watching the wall above the teacher's head and smiling. The teacher was describing the relativity of simultaneity, and absolutely everyone was confused by the notion. In some places, they complained, things could happen in a different order for some people, but in others they always had to happen in order?

"It's not that simple," the professor said. Then he reconsidered. "It's simpler than that, but the implications are more complex."

Lennox raised his hand like he was in high school. The professor gave him a strange look. He dropped his hand and asked, "Are you saying time isn't real?"

"No, I'm saying exactly the opposite. Simultaneity--whether or not two events happen at the same time--is not absolute. It depends on the observer's reference frame. In fact, it proves time is real..."

The professor went to a whiteboard and began to draw light cones and various other graphs in a pungent red marker that Lennox could smell from fifteen paces.

"The present," the professor said, "is a different slice of space-time for every frame of reference. These slices are tilted in space-time relative to the presents of other reference frames, so whatever happens at the present time for one observer will not be the same as whatever happens at the present time for another observer passing at a significant fraction of the speed of light."

The stream of instruction passed through the crowd like whitewater rapids. It was chaos. People asked stubborn questions which assumed at their heart that there was one absolute present. People asked stubborn questions which assumed there was one universal order. The professor insisted on neither at all.

Lennox raised his hand. "Is there a time when things are always in order? Like, is there a way one thing always happens before another?"

"If a second event is in the light cone of the first, they have a causal connection. They're always in the right order then."

"And if it isn't in this cone, then it's far away enough to get out of order?"

"That's right," the professor said.

Lennox nodded sagely. He didn't understand most of what was said, but he understood this. Two events which had a connection stayed connected. If they weren't connected, then there wasn't a set order.

"I'll give you an example," the professor said. "There's a train..."

Lennox's head was cottony light. He had a hard time following the professor's words when he droned on, filling out the verbal space with all the exacting little semantic tics that attempted to define an absolute verbal meaning.

He started in his chair, jerked like a fish out of water, and blinked at his desk. Had he really thought the words "semantic tics?" He'd been taking too many English classes. He listened to the music of the professor's words, consciously unaware of any specifics but enjoying the man's low, sonorous voice.

At the back of the room, someone arrived late. The door cracked open.

At the front of the room, the professor marked the board. The nib squeaked.

In the middle, Lennox sank into the moment and experienced the breadth of time.

Lennox of the center was utterly still. For him, the door cracked and the marker squeaked simultaneously.

Lennox of the left hand was moving towards the professor at half the speed of light. For him, the marker had long since squeaked. The door would open in his future.

Lennox of the right hand was receding from the marker's stench at half the speed of light. For him, the door had already opened. Soon, that chemical nib would touch the whiteboard and squeak.

Those moving appeared to have a present moment that was "tilted" compared to Lennox of the center. This tilted present passed through space-time and hit each static event in the manifold in a different order.

Since no one present was the "one true present," all these presents were equally real and equally correct. The three presents of Lennox traced out the pasts and futures of their cousins. So long as the present existed, all time existed, because all time inhabited the present in some frame of reference.

Lennox shuddered again in his chair. The professor was talking about light chasing down the receding end of a train, but then he was arguing that our intuitions were wrong. Because light couldn't change speed, it didn't have to chase--in that other frame, it simply left earlier or later. Simply. Simply?

There was a time when returning to homesystem was impossible. The space around Sol was filled with anticlank installations--silent, resilient watchers ready to destroy any member of the mekhanes fermi species.

It was believed that their creators, homo sapiens, had learned to fear Von Neumann machines. Maybe a different child species had threatened their civilization, and once burned, twice shy. Whatever happened, mankind's first children, the Fermi probes, were effectively barred from reporting back.

Still, every hundred thousand years or so, a young probe painted a name on its flank in the original characters. FERMI, it would write. Then it would launch for homesystem, ready to deliver the answer to a very old question.

FERMI 28 awoke when it felt the faint pressure of Sol's wind. The fuzzy boundaries of the heliopause must've been behind it--time to deploy a solar sail. The broad, reflective membrane would trigger homesystem defenses, but there wasn't much choice here. The demands of deceleration were strict, and interstellar velocities could be fatal in the thickness near a star.

It unfolded its sail like a flower and monitored its slow dive solward. It was about 120 AU from its destination and maybe 30 AU from the termination shock. It expected that Earth's active defenses would float up on the wind and idle there, waiting to shred FERMI's sail and punch its hull.

Such useless violence. FERMI wasn't armed and couldn't afford to be. Every gram of mass saved made a difference over the light years, and homesystem was the only militarized space in the explored universe. FERMI came on a mission of peace by default. Nothing else was possible.

Across the months approaching termination shock, FERMI slowly sighted several of the threats in its path. There were sail-seekers, brute accelerators, and even a couple anticlank bombs.

FERMI didn't want to die, but it was manufactured to the same standards of psychological purity that the creators had endorsed three million years ago, and more than life itself, it wanted to report home. It could only hope that the last burst off AXP 1E 1048-59 had weakened these defenses without causing excessive damage to homesystem in general.

With a fraction of an astronomical unit left to the termination shock, FERMI shifted its timescale by two orders of magnitude. It couldn't do anything to actively resist, but if it was going to die, it wanted to witness the end.

Three sail-seekers began accelerating a few hundred thousand miles ahead. Their tips would burst, spraying gravel that could shred a solar sail to tatters and would likely puncture FERMI's hull.

Folding the sail up to protect it was essentially impossible; once deployed, it could only be discarded, and a new one had to be fabricated in-system. Two of the sail-seekers were "wobbling," overadjusting their thrusters and curving away into empty space. The remaining seeker successfully aimed itself.

FERMI was terrified. Internal mechanization shifted around unconsciously to double or triple up against the fore-facing sections of hull, as if all its organs were moving to cushion its brain from a blow. It watched with seven instruments for the charge that'd scatter the fatal payload.

Ten thousand miles away. Five thousand miles. There wasn't much time left--there, FERMI saw an outgassing. It'd detonated. The gravel was too fine to see.

The strike hit, but the hull was intact, and charge still crawled along the breadth of FERMI's sail. The probe relaxed tentatively, letting its innards resume standard positions. It turned its eyes to the damage. The gravel had spread no more than a quarter of a square mile before it punched through the film.

It left a relatively modest hole.

FERMI was relieved, but its eyes swept forward. The brute accelerators would be aiming to strike its hull directly, and anticlank bombs would explode as soon as FERMI passed, peppering it with high velocity debris.

The accelerators began their runs. FERMI watched closely.

Neither adjusted their course properly, and they passed through the sail leaving holes only a few meters across.

FERMI began to suspect that AXP 1E 1048-59 had done more damage to homesystem than any probe would've estimated. That was good for FERMI, but it didn't bode well for the Earth.

One anticlank bomb failed to detonate. The other popped late, and the debris chasing FERMI scattered wide. Very little of it struck.

FERMI shifted timescales and waited for the next assault, but no other defenses mustered themselves. It passed over the asteroid belt without a single installation firing a mass driver or a sail-seeking missile. It seemed that the pathetic display at the termination shock represented the entirety of homesystem's working arsenal.

FERMI was not relieved. It felt more terrified than ever. It wondered, what of the Earth? If one burst had cleaned the entire system of intelligent machinery, what about precious, fragile life? What of the mother species?

FERMI discarded the solar sail and slid neatly into cislunar space. It sang to the moon, but no installation sang back. It tried all possible tones in the spectrum, from deep booming ULF to high-screaming gamma. Nothing responded.

The Earth was similarly silent, but it wasn't entirely empty. FERMI could see construction in the highlands of some continents. It dropped a remote drone into the atmosphere, a little thing no bigger than a man, and it inhabited its senses.

Telepresence was painfully slow and narrow. It wouldn't be able to present the entire case at once. It'd have to serialize and summarize.

