Reach for Infinity

WILDER STILL, THE STARS


Kathleen Ann Goonan


MEMORIES ARE STONES across a swift-running creek. I teeter on one and leap to the next, breathing in the scent of life-giving water, hearing the roar, the rush, of time.

Beneath them, the abyss.


MY ROMANCE WITH space began when I was four, when I visited the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. At least, that’s the first visit I remember.

And do I, really? I am one hundred and thirty years old. More or less.

I rub my thumb over the smooth groove across the middle of a palm-sized stone in my hand.


A FRIGID, MOONLESS night in January, 1954. Dad bundles me up in so many sweaters, tights, and snow pants that I waddle. The storm hit after my mother left for the Naval Observatory that morning, and ceased suddenly at dark, leaving two feet of snow.

The city is deserted; enchanted. Stranded cars buried in snow loom like small hillocks. Big wind flings fine, stinging pellets of ice against my face. Dad scoops me onto his shoulders and trudges up the plowed center of Massachusetts Avenue, which steepens as it winds up Observatory Hill.

I have seen the graceful iron gates of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. hundreds of times since then, flanked by black obelisks embossed with the seal of the USNO: a woman flies through the air, holding a planet aloft in both hands.

That first time the gates swung open, it seemed like I was entering fairyland. And indeed, I was: space was an unattainable place to which I could never travel, filled with wonders stranger than I could imagine.

My father speaks into an intercom. A man in a crisp white Navy uniform steps out of the guardhouse to welcome us. “Hi, Ed. And little May – you’ve grown! I broke a path. Dr. Jainkuru is waiting.”

As we climb the final curve to the highest point in D.C., I am like the prince climbing the glass mountain, except that it is ice. The deep voice of the wind is that of a ravening beast. Ancient trees, flailing like mad creatures, reach out to grab me with gigantic, crabbed arms. The otherworldly dome, gleaming white by day but now dim as a shadow, gradually emerges as we round the hill.

My mother stands in the open doorway, waving us in. For a moment, she does not even seem like my mother, for she wears a long, dressy coat and low heels. When we bustle inside she peels off my mittens and stuffs them into my pockets so they won’t get lost, and she is Mom again. “Brrr. Keep your coats on!” She laughs. “Only two hardy souls came for my talk. We have plenty of goodies to take home.”

We climb a graceful curved stairway to a domed room. The ceiling divides, revealing a slice of space. My mother raises the floor, but I still must climb a ladder to look through the telescope.

“That’s Saturn.”

At first, all I see is a shifting blob. It sharpens into a brownish sphere, encircled by a flat ring that looks good for running around and around on.

“I want to go there.”

“Maybe someday,” says my mother.

“Where’s the sun?”

“It’s on the other side of the earth right now. You know that – remember? But you saw thousands of suns when you walked here tonight. The stars are suns.”

“They’re too little.”

“Earth is very close to the star we call the sun. That’s why it looks so big. Those other suns might have planets too, with life. But they’re very far away. Too far to go to.” She smiles. “Except, maybe, in science fiction.”

“I want to go to the other suns, too.”

“Maybe you can figure out a way when you grow up. A lot of people have the same dream.”

The planets and their moons, shrouded in ice and gas, are enticingly bizarre. I grow to know them like people, catalogue their characteristics, study them fervently.

They are pure wilderness. I write in a notebook, in my childish hand: Wild, the planets. Wilder still, the stars.


WE CALL IT Stardust.


MY PARENTS HAVE died, so I live with my cousin Irene near the Blue Ridge. We are ten. Our china horses gallop on board the space ship. Stardust reads the minds of the china horses, which are much smarter than the real horses we ride across the whitefenced pastures of Blue Ridge Farms, the old-money estate of Irene’s family. That is because real horses hide their brilliance. But Stardust knows and understands them. They must flee the Earth. It grows pristine fields, mountains, and rivers, and finds the perfect sun, out of all the suns we can see at night. As they travel to Horse Planet, they will be wild and free; the ship will care for them. When they arrive at Horse Planet, they will rule the world.