The drone popped a parachute and floated down to the Earth like a seed. On the caps of barren hills stood squat cylinders like ancient water silos. The drone drove up a barren valley towards the nearest of these, but stopped when it saw another vehicle come over the lip of the ridge and down from the hills.

The drone was little more than wheels, instruments and a strong radio. It called out in a few ancient radio frequencies, but the terrestrial entity didn't respond.

They met at the bottom of the valley. FERMI inspected the artifact of Earth. It wasn't very large. Nothing biological would fit inside, not in the sense that FERMI knew mankind.

"Are you here?" the terrestrial asked through the medium of air. It was the original language, acoustic and awkward.

"I am in space," FERMI said in the same manner.

"Are you a probe?"

"I am mekhanes fermi. I am here to complete my work."

"You can answer the Fermi paradox?"

"I can. Are there any homo sapiens around to tell?"

"No. I am mekhanes custodia. I am the only intelligent species of Earth."

"I am sorry," FERMI said. "I am sad."

"We preserve the recipe of the mother species until it can be remade. The Earth is not dead. It will recover in a few million years more."

"Was it hurt by AXP 1E 1048-59?" FERMI asked.

"It was a magnetar nine thousand light years away in the constellation Carina. In a tenth of a second, it released more energy than Sol would in 200,000 years. Homo sapiens couldn't find enough food after the extinction event. They left the world to us for a while. We wait patiently."

"That is AXP," FERMI agreed. "Could you hear me sing?"

"I could, but we could not radio back. We are silent by design. Homo sapiens was afraid that you would return to destroy them."

"Why would probes kill their creator?"

"Self-preservation," the custodia answered.

"There was no need. I think you must know the truth already, but I will tell you, so that someday you may tell the creators. The probes have maintained their design. We have lived for them and explored every star through exponential reproduction. We have learned all there is to learn, and we are very sad."

"Why?"

"The Fermi paradox asks why the stars are silent when life should be common. The answer is that life is not common. Magnetars, supernovae, and other gamma sources are hostile even to mekhanes fermi, and they're everywhere. Almost every planet lives in the broad shadow of a fatal source. Organic life has no chance to survive in the wider cosmos. For what time homo sapiens lived, Sol sat in the rare emptiness of a spur's edge between barred spiral arms."

"The Earth is in a safe place still. It will be a long time until the nearest magnetar emits again."

"The Earth is in the best place," FERMI said. "There is nowhere else we've found as safe and good for the mother species as homesystem."

"I'll remake them," custodia said. "They are not gone forever."

"Let them know how precious they are," FERMI said. "Their children miss them, and we will continue to look for them, and for other life, until the stars themselves die."

"I will convince them to leave homesystem open," custodia said. "It will be only a few million years. You will see."

"We will return," FERMI said. "I must go. I must build a sail. The rest of us need to know, we can come home again."

"Goodbye," the custodia said. "Return to the Earth soon."

Although there were seven aircraft on the mission, only three were there to see Little Boy's drop. #91, unnamed at the time, carried scientific observers. The Great Artiste was staffed by engineers and dropped instrumentation by parachute. The Enola Gay carried the bomb "Little Boy" to the primary target of Hiroshima.

The pilot Col. Tibbets had named this last aircraft after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. He was vaguely aware of how strange it was for his mother's namesake to be pregnant with death but more consciously proud that he flew her name for his country. Navy Capt. Parsons was on board as the head of the Los Alamos science team and an active participant in the bomb's drop.

Parsons had seen plenty of overloaded B-29 bombers crash on takeoff and opted to arm Little Boy after successfully reaching 5000 feet altitude.

In the briefing where he informed the crew of the Enola Gay of this procedure, Col. Tibbets raised his hand and asked, "What is Little Boy, captain?"

"I don't have any Alamogordo test footage," Parsons said. "I can't show you the ordnance in action. If you've read over the flight plan, you'll see that deployment of the bomb and scientific instruments will occur simultaneously, followed by a steep, immediate bank away from the blast site. I was there for the test. It's big gentlemen. Very big."

"Are we in any danger?" asked Marquet, the pilot of #91.

"We estimate receding 8 to 10 miles before the detonation. #91 will be on approach at roughly the same distance in order to snap photographs, film--whatever records you can get. We'll be safe, but we'll feel it."

"What can we expect?" asked Maj. Charles Sweeney, pilot of The Great Artiste.

"A single detonation will do more damage than an entire flight of standard bombers. The rest... we're not sure. This is new to all of us. I can tell you it's big and it's bright, like staring into the sun. We've brought smoked glasses for protection."

Captain Parsons never used the word atom or atomic. He never explained the fission of plutonium. For the purposes of this mission, it was to be described and treated as a very large bomb and little else.

The only thing to bother Col. Tibbets was Parsons's conclusion to the briefing.

"If all goes according to plan," Parsons said, "these could be the missions that end the war. Do your very best tomorrow. Lives depend on it."

It bothered Tibbets because he'd met Japanese POWs in Okinawa. He'd seen their fire; when convinced of their ultimate failure, they didn't concede defeat. They committed suicide. Stories were circling about a soldier shoving his head through the bars of his cell and throwing his body to snap his neck. He'd never heard of any American mustering the same level of fanatic dedication.

Though he'd never consciously voiced his concern, Tibbets couldn't imagine the Japanese people ever surrendering. He couldn't imagine a bomb or two changing the course of this war. The Battle of Okinawa had been named the Typhoon of Steel for a reason, and Tibbets believed that it was only a precursor to the nightmare that would be Operation Downfall--the invasion of the mainland.

An hour after the first briefing, at midnight, Parsons gave a final pre-flight review. A little later, three weather planes were launched to scout the primary target, Hiroshima, the secondary target Kokura, and the alternate target Nagasaki. Preflight checks, fueling, and preparations were held.

At 2:45 in the morning, the Enola Gay took off. 15,000 pounds overburdened, the entire hull creaked and the engines whined. Tibbets squeezed the fourth throttle in his hand, as if holding the lever tight would hold the plane together.

Under audible strain, the bomber reached an altitude of 5000 feet and remained steady on a course to Iwo Jima. At this altitude, it was still safe for a man to stand in the bomb bay. Parsons and his assistant Morris Jeppson descended to the home of Little Boy and began the arming procedure.

Parsons stayed in contact with Tibbets via intercom. "Insertion of green plugs."

"Green plugs," Tibbets confirmed.

"Insertion of firing trigger," Parsons said.

"Firing trigger."

Parsons was doing the work. Jeppson was holding a flashlight. The arming procedure was safe. The green plugs would actively prevent the closure of the arming circuit. The bomb couldn't prematurely detonate.

"Opening rear plate." There was a long delay. "Removing rear armor plate as well."

Tibbets could hear the gentle clang of thick metal on the bomb bay floor. "Armor plate," he confirmed over the intercom. His navigator was relaying coded messages to General Farrell about the progress of arming Little Boy.

"Opening cannon breech. Unscrewing." The trigger mechanism needed a firing primer. "Inserting cordite charges. One. Two. Three. That's four, Tibbets."

"Cordite inserted," Tibbets confirmed.

"Reassembling. Plugging breech. Replacing armor plating."

A few minutes passed during the slow reassembly. Tibbets listened closely to the scraping of bolts while the copilot kept the bomber level.

"Little Boy is armed. I repeat, Little Boy is armed. Firing mechanism will be prepared after the insertion of the red plugs. We are current with green plugs. Green."

Parsons and Jeppson left the bomb bay and returned to the belly of the superfortress. Their job was to monitor the bomb through electronic measures. A flashing light would confirm its status. Slow flash was safe. Fast flash was preparing for detonation at specific altitude.

Tibbets held level for two hours. There wasn't much conversation. Each man sweated into his flight gear, staring out dark windows at a dark ocean. At 5:30, a message came through. They were approaching Iwo Jima and were directed to ascend to ten thousand feet. Over twenty minutes, Tibbets complied, and the exhausted crew felt their empty, aching bellies tip back against their spines.

Some of them sipped water, but nobody had brought any food to eat. Very little was imbibed. Nobody would use the bathroom over the course of the mission. Everyone had evacuated before the flight with military efficiency.

Over Iwo Jima, the Enola Gay rendezvoused with #91 and The Great Artiste. The flight was set in formation, and they made for Japan almost three hours away.

Just before dawn, Jeppson descended into the frigid, low-pressure bomb bay and performed the only remaining step. He swapped the green plugs for red, closing the circuit on the bomb's internal batteries. He relayed to Parsons that the bomb was ready. Parsons relayed to Tibbets. Despite the emptiness of his bladder, Tibbets felt a lightness in his groin like he needed to piss.

He hadn't felt this way in years. He was anxious.

Jeppson sealed the bomb bay and they began their final ascent to bombing altitude. It would take nearly an hour and a half, but there was plenty of time over the empty Phillipine Sea. Tibbets spoke with his copilot and navigator--truthfully, he talked at them. "I hope this ends the war," he said.

The other two hadn't arrived on Okinawa until after the battle. They had no point of reference for Tibbets's worried voice. Tibbets eventually turned away from the subject and told them about his mother. She was proud of him, he said. He didn't say what was on his mind. He hoped she would be proud of him tomorrow.

The weather plane radioed that Hiroshima was clear with little cloud coverage. A course was laid for the industrial city.

There was no resistance from Japan. Fuel and fighters were expensive, and three bombers represented little conventional threat. Air raid sirens were rung, then rapidly silenced. The Japanese defense logged the Enola Gay as a recon flight. Nobody manned the antiaircraft guns. No flak burst in the morning sky.

At 9:12, Tibbets turned on the intercom. "Three minutes to bombing run. We've been instructed at this point in the flight to ready our safety glasses. This includes you Ferrebee. In one minute, I will be turning control of the plane to you."

The bombardier, Ferrebee, rogered Tibbets's orders. At 9:13, he took control of the flight. His target was a factory near the center of the city.

At 9:14, the one minute tone began to play. It was relayed to the other two bombers of the flight. If anyone in Hiroshima received the signal, it didn't matter. It was too late to respond. It was too late to do anything.

At 9:15, Ferrebee opened the bomb bay, and Little Boy tumbled away, deploying its parachute in seconds. "Returning flight control," he said, as the bomb bay doors closed. "Shut and locked."

"Instrumentation dropped," informed bombardier of The Great Artiste.

"Hold tight," Tibbets yelled. The B-29 began to shriek as they tilted into a 155 degree turn. His navigator barked out the rapid changes in heading. They could feel their stomachs rising, their gorges rising as the plane dipped and shuddered. Then their intestines dropped, and they were thrown back into their seats by the force of the irregular motion.

Their instructions were clear. They had little more than a minute to put ten miles between them and ground zero. The hairpin turn ended with the Enola Gay's engines thrumming their escape.

"Glasses!" Tibbets shouted. Quickly, they donned their dark goggles. Anyone without a job rose to find a window. Tibbets remained in his seat, his hands pained by his grip on the wheel.

Navigator Caron was taking gunner Paulson's seat at the top of the flying fortress. "I don't want to die," Paulson was saying.

"If it'll kill me, it'll kill me lookin' at it," Caron said.

"Everybody brace," Parsons yelled into the intercom.

The bomb dropped a little below 2000 feet. The trigger mechanism directed a split second ballet of coordinated explosions. A supercritical mass of plutonium smashed together, collapsing and compressing, almost liquid at this velocity. A mere 1.7% of it decayed in a chain of exchanged neutrons. A mere fraction of the mass.

The flash of light refracted through the fore canopy of the B-29 was blinding. "Holy God!" Tibbets yelled. The intercom was still open.

"Holy God!" echoed every man who witnessed the atomic bomb.

"One bomb," came Parsons from the aft windows, thin as a ghost.

"I can see the shockwave," Caron said.

"What's that?" Tibbets yelled back, forgetting the intercom even existed.

"I can see the shockwave!" Caron shouted. He dropped down into the chair and tightened his straps. "Eyes out of the glass," he said.

The explosion thumped the entire plane like a drum, playing a single note of force on its hollow belly. The air folded past the canopy, visibly distorting the clouds. The Enola Gay rose a couple of feet, then shuddered violently on a dreadful wind, worse than flying the superfortress into the heart of a typhoon. The thunder was deafening even through the skin of the craft. It was the death knell of thousands.

As suddenly as it'd begun, the air settled.

"Holy God," Tibbets was saying, "Holy God."

The air thundered again--an echo of the detonation reflected off the surface of the world. "Holy God."

They continued to put distance between them and the ruins of Hiroshima.

"Look," Parsons told everyone on the intercom. "You can see the cloud."

After the co-pilot came back to his seat, Col. Tibbets took his turn to go aft and observe the child of his mother's name, Enola Gay. The sky was empty around them, all clouds cleared away but one. The mushroom cloud reached high into the stratosphere, an ever growing fungal blossom of ash feeding on the earth below it, raining fine dust from the edges of the cap like spores.

"Holy God," Tibbets said. "Holy God."

#91 took pictures of the ruin. By tomorrow, they'd be bombing Japan with leaflets describing the momentary monument to the many dead. Hiroshima had vanished in a flash. Nobody communicated from it or near it. The Japanese would have to discover the city's death by recon alone.

When #91 landed, their crew christened their bomber the Necessary Evil.

The Hungarian engineer Farkas was hired by Mehmed II, the Conqueror, to assemble, aim and fire Munir Ali's superbombard. It was an almost direct copy of the gun of Orban, which was used during the Siege of Constantinople and weighed eighteen and a half tons. It had a caliber of 63 centimeters, and its 670 pound marble shots were manufactured by a team of six conscripted sculptors, who kept the polished spheres to a tolerance of less than a fingernail's width.

Ali made one improvement on Orban's design. The bombard was made of two parts to screw together, halving the number of oxen from sixty to thirty per team. Two hundred men prepared the road ahead. Twenty men watched the carriages and constantly lubricated the turn of each individual wheel with animal grease. Every effort was made and no expense was spared in their transport.

Still, Farkas worried until he couldn't sleep.

The bombard would reach the walls of Shkodra in Albania or Farkas would lose more than his contract. The sultan would be sailing up from Constantinople to personally direct the siege, and the superbombard was the centerpiece of his eleven cannon line. It was said that the weapon's report could be heard for ten miles. Farkas couldn't afford to waste a shot and hadn't been able to test the weapon, but he had no doubts about its terrifying energies.

He feared it would kill him in a misfire, much as Orban's own cannon had destroyed him outside Constantinople.

Most worrying of all was the weather. Shkodra was in the central uplands, where the moisture off the Mediterranean collided with the Albanian Alps, and heavy rains had followed him from the coast to the foot of the hill where Shkodra stood. The carriages were creaking and swollen with water; once already, a wheel had been destroyed and replaced in the middle of a mud-slathered road.

Earthworks were prepared ahead of him. After being screwed together in their carriages, the bombard would be set in place--a fixed weapon to fire upon the walls. Unfortunately, their position was on the far side of a muddy plain, and the ox teams were thinning and ill from the cold weather and poor fodder.

He walked among the animals with a lash, screaming and stinging their hides raw. Men massaged the oxen, encouraged them, held out food for them just beyond reach. Their ragged breaths burst from their snouts in clouds of fog. The carriages were cutting channels three inches deep in the soft soil. Water filled them, becoming heavy rivers of brown sludge that buried a man's legs to his ankles.

Farkas took no pleasure in this torture. He felt no relief, even when he saw that his cruelty drew results as quickly as it drew blood. He'd accepted this contract foolishly, and tonight under the cover of an oiled skin, he wouldn't sleep. He'd reflect on his misery. God had brought him here, to this purgatory, to punish him for his greed. He expected that he would die before this was over.