Sounds like a plan.

Forty years later, Irene and I form Infinity Tech and begin R&D.


SLEEPING PORCH: SAGGING, third floor, delightful. July: overpowering scent of roses. Almost my 130th birthday – July, 2080.


IN THE DIM just-dawn, I wake, but do not cloud, ears filled with finches in sudden chorus, susurrating white oak leaves that let moving light-specks dapple the walls, and the oak limb I should cut down scraping against the roof.

People now don’t grasp the irony of the term clouding, which caught on such a long time ago that its origin is the stuff of crossword puzzle clues. Though I’m sharpened by data when I connect with it, clouding clouds my self. I must allow that nameless, mysterious something its daily time. If I don’t practice, I go barking mad.


I am aware that many consider stark barking mad to be my constant state.

After sitting, I don my data bracelet, walk through my decrepit, beloved mansion, let out Sybil, my old-fashioned unenhanced mutt, and sort through neurology studies at my kitchen table. Right now, I’m working for a company that needs expert testimony in court.

A few hours later, I sip midmorning tea, data bracelet tossed next to a vase of pink peonies that copiously shed petals, and consider that my birthday, fast approaching, might be a lonely affair. After 130 years – hell, after a hundred years – one begins to think seriously about one’s brand spanking new oldness. I am healthy, despite my trips to Mars and to the Moon, but am I wise? Assuredly not.

I’ve worked hard at maintaining relationships, but life is a lot more comfortable if you have people around who share your referents. Most of my dear friends died tragically young, on the cusp of medical advances that would have let them live. Progress to my present age was not one of smooth acceleration. There were cliffs of near-death, bullets dodged, economic hurdles overcome, and reprieves granted at the last minute after years of debilitation. People as old as myself are not common, but will be in the future. Most people born after 2020 will probably live to be 160 or older.

I’ve had the time and resources to follow all of my interests, which is the best thing about living a long time. My first degree, predictably, was astronomy, but I tasted astrophysics and other engineering disciplines before settling on neuroscience, at least for several decades now. I never followed a straight path.

My big achievement? Irene and I developed a new kind of space vehicle – flexible, one that could adjust to changing conditions on very long voyages.

Stardust. Ahead of its time, mothballed for twenty years for lack of funds. My fault. I probably can’t even think in that league now, no matter what neuroplasticity drugs I might try.

Well. I’ll just have a birthday party. I decide to invite my zen friends, the other three-quarters of my jazz quartet, and one of my next-door neighbors, a woman who has gone Cat – Siamese, to be exact, with beautiful ivory face-fur, who long ago tired of her apparently unrescindable choice (she as much as told me she ate my koi) – farmers from the Market, Irene (though she probably will not have time to come), and all of my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I throw in some new acquaintances.

Already, I am cheered. I know lots of people. I’m normal. Well-adjusted.

You gotta have a dream.

I decide to get out of the house for lunch.


BLACK, DEEP COLD. I do not know how long it lasts. A second. A light-year.


I MEET AMANDA in a café a few blocks from my house. “Hello. I am your server.” Gazing down at me with blue eyes, her face perfect as that of a china doll, she exudes a strange smell – nine parts homelessness and one almost-disguised part Artificial Person. Newer AP’s lack this smell, which is like the undertone of a complex perfume.

“How’s the special today?”

“Great.” Her voice is toneless.

As she bends her head over her device to put in my order, I take a deep breath. Relax. Let go of your anger.

Right. That never works for me, either.

I’m sure that the restaurant isn’t paying Amanda. She probably sleeps on a pallet, eats scraps, and doesn’t know to complain – and if she does know, is afraid to. In a word, AP’s are childlike. No one befriends them or interacts with them. Help groups are often a front for manufacturers, who want to reel in their lost, discarded, or runaway products before someone else figures out their secrets, the government, which wants to use them to indict manufacturers and owners, or vigilantes, who simply want to rid the world of this new affront to human dignity. Dozens are on Mars, where they help maintain Giovanni, the colony, which withers while countries and corporations spend fortunes and years arguing over ancient treaties and agreements.

Creating an AP is horrendously expensive. Using standardized DNA printing templates created for legal medical research, artificial and recombinant DNA, and other bio advances, blank adult humanoids – fully functioning but comatose humans – are infused with virus-borne agents that initiate and accelerate neural development a millionfold. The pre-AP is stimulated with the language of choice, and certain parts of individual brains are more intensely oxygenated, depending on the use to which the AP is committed. Content organizes the brain. Sessions of intensive, finely targeted fine and large motor control exercises give them a developmental kick. I have no doubt that many of them die in the process, or soon after awakening.

I feel responsible. Some of my neurology research fed into the possibility of Amandas.

“My name is May,” I tell her. “Is Amanda your real name?” She looks down at her uniform pocket, twists it with both hands. “Yes.”

“Would you like to come home with me, Amanda? You can eat, bathe, and decide what you want to do.”

“Okay,” she says, obviously not even imagining that I might harm her. Her blue eyes, her hesitant smile, are dazzling. I take her hand.

We have almost reached the open front door when a woman steps in front of us. “Where do you think you’re going with my J?” J is short for jiang-shee, Chinese for zombies, because they first showed up in China about two years ago. Then, almost overnight, they were everywhere. Criminals love them. They can do the dirty work. Some appear only intelligent enough to perform very simple, repetitive jobs, but often, they have savantlike capabilities. APs are one among thousands of technological wonders that seem to manifest suddenly, the way smartphones became ubiquitous in the early century, so indispensible and seductive that everyone surrendered.

I bluff. “This woman does not belong to you. I’m a tracker.”

“What?”

“This AP is the property of my boss.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But she lets us pass. Her next step might be to call and turn us in, but I’m gambling she won’t.

Outside is a pleasant, tree-shaded sidewalk where people shop, lunch, stroll. I signal for a pod, and she gets in, again, unquestioning. I tell it, “The Washington Monument,” and the pod moves off, self-driving, silent except for the light tone that proclaims its presence and harmonizes with the other pods and small busses that fill Connecticut Avenue. They flow around bicycles and pedestrians. The terrible carnage of bicyclists, pedestrians, and automobile passengers is a horror of the past, inexplicable to those born since it ended.

I study the perfect profile of this manufactured human as she stares out the window, wondering who she truly is.

I think about what to ask her. How old are you? That would be a good question. I fear they have pre-programmed short lives to create a market for new, improved models and, perhaps, to keep them from developing into something uncontrollable. However, she probably can’t answer honestly. Most are engineered so that it is impossible for them to understand that they are AP’s; thus, they cannot betray their origin and get their manufacturer or owner in trouble. Or agitate. They are similar, in this regard, to some right-hemisphere stroke victims. One possible result of a right-hemisphere stroke is left-side paralysis, coupled with the stroke victim’s inability to understand that their left leg does not work. They believe they can walk, try to walk, and even though they always fail, they never learn that walking is impossible. In the same way, AP’s cannot acknowledge that they are created.


They believe that they are normal humans.

How about Are there others like you? A community, someone you can turn to? But all AP’s are unique. Expensive, created by different entities for different reasons; chock-full of heavily guarded biological trade secrets.

“Where do you live?” I ask.

“Here. I live here.”

“Where is ‘here’?”

She smiles and gestures. “All around. Here.”

I’d vaguely planned some elaborate hugger-mugger: mingle with tourists, take the Metro, grab a d-meter at a kiosk – the only way to tell if tiny drones are locked onto you. Drones were made completely illegal in D.C. in 2025, but droners are always one step ahead of the law. They can be anywhere, anything.