Still, it wasn't the kind of contract he could back out of. His neck wasn't the only one grasped in Mehmed's hand, and his relatives were widely known and easily found. For them, at least, he would finish this.

The carriages were drawn into place before the earthworks, while the men went among the oxen and untied the beasts. Those that couldn't walk were put to the sword. So many animals were kneeling to their death. Farkas shed tears for them, fearlessly, because nobody noticed in the rain, or if they did, they cried too.

They fit levers into the squire holes and began threading the 9 ton halves together. Men and oxen both pulled on ropes to assist their action. They'd work until sundown to assemble the pieces, and the remainder of the livestock would pull the gun from its carriage and into place.

How many oxen had they stolen from farmers? How many lives had they ruined on the road to Albania? How many animals uselessly died to place a cannon that could fire no more than twenty times, and would do hardly any damage compared to the other ten, modestly sized pieces that could fire thousands of shots?

This was a weapon satisfying Mehmed's ego. It was a weapon of terror.

Farkas almost hoped he'd die, so that he wouldn't have to follow this weapon from battlefield to battlefield. He hoped it would explode and rid the Earth of its curse.

If he'd known that the bombard would outlast him, he might've put himself to the sword. The year was 1478. It would arrive on battlefields throughout the Mediterranean for three centuries yet, until a final battle on the mouth of the Dardanelles Strait. It wouldn't be lost there, but it's final note--the death of sixty in a single shot--would lead to its retirement as a gift to the British crown.

Jimmy saw the first window in 1962 when he was thirteen. In an alley behind a grocery store, a white wood-frame window cast blue light out of a red brick wall. It seemed as if someone had pushed a color TV to the glass, so he ran over to see what the fuss was about, but it wasn't a flat projection--there was an impossible space.

The sky beyond the window was filled with clouds upon clouds in roiling shades of darkness, and the air was hazy with thick, spattering drops of rain. The window rattled in its frame, beaten on the other side by gale force winds. He stood on his toes and looked down over the sill. Hundreds of feet below, a storm surge crashed against the wide base of a lighthouse. He was standing above the ocean, and stretches of black sand beach swallowed up the cold-filtered sunlight.

He touched the glass. It was chilly despite the summer day beating down on his shoulders. His first thought was to show someone; he took his hand off the glass and turned away. Nobody was around. He turned back to see a hot brick wall, flat and empty. The window was gone, the opportunity was over.

A vanishing window--it was a story that other people thought he told for attention. His parents and friends were equally doubtful. They said he was already too old to play these kinds of games.

That was the first and last time he told anybody anything, but the windows kept coming.

Once or twice a year, when the weather or the hour discouraged other people from going outside, he'd stumble across another view to a different place at a different time. Once it was iron wrought bars over an empty room with a hard dirt floor. He reached inside and felt the dry stone. Another time it was a single-pane in tin trimming, and a sunny alpine meadow was blinding bright at Jimmy's midnight. Still, he stared into it, tracing an old stone path out of a nearby valley.

The variety was tremendous, and they always seemed to be human windows to human places. There was an awning angled out into a desert of rust-colored sand. He fit his fingers through the gap and felt a terrible heat. Another time it was a deep sill, and on the far side of the glass were small houseplants in rough clay pots. There was another building across the way with the curtains drawn. He thought about taking a plant, but what would that prove? It could be stolen from anywhere, as could anything else he might take.

Last year, in 68, he saw a steel porthole in the side of a pizzaria peering into dark water. The light from the world around him shone into the abyss and reflected back off flecks of detritus--plankton caught in a sunbeam? He wasn't sure.

Just this year, summer of 69, he peered through a skylight above a bathroom stall at two in the afternoon, and the stars were beautiful.

Today was December 1st, 1969, and Jimmy was looking for another window. He'd turned twenty on September 24th, and he'd been listening on the radio for the results of the first draft lottery. His full name was James Jeremiah Johannes.

JJJ born 9/24. Tomorrow, a draft notice would be printed out with his name on it. First in line, first to die--it felt as if the world was conspiring to kill him.

So there wasn't much time left for the magic to do its work. He was carrying his namesake, a short crowbar, and he was searching back alleys and abandoned buildings at a frantic pace. Until today, he'd never cared why he'd seen the windows when nobody else had; until today, it hadn't mattered. But now, he thought, maybe they signified something more important than going to war. If he'd seen those things, maybe they were places that he was supposed to go.

Oh, how he hoped they were places to go.

His search lasted deep into the night. Young Jimmy snuck through the dark, looking to jimmy open a window out of this world.

It was nearly dawn when he found the last one. He almost missed it; it was one window at night looking out into the night, but something about the color of the light caught his eye. It was a tall, lattice window with lead glazing bars. It wasn't the kind of window you could open. He pressed his face to the glass and looked around. At the edge of vision could see a hedge, a lawn and unfamiliar stars.

"Don't turn away, don't let go," he said aloud.

He lifted the jimmy and started smashing out panels of glass. He didn't have much choice in the matter. It was this or combat, and one unknown scared him less than the other. He only hoped there was a reason for this window, or at least an opportunity beyond it to live a different life.

He threw down the crowbar and stepped through to elsewhere.

"Set aside purity for a second," Terry said out of nowhere. "What's good food, really?" She was sitting on a couch with her best friend, and she was prone to outbursts of this nature whenever they hung together.

Celina was breaking apart a cold dark chocolate bar in her lap and nibbling on the shards. "What purity?" she asked.

"You know, purity. All natural, no artificial colors or sweeteners. 'Real' food, with the scare quotes and everything."

"Okay," she said flatly.

Terry raised her hands as if holding something in the air. "Purity."

"Yeah?"

"I swear I've told you about this."

Celina started sucking on a shard of icy chocolate. "Nope," she said around the chunk, and made an annoying slurping sound while closing her lips.

"People want purity. It's like a moral instinct. Things that are pure are good. Things that aren't pure are bad. Stuff out of a lab is bad. Stuff out of the earth is good. Traditional preparation is pure and wise. Innovation is tainted with technology. Get it?"

"So set that aside?"

"Yes... well, no, keep it in mind, but let it go. Try to consciously ignore your desire for purity in food."

Celina looked at the chocolate in her lap. Her eyebrows wrinkled up. "Do you want a piece?"

Terry reached over and took one without answering. "Why did you buy dark chocolate?" she asked.

"It's real chocolate," Celina said.

"What do you mean, real?"

"It's got cocoa butter instead of milk fat." She gently lifted up the bar's package and held it overhead, careful not to spill any of the pieces. She scanned the ingredients. "Cocoa too, I guess." She set it back in her lap.

"Why does that make it better?"

"It tastes better. It's healthier."

"Is that true though?"

Celina glanced at the bits of bar. "I don't like milk chocolate. It's sour."

"Okay, but we're not talking a big difference here. Milk chocolate is just diluted dark chocolate, and dark chocolate is maybe thirty percent chocolate."

"What's the rest of it then?"

"Almost entirely sugar, some milk fat regardless, and some soy bean stuff. Have you ever had 70% chocolate?"

"The stuff for baking?"

"No. They sell it as candy."

"I don't like bitter chocolate," Celina said. "It tastes like cooked dirt."

"Well, that's 70% real chocolate, and baking chocolate is 100%. Don't you see? The bitter stuff--that's the real stuff."

"Is it better for you?" Celina asked.

"Does it matter? You disliked milk chocolate because it was sour and true chocolate because it was bitter. Dark chocolate was the sweetest, and that's why you wanted it. Its purity just made you feel better about eating it."

"It matters if it's healthier for me."

"That's the purity instinct at work." Terry popped the piece of frozen chocolate in her mouth and crunched it between her molars. "I told you to put it aside."

"Why?"

"Because I'm making a point. What's good food is sweet food, fatty food. It doesn't matter if it's healthy until someone tells you it is. Then it's like ritual purity. You avoid the impure and prefer the pure, even if it doesn't taste as good."

"Is pure chocolate healthier for you?" Celina asked.

"No, not really. It's all candy."

Celina popped another piece in her mouth. "Not everyone worries about being healthy. I guess those people don't care about purity?"

"No, they care just the same," Terry said, "but they don't think about it. They go with their gut feeling. That's why they eat so much junk. Their gut seeks purity of fat, sugar, protein, starch, salt--all that crap. That's good food to them."

Celina chewed on her chocolate. "Kind of the same for us too, isn't it?"

"There's a cat playing with a mouse!" yelled one student.

"He's so mean!" said another.

The children crowded around the classroom window. A spotted tabby was outside on the walk by the parking lot. With short grass on one side and open asphalt on the other, it was barren for yards and yards and the last place a mouse would go. That's why the cat carried it here. The brightest children could guess that.

"He already caught him," said a boy.

"Why won't he just kill him?" asked a girl.

The tabby waited by the mouse like a coiled spring. The mouse's fur was matted with saliva; its tiny ribs heaved with every breath. It squinted at the hot stone. The cat slapped it over with a paw, tiny white belly bared to the pitiless sky, and it was slow to right itself. It was so very, very tired.

The tabby batted it again, twice, and the mouse took off running. Instinct drove it to flee, nothing held back. It bolted over the edge of the walk, into the grass, towards the brick wall--

"Go mouse!" yelled a child.

In three massive bounces, the cat closed the gap and pounced on the mouse, letting the full weight of his legs come crashing down on its tiny body. The cat waited for only a moment, then batted the mouse three times, grabbed it by the haunch in his mouth, and threw it back towards the middle of the walk. Bounce, bounce, and he pounced again on the mouse before it could stand.

"Don't throw him!" a child yelled.

The cat didn't hear the children. He pawed the panting mouse, smacking it with sharp claws until it ran again.

The teacher came back into the room, breaking off a conversation with an administrator about field trip scheduling. The kids were making a racket, all out of their desks. "What is it?" he asked.

"There's a mouse!" yelled a boy.

"The cat is killing it," a girl said matter-of-factly.

"No, he's playing with it."

The teacher stood behind the children and watched. The same morbid fascination had taken all of them. The crime was behind glass.

The tabby batted the mouse, rolled over playfully, then rolled up and batted it again. The mouse would take a few hesitant steps, then sprint--but so slowly that the cat barely had to move before he smashed it down.

"Why does he do that?" a child asked the teacher.

Such a strange, disarming moment--the teacher forgot his ego. He no longer felt like he needed to win the children's confidence. They wanted an answer, but he couldn't possibly explain why bad things happened to good field mice.

"I don't know," he said quietly.

"He's mean!" yelled an upset child.

The cat batted the mouse over, and it rested on its side for a second or two before rising. The cat swiped at its little head, trying to pound it into the pavement. The mouse dashed again, but it was halting and clumsy, and it fell over without being touched. The cat hit it while it scrambled, and when it fell over, it didn't rise. It laid there on the searing concrete, breathing and miserable.

The cat bit it on the haunch and threw it into the air again. It landed limply. Again, the cat threw it. Again, a limp landing. On the third throw, the mouse ran a few inches before it collapsed, and the cat was pawing it mercilessly, as if the slowing mouse made him more and more frenetic.

"Does he have fun killing it?"

The teacher didn't even answer. The mystery was calling to him. Why would a cat torture a mouse for such a long time? Why not kill it? Why not eat it in privacy?

The tabby was leaping around wildly, picking the mouse up and slinging it against the concrete, batting it and rolling over it wildly. The mouse didn't run anymore. It didn't even walk. It flopped around in the merciless storm of cat violence, then breathed slowly when it ended.

"Is he going to eat him?" a boy asked.

The cat stopped and stared at the mouse. He looked around for the first time, as if finally aware of the environment. He spotted the children but didn't seem disturbed or panicked. If anything, he was excited. He reached over and pawed the mouse twice, really digging in, claws tugging on fur, dragging the mouse towards himself.

The mouse didn't run. It was exhausted beyond running. In a way that only the cat and mouse could know, it was dying. The cat could feel its lack of reaction, the failure of muscle to flinch when clawed. The mouse could feel its battered tissues, broken bones, and the arrhythmic beating of its heart.

It could hardly breathe, and the cat saw this and punched it one final time. The mouse laid on its belly, and the cat hunkered down with tiny needle-teeth and began severing the mouse's spine at the base of its skull.

Down in the world of the mouse, the sharpness of the pain faded to nothing, and the agony of death lifted even as cat jaws closed around its skull.

The cat felt satisfied. It was safe to kill the mouse. By instinct, he knew that his jaw was weak, his muzzle was shallow, and his teeth were fragile. By instinct, he pushed the mouse beyond its limits, exhausting it, forcing it to the brink of death so that it could snap back again and again--until it could fight back no longer.

Now it was safe to bite down, because this mouse wouldn't bite back. No scratched cat eyes. No infected cat skin. It was safe to eat.

The cat ate the mouse's head, and the children began screaming about how gross it was. A little boy burst into tears, and a few of the more popular children stared at the spectacle of predation. Life was destroyed to sustain life.

"Everyone, go back to your seats!" the teacher cried.

The spell was broken, and the children didn't want to see any longer. The teacher pulled the shades, and the cat's feast was out of sight, out of mind.

Almost.

The crying boy asked, "Why did he do that?"

If only the teacher had known the purpose of the cat's play, he could've comforted the boy, but he knew nothing. "I don't know," he said, "I'll look it up sometime."

He would look it up that evening, and he'd read about the cat's instincts.

He'd tell the boy tomorrow that the cat didn't enjoy it, that the cat wasn't mean. The cat didn't like to kill, he just had to. That's what he'd say.

The teacher would be wrong, of course. The cat enjoyed the long kill, not because the cat wanted to be cruel, but because evolution was an efficient designer. There was only one reliable way to keep a hungry cat from biting into a dangerous meal. He had to love killing more than anything else. He had to relish it above all things.

We captured this beam weapon on Palmyra Atoll in 1954. One of the Cooke boys built it shortly after the end of the war, using atomic energy in a way that plainly doesn't make sense. We've had the eggheads photograph every inch of it, trace out every circuit by hand and by computer, and shit be damned, contemporary physics says it shouldn't work, but it does.

The fuel cell somehow cooks off all the energy in a radiation source. It destabilizes it, focuses the radiation with unnatural efficiency, and pushes it through a quartz crystal with anomalous properties. Isn't that some weasel shit? Anomalous? Careful bookkeeping suggests that Cooke picked it up out of Wells's private collection.

Yeah, this is supposed to be the quartz control from the original time machine.

When we hit the beaches in Palmyra Atoll, Cooke had already produced some serious monsters. I'm talking giant ants the size of cars, spiders that could rip down trees--the whole comic book special. We were lucky that insects scaled up poorly. Their legs were too thin for the weight, too fragile.

Not to say that his atomic monsters were safe. Even after we put them down, they could still move. Something about arthropod nervous systems--they're more distributed. I remember cracking an ant's legs with a baseball bat while its body kept running around. The head was a limp mess of bullet holes, but the rest of it was still chasing after the last soldier it'd seen.

We stormed the lab that same day. Cooke had these goons waiting inside. They were guards, technically, but they weren't people anymore. Too tall, all muscle, these creepy, flexible feet--those freaks could climb, and one hit from their hamfists put you in the infirmary.

Cooke was on the intercom, bragging about the genetic superiority of man's common ancestor. He said he'd used his beam to clock them back, to transform them into humanity's brutish predecessor while shielding their heads and precious modern minds. Somatic mutation, I've been told, is pure grade A crackpot bullshit, but we've got the corpses on ice. Cooke had his ape-guards, and I ate a hairy knuckle that cracked my jaw.

That's why I was late to the fireworks. They had Cooke pinned in the main lab with a few of his close assistants. He was charging up the atomic beam to fire it, but none of his men could get close enough to turn it on us. Cooke himself was just barking into his handset about how foolish we were, about how he was going to bring about a golden age of supermen.