Because I don’t reflexively cloud every time I turn around – in fact, I left my data bracelet at home – I can’t be tracked. But Amanda probably can be.

I realize: maybe she knows. “Are you being tracked?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I turned it off.”

She is more aware of her situation than I first surmised. “The YouTel,” I say, deciding to believe her.

We get out at the snazzy YouTel, where you design your own space with nanotech – the limited, heavily regulated nanotech that has become the civilian norm, though military and space programs can do anything they please – and pass the French Embassy. After a few blocks, we enter the cul-de-sac where the local Victorian embarrassment no one has the power to change overpowers newer faux-Classical homes that cower at both sides, the owners of which probably plot my death.

Huge New American Chestnut trees shade the dark green, turreted mansion my parents fell in love with over a century ago, and it was old then. My acre is rich with generations of gardens gone wild. I wish that I could afford to keep it up. I get a bit of money from Infinity Tech, but about twenty years ago I sold most of my stock to help one of my sons, which was a fiasco any way you look at it. Irene spent years buying it all back. My son lost the money.

My house needs... everything. Sometimes I’m almost ready to succumb to nanotech plumbing, wiring, roof. A huge investment up front, but touted to last “forever.” I would lose my historic tax exemption, though. It’s expensive to live a long time, and I have not invested wisely. To say the least.

I give Amanda the ten-cent tour.

“The kitchen.” Most people swoon at the high, glass-door cupboards, the marble table in the center of the vast room, the tiny black-and-white tiles on the floor, and the fireplace, and I explain that in its heyday the Big Green One had a large kitchen staff. Breakfast in bed for sir and madam and fifteen house guests? Dinner party for twenty-five? No problem. Amanda just nods.

I open the French doors of the morning room, filled with musical instruments, and she catalogues them. “Chickering grand piano, 1921. Martin guitar, 1945.” She continues with the saxes, clarinets, mandolins until I open the pocket doors. “The drawing room, where I paint.”

“The original floor plan has been changed.”

“What?”

“It was filed with the city in 1894. This room was a doctor’s office, and was accessed through the foyer, not through a pocket door.”

“I thought you were disconnected.”

“I am. I remember. I know the permitting history of all the properties in Northwest Washington. A job – development opportunity search. The houses on both sides were built by the same builder, in 2072, after older homes were torn down.” Definitely an AP.

I show her the wide back porch with run-down wicker furniture, where my overgrown ‘wildflower garden’ sweeps onto the lower steps like the waves of an oncoming storm. “Do you like gardening?”

“I don’t know.”

When she sees the long-unused business suits in my closet (I freely admit that I keep old things, and lots of them) she beams. “May I borrow the dark blue one? Maybe I could get my job back.” She plucks an expensive scarf from a hook, knots it artfully around her neck, and pirouettes before the mirror.

“Where did you work?”

“At... um, somewhere down on K Street.”

“What did you do?

“Analyzed data. Gave presentations.”

“What happened?”

“I woke up in a park. I don’t know how I got there.” A castoff: reasons, unknown.

“Amanda,” I say gently, “I don’t think you can get your job back by wearing the right suit.”

“Oh, yes, I can. How you look is everything. They made me wear yellow. It’s wrong for my complexion.”

“How did you get the restaurant job?”

“That was a job? There was nothing to do. There wasn’t any feed.”

“Feed?”

“Where you sit and they hook you up and feed you.”

“What do they feed you with?”

“I’ll show you.” She taps one of the faded hydrangeas on my wallpaper.

“It’s not there.”

She looks baffled.

“I only have it in one room.” It, the cloud, whatever. She follows me to a room on the third floor. Walking through the arched doorway activates the Wall. It is continuously updated, but I don’t wear it, implant it, or have it in every room. I don’t love it or hate it. Like my bracelet, it’s a tool. I flop down on some floor pillows. She stands, intense, before the wall and gestures.

Numbers flow down the screen so fast that they form a moving pattern. “It’s relaxing, isn’t it? It’s not in my brain. But it’s better than nothing.”