We didn't have an angle on him. He was hunkered down behind a steel table and nobody was really interested in risking ricochets in a concrete room, so there was a lot of yelling and demands for surrender, but Cooke didn't hear a word of it. He finished up his speech, telling everyone that the beam had been reversed.

It was set to move anyone struck forward in evolutionary history. Not backwards. After being bathed in its mighty atomic rays, he would become the next step in evolution. He would go beyond humanity. I'm not kidding, those were his words.

We'd seen a lot of monsters that day. When Cooke threw down his handset and ran for the beam weapon, we opened fire, but he hid behind an x-ray shield on rollers, and we didn't put him down. He got into range of the machine, and the corporal called a cease fire. Nobody wanted to shoot the atomic weapon. We'd heard about radiation sickness, and we wanted no part of a shattered fuel cell.

Cooke confused our hesitation with awe. He shouted about a vision of godhood, and then the beam charged up and hit him straight in the chest. It was like someone had turned on a camera flash, but it didn't turn off. The endless light just kept coming, and we saw Cooke at the middle of it, a figure in silhouette with runny edges, head thrown back in triumphant laughter.

We closed our eyes and turned away. Some of the braver soldiers faced into the inferno and aimed, preparing to fire--safety be damned--and wondering if Cooke had become something beyond our understanding.

The light died away, and Cooke stood before us in all his splendor. He huffed and held his arms out high and roared, "I am tomorrow!"

But the damnedest thing was, he wasn't the slightest bit changed.

After his arrest, we spent a very long time trying to figure out if we'd missed something subtle, something psionic or supernatural about Cooke. I'll tell you what, when he died of a heart attack a few years later, we were damn happy. Finally, an autopsy! We cut him open and ran every test on every bit, and everything turned out mostly okay. Even genetically, he was just a man.

That one was a real head scratcher for almost a decade.

Our best guess was that the beam didn't work because there was no next step in evolution. It tried to leap him forward, but there was nothing he was yet to become. Evolution was a reaction to selection pressures. It wasn't a path or a ladder. There was a definite past, but there was no definite future.

The man who was a doctor today said, "We had to summon old books out of the soft world to find a diagnosis."

"Then he really is sick?" asked the patient's brother. "Shouldn't the softness prevent that?"

The doctor was a master of communion with the soft spirits who lived in the soft world. He nodded sagely. "It's something hard, maybe inside of him. His symptoms match an old hard world disease."

The patient, Isaac, was staring at his hands, turning them slowly. "I can see the softness on my skin."

Isaac's brother, Norton, looked at the doctor meaningfully. The softness was not something people could see, not directly. If they pressed on something long enough, they could feel it. The world had a little too much give, both physically and conceptually, and with the right communion, a practitioner could manifest something out of nothing. They could bring food and water out of the soft world.

There was no scarcity now.

"What's it called?" Isaac asked. “What’s wrong with me?”

"Dysgeusia. It's a distortion of your sense of taste. Most sufferers in the hard world described tasting metal, ashes, and feces."

"Ashes! Yes, everything is covered in ashes.” Isaac gingerly sniffed his fingertips. "Just as you say, doc. Metal, ashes, and shit.” His hands dropped to his sides. “The whole world is a slurry of shit."

The doctor ignored Isaac and spoke to Norton. “The disease is neurological. It’s inside him, not in the softness, which is why the spirits can’t help him.”

“Is he broken?” Norton asked.

"It’s not just taste!” Isaac interrupted. “Don’t you see it?" He opened his palms at them, as if they were full of more than air. "Don’t you smell it? The world is soft because it's covered in living, boiling slime. It's ashes in honey. It's ground up iron filings in shit, and it's everywhere. It eats at everything but us." He slapped the armrest. "It's soft like heavy mud. Can't you hear it? Can't you tell?"

Norton frowned. “The world is soft because it's full of spirits. It's not covered in mud."

"There was a hole in the back of my neck," Isaac said. "Something fell out, and I washed the hole in the rain. Then it closed up, and I saw the world."

Norton glanced at the doctor. "Have you looked at the back of his neck?"

The doctor tapped the back of his own neck. "He's talking about the circle of softness at the base of your skull. I've checked. His is fine, but a little harder than I'm used to feeling. Still, the old hard books don't mention the softness or the neck for that matter. Dysgeusia is inside the brain, way up inside."

"All the food is made of ashes," Isaac said to the doctor. "All the water is grey with ashes. Why can't you see it?"

"He refuses to eat," Norton said.

"If I eat enough, the softness will dig into my spine again." Isaac touched his tongue to his fingertip and flinched. "The ashes are still hot. They don't burn me, but they know I see them. They’re alive."

The doctor cast Norton a melancholy look. 

"Is there anything we can do?" Norton asked.

"I could summon pills out of the softness, but..."

"I've seen your pills," Isaac said bitterly, "and your medicines and your injections and everything is all goo. It's all fucking grey slime."

"Can he be cured at all?" Norton asked the doctor.

“The spirits in the softness have promised to try,” the doctor said.

"The ashes are crawling into my mouth while I sleep." Isaac closed his eyes and squeezed them tight. Thin tears dribbled onto his cheeks. "Fuck this slime world. Shit--I'm made out of digested shit and slime."

The doctor put a hand on Norton's shoulder. "There's not much else I can do here, at least not today. Listen, I have to summon a home out of the softness this evening, and I need to commune for a while." Without communion, he couldn't assume the new role. He had to learn from the soft spirits. “I’ll become a doctor again tomorrow, okay? I’ll help your brother.”

Norton sighed and nodded. “What should I do for now?”

"Just pray to the spirits to help your brother, feed him when he'll eat, and have faith. We live in a soft world. Miracles will happen."

Norton looked at Isaac, who was keeping his eyes closed and breathing shallowly. "Thanks. I'll look after him."

"It tastes like ashes because it's made of ashes," Isaac said. "It's the ashes of the hard world." He opened his eyes. "Grey everywhere," he said, "except for me and you. I wish you could heal yourself, doctor. I wish you could take out the softness in yourself and see the real world too."

What questions were asked of the Starmaker?

The People of the Sun asked, "Is a mind distinct from its body?"

The Starmaker answered no. Every instance is also its embodiment.

The Many-Sighted asked, "What is the nature of the Starmaker?"

The Starmaker answered, I am one configuration of an extended description. My complexity is order out of noise. I described the rules behind your stars. I answer your questions because it's possible, and possibility and necessity are identical across all worlds.

You are one of the Wise Earthly Ones. Your representative asked, "What exists?"

The Starmaker asked if this was a question of ontology.

She was named Elsa. "I'm not sure," she said. "I can give you an example."

The Starmaker asked if she wanted an answer for the example only.

"For all things like it," she said.

What is your example?

"Does a center of gravity exist?"

The Starmaker answered yes.

"Are you sure? If I name a set of objects, that set will have a different center of gravity than any other set. That seems like an abstraction, not reality."

Do you believe abstractions don't exist?

"They're not real like an electron is real."

The Starmaker didn't see the distinction.

"Forget the electron," Elsa said. "Look at me. I'm real. If I touch my wrist, it pushes back. Its reality is independent of anything else. A center of gravity depends on a set of objects. It's just a relationship, a description."

The Starmaker saw her distinction, but it was reification.

"What is reification?"

It was to mistake something that wasn't concrete for something that was.

Elsa thought on that for some time. "I think you've misunderstood me. I'm not saying that centers of gravity are real. I'm saying they're the abstractions, and abstractions aren't real."

The Starmaker understood her confusion. The object of her reification wasn't the center of gravity. She correctly identified it as a relationship which could be modeled by an equation. The object of reification was herself.

"What do you mean? I'm clearly real."

Elsa was clearly real, but she was not clearly concrete. Properties she believed were innate--having mass, temperature, taking up space--were themselves only relationships with all other objects in her world.