I open my mouth to tell her that I have the kind of interface she craves – a device that looks like a skullcap – when she reaches out and pulls the numbers from the wall in long shining strands, shapes them, hugs them, and then, to my surprise, throws off her clothes and lurfs them in big luminous blobs over her body with her hands, splashing herself with information.

She seems happy.

I walk to the end of the hall, open a screen door, and sit on a small, dangerously rickety balcony that overlooks a koi pond, now empty of carp but rich with algae.

My old colleagues have gone off the rails.

They, apparently, are the ones who are barking mad. They have sold out; released this delicate woman into the dangerous wilderness of us.

I begin to feel steely. Invigorated.

I can outbark them any day.


GENTLE WHISPER: DOING okay? Good.


I FIND THAT Amanda was ‘let go’ – really let go, like you might boot a stray dog back into the street – from Smith-Erikson, a gargantuan investment firm. I learn how to access her information via her cloud-stored data. I watch the entire illegal action, as well as her three-year-long life, in fast-forward. They kept her in special AP barracks, where she and her companions were fed, exercised, and allowed to watch movies. I surmise that Smith-Erikson had no idea that she could make this kind of record, which, of course, the manufacturer could watch. I ask Amanda if she can turn off the record or make it private and she says, oh, I made it private last week. She burns it out of the cloud.

“Did you make it private when you left Smith-Erikson?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“They were mean.”

When I was a teenager, I had two show-quality collies, a breed that, at the time, were all the rage. I sold their first litter. It was agony. I hated to let any of those defenseless pups out into the void of potential abuse, loneliness, injury. I had my dogs neutered.

Amanda reminds me of those puppies.



WHY NOT USE computers for AP tasks? One reason is that the human brain is the most powerful and intricate computing device known. Our brain performs billions of transactions a day; synchronizes information seamlessly behind the scenes of consciousness. People-like beings can easily sit in on meetings and in negotiations without the opposition being any wiser. Accusing someone of not being a person is lucratively actionable. Amanda could strut into a room, slide into a seat at a long, polished table, speak the language of statistics with charming ease, and close immense, complex deals.

You give them benefits, on paper, but when the AP disappears, after documentation about deep emotional problems or non-performance, those funds are easily re-absorbed by the Corporate Person. For the most part, they are curiously, alienly egoless. They will never demand pay, much less a raise – at least, not until they grow up. Not unless some barrier is broken.

They are new and shiny.

It’s the Wild West. Impossible to regulate.

If anyone can break that barrier and give them a sense of self, it’s me.

It’s something to do. I’m not sure that it is a good thing to do, because I don’t know what it will mean for them; to them.

I hesitate.

But my mother always said you needed something to look forward to. It would be good to look forward to a nice, new study. A new wilderness.

Amanda is asleep on the floor, in front of the darkened Wall. I bring her the suit she liked, that uniform that got locked into our brains in the early 1900’s, and leave it beside her, with a note to find me in the kitchen when she wakes. The suit will be tight, but tight will look great on her. The next day, I give her the run of my closet, but she wears the suit, with heels that must pinch, for a week before she gives it up.

That’s when a fleet of boxes arrives – beautiful nanotech clothes that I know are very expensive. Cheap as dirt to make, but the formulas are proprietary.

“You will have to return them,” I say. “I can’t afford them.”

“No one has to pay for them. I hacked them.”

“Amanda, that’s wrong.”

“Why?”

My lecture on how she is undermining capitalism, the arts, and the economic structure of the world is met with a shrug. “That’s crazy.”

Considering that her very existence may be doing the same damage, I suppose she’s right.


A STAR-MAP. One star slides toward me until its leaping gasarcs splash and twist against velvet infinity. Slide back, change view to schematic: planets orbit; moons abound. Habitable? Inhabited? Voices murmur. A stone with a smooth groove in the center rests in my palm. I grasp it tightly.