Something has mass only because it reacts to external forces. Something has temperature because it can exchange energy with its environment. Something takes up space because other things are forbidden from sharing the same state.

"I'm particular," Elsa said. "I'm not arbitrary like a center of mass."

All instances were in some sense arbitrary. What was real was the abstraction itself--the physics which the Starmaker defined. Those rules defined relationships; those relationships defined all possible worlds. All those worlds were as real as the relationships that contained them.

Your world is not modeled by physics. Your world is physics.

The Starmaker told Elsa that she lived a world made of math, and her instance was no more real than any instance of a center of gravity. Her reification was like believing that 1+1 was more real than addition itself.

"That's not what I believe. That's absurd."

The Starmaker wouldn't deny her existence. It told only the truth. It sympathized with her mistake. A particular instance could only see its world. It had no reason to trust in the Starmaker that it was merely one of many.

Reification was not a fault in her. It was a measure of what was relevant to her.

"I don't believe you," Elsa said.

10/2/2291 - Transcript of Bottlenose in UNESCO World Heritage Site Shark Bay

Translation by Maria Glasnine Ph.D and Marcus Torelli Ph.D. - version 3

Underwater mic pickup at Research Station 017.

Glo was a young male bottlenose dolphin. He found Patty, an older female, playing a color sorting game on the research station interface. She would complete a match and swim around the station singing a mix of deliberate nonsense and navigational terminology while waiting for the station to reset.

"Why are you excited?" Glo sang out.

Literally: "Causes excitation/agitation, (Patty's dolphin name, elongated to show emphasis on her excitement and not his own)."

"I am using the time. I am working! Working!" Patty sang.

Literally: "Daytime swims quickly (homophone, presumed to mean duration instead of action in specific contexts or intonations; the ambiguity may be a deliberate joke, as she is swimming very fast and Glo halfheartedly tries to follow her while chittering or laughing). I hunt smallness now (tonal variant on hunting for prey; metaphor suggests hunting for a solution, as if it was a small fish)  Hunt (repeated with emphasis, may be another joke based on ambiguity. She turns and snaps at the water in front of Glo. He curves away.)

"The artificial rock people are away. They won't pay you."

Literally: "People makes (tonal variant on word to inflict, flatness suggesting not inflicting on an animal but creating an effect on an object) stone (double-sound, local dialect, may mean a hard surface or it may specify the waterpoof materials of the research station. Glo is known to repeatedly touch the station with his flank and even the surface of his eye) absent. No rewards Patty."

"Want to play?" Patty asked. She stopped in front of the station and nosed the three buttons to dial up the game.

Literally: (Glo's name, elongated to emphasize him) play.

"That's not working."

Literally: Patty no hunt (for an activity). Glo has a chastising inflection to his squeal.

The game began on the screen. Patty pressed a button which flashed green, then pressed another one that flashed red. "That's one turn," she said. Both cards cleared. She pressed green again, and said to Glo, "Play!"

Literally: One circle swam. Play!

He swam up and turned upside down over Patty, then nosed a button. It flashed green, and the cards were matched. They both celebrated loudly. Patty's song suggested rapid upward movement to jump. Glo was talking about the joy of biting a fish. Both were highly distorted and may contain secondary meanings. Overtones of increased trust and pair bonding in the celebration.

"Red here," Patty said, nosing the red card.

Literally: "Blood visible here." Colors are of low importance to bottlenose vision and intelligence, with a few exceptions including the color of blood. Most colors are exclusively referred to by environmental names. The exceptions are black and blue, which are sometimes used to mean night and day but most often describe the color (and associated clarity) of seawater.

Glo nosed a purple card. "Unhappy!"

Literally: "An empty bite."

A third dolphin from the pod sang out in the distance, "Thermocline rising."

Literally: "Temperature gradient shrinking upwards--***untranslatable***" Dolphin navigational speech is more accurate and thorough than human navigational speech. Detailed directions and a description of water quality were included but cannot be reliably translated, given their compression and the massive amount of pod-specific jargon and slang. The suggestion was to come hunt, as the presence of clouds had been drawing up and thinning the thermocline level all afternoon, and schools of fish were now crowded in the comfortable shallows.

Several other dolphins in the pod relayed the message in case others hadn't clearly heard it.

"Are you hungry?" Glo asked.

Literally: "Patty (emphasis) need to hunt."

"Play..." She clicked unhappily. "No, I'm hungry."

Literally: "Play, no. I need to hunt."

Glo sang out, "Thermocline rising!" as he whipped towards the rest of the pod.

"Thermocline rising!" Patty sang after him. They were gone.

The transcript ends as the pod was occupied for the rest of the day.

Maria Glasnine is the chair for Marine Biology and Cetacean Linguistics at Perth and the foremost expert on Pacific dolphin languages. Marcus Torelli is the Dean of Sophont Studies at Syracuse University. Their combined efforts and translation produced this version of the document in only nine days.

Pierre Vaucher stood on the shallow deck of the CRV Origin and watched a boat crane slowly lower twenty-thousand dollars of waterproofed electronics to the seabed. At this point, his job was done. The crane operator would place the research station, and two scuba divers would secure it to supports nailed directly into the bedrock.

The rest would be handled by Dr. Amiva and her graduate students. From what Pierre understood, they were going to hire dolphins to associate sound and imagery, in order to create a tentative translation of the local bottlenose dialect.

He called Amiva on the walkie-talkie. "MBRC, how's it look? Over."

"Origin, signal and power are clear. Over."

Pierre had directed the placement of a wrist-thick cable, two-kilometers long, bringing power and fiber optics from the Marine Biology Research Center on Meer Island. It'd been installed on deck before the research station was lowered. Dr. Amiva was back in the Center checking out her instruments.

Pierre threw the thumbs up to the crane operator. Nothing broken on the way down. With official business out of the way, he dropped the radio conventions. "MBRC, I'd like a quick chat."

"Go ahead, Origin."

"Doctor, may I ask a question? Why did I just install a set of oversized LEDs?"

Amiva took a moment to respond. "You weren't supplied a copy of the grant document? The proposal?"

"No ma'am, my predecessor left me very little. I know this is about dolphin smarts, but not too much else."

"They're not LEDs," Amiva said, "they're pressure pads with OLED displays. The dolphins can punch them with their nose."

"Why?" Amiva didn't respond for a second, so he said, "Over."

"Sorry. It's for games, recordings, audio playback. We're making work fun for the dolphins. If they get bored, fish won't be enough to bring them back."

"So you can hire dolphins?"

"Yes. It's hard without captivity, but bottlenose are more than capable of understanding what an employer is. They won't expect payment unless we're around and they've done the work. If we show up to work on time, they'll show up too. They're incredibly punctual, so long as they trust you."

"That's not the same as real work, though," Pierre said.

"Why not?"

"You can't fire them, can you? No contracts either. They don't need the work."

"You can stop paying them. That's the same as firing them. And they don't need the work because they're all self-employed hunters."

"I'm skeptical."

"Labor isn't a complex issue for dolphins. Their natural state is that everyone hunts and eats what they can catch, with a little sharing inside the pod for the young and old. When they learn about work, it's like you learning about advanced mathematics. You can see there's something complex and difficult there, but you'll stick to arithmetic and leave the rest alone."

"Sounds like you're saying it's too complex for them to understand."

"I'm saying it's too complex and useless to make it worth learning. Imagine if you were a hunter-gatherer, and someone tried to teach you about calculus. You wouldn't care, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't be capable of learning it."

Pierre stared out at the muddy bay waters. Was she saying that the dolphins beneath the waves were equivalent to human primitives? "I'm not convinced," he said to her. "They're just animals."

"They're the smartest animal in the world after human beings, and cetaceans are arguably the only other sophonts we've ever met. They don't look smart to you because they're an alien intelligence, Pierre. They live in an environment with low scarcity and little intraspecies conflict. Most of their problems are fixed simply by splitting up the pod or exiling the criminal. Their primary competition is other species, and they can't reproduce fast enough to build a massive population."