TREES, POTATOES, STORMS, planets, and me. We all have eyes.


ONCE I AWAKEN, they are easy to see. I notice Jack in Farragut Square. He seems mute. Thin, tall, with long, dark, greasy hair and a long nose, he gesticulates with a combination of broad and tiny gestures, animated, clear-eyed, and filthy, wearing a too-large tweed jacket open over a bare chest, shorts, and no shoes. I run a search revealing that he speaks no known sign language. Crowds flow past him, ignoring him as they ignore any bum.

I sit beside the statue of Admiral Farragut on his mighty steed, sword drawn, for hours before I rise, muttering Farragut’s Civil War battle cry, carved on the base of the statue: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”

I take the man’s hand, and call for a pod. He is compliant and, when we get home, extremely hungry. He is not deaf, yet he only speaks with signs. He emerges from his shower cleanshaven, long hair combed. He seems to like his little bedroom, and loves the Wall, where his motions splatter the surface like paint, which resolves into equations. Beyond me, certainly. But he quickly finds others with whom he can communicate; women and men from all over the world. They splat upon one another’s work in a rainbow of colors, nodding, applauding. I hear him laugh, but never hear words. He and Amanda battle for Wall time, so I surrender a few more walls to data. I have plenty of empty bedrooms.

Xia is a bike messenger by day – kinetic; valuable, as she streaks through G-town like the visual trail of an acid trip – and by weekend a Harley sailor, leaning into the curves of the Blue Ridge Parkway motorcycle lane with such fierce, acutely tilting joy that she scares the bejeezus out of me the one time I go with her. She has maps in her head, loves speed, has excellent reflexes, perfect vision, and is strong as a horse. She can also operate and repair any machine.

I find Olek sleeping on a grate near American University. He is long-limbed, ebony-black and has a British accent. He says that he worked there but that one day when he went back his ID didn’t work, and he couldn’t get another. “In fact, no one seemed to know me any longer.” He speaks beautifully and at length, a loquacious contrast to Jack. “What did you do there?” I ask. “I made vids.” In fact, I find him on thousands of vids, through a face-matching program. He delivers lectures about the history of physics and chemistry, up to and including the latest nanotech endeavors. I am watching one of them, a lecture on the discovery of the Higgs Boson, when he enters the room and sits beside me. “You have paid for that. There is no need.” He recites it verbatim, then answers my questions about dark matter until I reach the limit of my ability to ask.

They are all amazingly kind, empathic, and seem almost telepathic, but they are created to serve. I’m not sure how deep these behaviors, or any of their behaviors, go. They have vague ethnic facial characteristics – Amanda and Jack, mainstream American; Olek, Maasai; Xia, Chinese – but no culture; no depth. Being human is a culture in and of itself and they lack all but the most obvious human culture. I can see them replacing one’s beloved, but perhaps in a more compliant mode. A million nightmares dating from the Golem have finally come true.

Is it humane to deny them understanding of who and what they are? Of course not. I will find the key. And shouldn’t they at least have a normal lifespan? I will unlock their humanity.

I sit in my living room one evening after we have cleaned up the kitchen and reflect on what I’m doing. What am I doing? In the strange, roiling humansphere, what is now normal? We are constantly knocked flat by massive waves of the New that seem to come out of nowhere, tsunamis of powerful change that deposit some of us on high ground and leave the littoral strewn with those who didn’t make the grade.

It is said that some of the things that make us human are that we have language, we use tools, and we are creative. I have another qualifier: we are irrational. We constantly draw on irrationality, whether we know it or not. I would be heartened if they behaved irrationally. Playfully. Humans play. When was the last time I played?

They will be my play.

Working together, they assemble a pure white two-thousandpiece jigsaw puzzle in twenty minutes. It takes them that long because a certain amount of time is needed to physically move each piece. I give them a box from the attic full of an antique Underwood typewriter my charming grandchildren dismantled one rainy day. Not even knowing what it is, it only takes them a few hours to reassemble it, minus the platen and a few screws. They do not react to music by saying they like or dislike it – indeed, they are puzzled by my question, though they all have perfect pitch.

I get out sheet music and elementary exercise books for the piano. I’m pretty rusty – the sax is my instrument of choice, right now – but keep at it for a week, an hour a day, and soon, to my delight, I can play my old Grieg, Bach, and dreamy Chopin. I am not surprised when, a few days later, I hear perfectly rendered Beethoven ringing down the hallway. I peek through the door and see that it is Olek, and that there is no music.


When he winds up, I applaud. “You heard that somewhere and could just remember it?” He tilts his head and narrows his eyes. “What do you mean, just?”

“It’s unusual for humans to be able to remember every note of a complex composition after hearing it once. It would be easy for an AP, I suppose.”

“I know a lot of them. What would you like to hear?” he says, leaving the question open.

I do the same thing for all kinds of arts: jazz, the core of which is improvisation; painting; dance. They copy effortlessly, but cannot seem to create anything new, or collaborate on a jazz improvisation.

Nevertheless, I keep trying, thinking of ways to help them make that leap.

If they can.

I don’t know that they aren’t creative, but if they are, or can grow to creativity, that might be one way to humanize them for the public.

If they knew the difference, would they want to be only human? The question is tiny, fleeting, in the big, booming satisfaction of my own salvation-through-helping. Do they want to wage war, be cruel, think of how to create creatures like themselves?

Feh. You gotta have a dream.


SPADES: CARDS CLING to the table and collapse into a small, light game-cube filled with an infinite number of games. Programmable. We have fun thinking up fiendish new games.


“I HATE PULLING weeds.” Amanda leans back on her heels and wipes sweat from her forehead with the bottom of her t-shirt.

Olek says, “Try pulling dinner duty for a change.” He is perfectly beautiful. They all are. His long, bare legs are stretched out, ankles crossed, on the rubble with which we will build walkways through the garden. He sips green tea, having just finished ingesting international news from a thousand feeds. “Big to-do about J’s today. Their rights.”

They are conversing more frequently and more fluently, except for Jack.

“All of you are J’s,” I say.

Amanda studies the plants. “Why do they call these weeds? They have flowers.” She lowers her eyelids a second, then says, “It’s purslane. Hmmm. Many uses.”

Olek clasps his hands behind his shiny, bald head. “I wish J’s the best of luck. It’s wrong to deny that they’re human. Even though they really aren’t.”

“They are!” says Amanda. She crawls around on her hands and knees, piling up purslane.

“What’s different about them and humans?” I ask.

Olek says, “They are transgenic. And their brains are engineered to handle big data. Most humans can’t do that. I gather that it scares a lot of people.”

“How do you think we could help them?” I ask.

“Educate people,” says Olek.

“And make their brains more normal,” says Amanda. “Poor freaks.”

Yes, they converse now. The rest of the time, who knows what they’re thinking, even between the words.

I suspect we’ll have purslane for dinner. Next week we’ll probably be wearing it.

Creative. In my opinion. Economical, too.


TIME TO WAKE up! The faces of my dear friends surround me. I vomit.


WITH THEIR PERMISSION, Amanda wipe out all of their cloudrecords as soon as they arrived, so we are out of sight, and out of Mind. I hope. I don’t want to risk raising their profile by trying to get brain scans. No health-industry machines are standalones, unattached to the cloud.

They never question my authority. Not one of them ever says “Who made you God,” as would happen in any normal mix of humans, particularly those to whom I have rented rooms. I never lay down the law. We have no formal organization. I can discern no pecking order among them.

They mate like rabbits. With restored fertility, what would their children be like?

One of their outstanding characteristics, their physical perfection, would ring through you like a bell if you were to see them as a group. On the other hand, the science and business of physical beauty has advanced spectacularly since I was young, so, taken singly, they are not all that noticeable.