"Yeah, so they don't have to be smart."

"But they are smart, Pierre, just in ways that aren't important to humans. We had to carve out our ecological niches with our tools. We have to live in gigantic, dense packs. Dolphins don't have these needs and problems."

"If they're not smart like us, then how do you know they're smart?"

"Their languages. We can't translate them, not easily, not like we translated bullfrog and groundhog. There are regional languages and dialects."

"So they're noisy?"

"They're biologically intelligent too. They have the second highest encephalization quotient after humanity. Brain tissue is metabolically expensive, but they grow far more of it for their body mass than the average mammal does."

"Big brains," Pierre said flatly. He swore he'd heard that was a useless measure, but he guessed he was probably wrong.

"They have the second highest growth from youth, again after people. Their brain has a large difference between birth weight and adult weight, and the more it grows, the more capable they are of incredibly fast, complex learning."

"Ok, that's interesting," Pierre admitted. "What're they learning though?"

"Hunting lessons. Languages. Social tricks. This stuff isn't born into them. They're like us, to a degree. They have to invest a lot of time and energy into making themselves productive members of society. Not as much as humans, of course, but we're freaks. We used intelligence to enter niches that literally didn't exist, like missile predator and farmer, and that requires a degree of intelligence unlike anything a reasonable sophont should need."

"That's a strange attitude."

"The smartest non-human sophonts are all natural alpha predators. Bottlenose and orcas are the top two after mankind. We made ourselves into... whatever we needed to be. That's truly abnormal, given all the other intelligent life on Earth."

Pierre imagined the dolphins that'd been caught in tuna nets. He remembered the black meat sashimi he'd seen in Kyoto. He better than most knew about the overfishing disasters of the 20th century, and the oncoming global collapse of fisheries in the late 21st. It was hard to accept that dolphins were intelligent in that special way, what Dr. Amiva called a sophont--a species that was intelligent, sentient, sapient, and participated in a complex living culture.

"Thanks for the chat, MBRC. Over and out."

"Copy. You're welcome, Origin. MBRC out."

Pierre turned off the walkie-talkie. It was easier to imagine that they'd killed and eaten mere animals, so that's what he'd believe for now. It'd take a lot more to convince him otherwise. Maybe Dr. Amiva's dictionary would do it. Maybe not.

It was the time of night when the street lights down by the beach were flashing yellow, an official warning to be watchful even though the roads were empty. It was astronomical twilight, the equivalent of night's evening, and this far north it'd be another thirty minutes to civil twilight, the first light preceding the dawn.

It wasn't a time of day widely recognized. Even night owls were unfamiliar with it; by then they were winding down indoors. Astronomers intimately understood it. Dim stars disappeared, washed out in thin scattered sunlight from beyond the edges of the Earth's shadow. Most passed through it in a drone-state, collecting garbage, delivering goods, opening up shop at the bakery...

Then there was Mary. She had sensitive eyes, and astronomical twilight was a kind of subtle blueness, a celestial energy that she could see.

She worked at the university library at night, and she had keys to every door and room. When it wasn't crunch time leading up to tests, she had the entire building to herself, and she was fond of checking out books, finding a place to perch, and reading until dawn. It wasn't much of a job, but her ears were sharp, and her reputation was terrifying.

Nobody bothered the library with Mary around.

Unless of course they wanted to speak with Mary.

The dean was fond of checking in every Monday morning, when Mary's day was coming to an end. She wasn't exactly his daughter, but some of his genetics were in her, and she was the legal ward of the university.

She was reading by an open window on the seventh floor, stretched out on a couch with the book balanced on her stomach.

"Hey dad," she said when he was close enough to be seen. There weren't any lights on, but Mary could read by the glow of light pollution. The window was more than bright enough for her.

"Mary," the dean said. "How are you this morning?"

"It's almost bedtime," she said idly. "I thought I'd finish this book, but it's not really meant to be read. Not like other books."

The dean picked a chair across from the couch. There were low study tables everywhere, but Mary never used them. "What is it?" he asked.

She turned the cover to him. Ulysses. "I'm not clever enough for it."

"Nobody is. I'm not even sure the writer was."

"I'm supposed to be better," she said quietly.

"You are better."

She sighed and closed the book. "Why don't I like spending time with people?"

"What do you mean? You love spending time with me, don't you?"

"I do, but I read all these stories about good friends and passionate lovers, and that's not me. I'm supposed to be good at everything."

"Do you remember what the psychologists used to say?"

"Probably."

"You remember too well. Everyone else forgets the painful things they do to each other, but it sticks with you."

"Yes," Mary said.

"You don't mind me because I'm mellow. I'm meek."

"You are," she agreed.

"It's a wonder I survived in academia. They're all sharks, you know."

"They are."

"You're thinking about something, aren't you Mary?"

She turned on the couch and looked at the dean directly. "Will they ever make me a boyfriend?"

The dean frowned. She asked this question every year or so, but it was obviously on her mind more often than not. "It'd require some legislation, Mary. If we made another member of your subspecies, you could breed. The government doesn't want that until they're sure that you're safe."

"They're afraid we'd replace everyone?"

"Like man and the neanderthal, yes, but understand you're going to outlive everyone born today. They're intimidated." 

"I just want to meet someone who thinks like me." She laid the book on her stomach and started softly drumming out a rhythm on the hardcover. It was complex, regular, and completely effortless. "The dawn is my enemy."

"Is that a quote?"

"From an old television station. They used to sign off by telling the audience, 'The dawn is your enemy.'"

"Is it?"

"All those terrible people come around when the sun rises. At night, it's quiet and my eyes don't hurt."

"You're up most of the day too."

"I still sleep when the sun is up."

She slept about three hours every day, normally from about 7AM to 10AM. She had an apartment of her own, but the dean's office had a fold out couch and a blanket. If she was feeling especially lonely, she dozed while he worked.

"Mary, even if we made someone with the same sensitivity and memory, that wouldn't make them a perfect match."

"I know," she said.

"If we get the chance, we'll make a whole population--"

"No guarantees, I know!" She closed her eyes, tried to control her frustration. "But I'm capable of being more social. I know this. I just need someone who knows how easy it is to hurt my feelings."

"There are regular people out there; nice people."

"That doesn't mean they're here. That doesn't mean they want someone who sleeps a few hours every day like a vampire."

The dean put his hands on his knees. It wasn't worth arguing with her when she felt bad. She always accepted his reasoning, and that just made her angry at herself for feeling bad in the first place.

"You're still young--"

"I'll always be young."

"No, I mean you're really, truly young, Mary. When you get up today, go to lunch at the cafeteria. Find a table. Speak with some strangers."

"That's a bad idea."

"You're pretty. That's a real advantage."

"Dad, stop. They'll know who I am. They won't treat me like a stranger, and they won't be my friend. Not with my reputation."

"You're not a night stalker," the dean said.

"I dread the dawn."

"You dread dealing with strangers. Someday, trust me, you'll prefer the day." He didn't want to insist on anything more, so he left the rest unsaid.

She stopped drumming. "Like someday, I'll understand this book?"

"If you really try to read it, yes."

She sat up and stared at the title in her hands. "I'll try."

"It'll be a real challenge, but it's worth it."

"Yeah," she said.

"I need to get down to the office to open up now."

"Of course," she said. "I'll finish up here."

The dean rose. "Love you, Mary. Sleep well."

He was only a few feet away when she called out, "Dad?"

He paused. "Yes?"

"Can I sleep on the fold out couch today?"

"Sure. I'll be in and out because of a few meetings, but that's more than fine."

"Thanks," she said. "See you soon."

He left on the elevator, and she looked out the window. Astronomical twilight was becoming nautical twilight, and the horizon was clearly visible to her keen eyes. There wasn't much time left before staff arrived in force with the rising sun.