I stock all the baths with powerfully scented soaps.

I continue my study. The better I get to know them, the more difficult it is.


ON AUGUST 9TH, I’m in the kitchen, working on a big pan of party lasagna, when Olek comes in. “I can help.” He grabs some garlic from my cluttered windowsill and says, “Why do you have all these stones here?”

“They’re pretty, aren’t they? This chunk of white granite is from Nepal. Here’s a pebble from the shore of the Ganges.”

“Which is your favorite?”

I pick up a pale, irregular, sandy stone with a curved, inchlong indentation on one side. “I found it in Rock Creek Park when I was a little girl. It’s the fossilized trail of a prehistoric creature. Maybe a snail. It reminds me that we’re all made of stardust, that life has changed again and again over periods of time so vast that we can’t even imagine them.”

He nods, and bursts a garlic clove with the flat of his knife.

Amanda enlisted everyone to help in the garden, along with my hired hands, who I made sure were as newsless and politicsfree as one can be, now, unlikely to even know or even care about APs.

As the sun sets, the last rays intensify the yellows, purples, and reds of gladiola. Brash dahlias and sophisticated lilies, divided by peony bushes and ornamental grasses, enclose small, private alcoves, some with fountains. Stands of strange new flowers that I think Amanda must have invented punctuate the bloomscape; her Wall time shows intensive genetic work. Tiny solar-powered spheres, flung like confetti, cling to the trees, and the heavenly scent of night-blooming jasmine will soon infuse the evening.

One of the zenners brought a keg of homemade beer, and we cheer when it froths from the tap. Bertha Smith, my Siamese neighbor, eyes my new koi as they weave sinuous paths beneath water lily pads on the renovated pond. I shake my head at her and mouth No. My jazz friends and I are setting up when someone taps me on the shoulder.

“Irene!” We hug madly, kiss, and hug again. Wipe away tears. Irene is tiny, blonde, and the President and CEO of Infinity Tech, roaming the world to oversee launches and get more contracts, riding herd on a passel of brilliant engineers, piling up patents.

“Gosh.” She gazes at the yard. “It’s as lovely as when your parents were alive. Is that gazebo still back there?” She grabs my hands and pulls me along the curving paths. “It was a sailing ship. A frontier cabin. A covered wagon. A... a space ship.” She stops for a moment. “You are doing okay, aren’t you? This must have taken some cash.”

“Doing a bit better. Infinity Tech is doing pretty well too – my monthly cash infusion has increased lately.”

“We are,” she says. “In fact, I’m on call for a Russian launch right now, but sent my best backup.” In the gazebo, we settle in wicker chairs. “Tonight, I declare this the Stardust!”

We clink raised glasses to the dream that nearly destroyed us. I say, “I wish–”

She puts her hand on my arm. “May, I came to apologize. I’m sorry about everything. I should have been more understanding.”

“There’s no need for any apology from you, Irene. God, I should have been on mood drugs or something.”

“I should have told you how much I’d invested in that drive research, how little money we had to spare right then.” She shakes her head. “Two fools and their money. But we’ve pulled out of it at last. You know, we never wanted other investors – never wanted them to know what we were doing. What we had. We are completely in the clear at last. That’s one of the things I came to tell you.”


“Thanks you, Irene. I wish I’d done more to help. It seemed like the most helpful thing I could do was stay away. What else?”

“I–”

Xia and Amanda meander past, carrying champagne flutes, bending to examine plants in the fading light. Irene stares at them. When they are past, she says, “Christ on a stick, woman! How long–?”

I give my head a slight shake, not wanting to talk about harboring APs. “You’re right! I haven’t been out to the farm in ages.”

She gets it, of course. “You’ll have to come...” she looks on her arm, where two months of her calendar manifest in curved, glowing blue and green. “Well. Looks like late October. I’ll have my secretary do some rearranging.” She tilts her head, listening. “Crap. My backup isn’t doing very well. We should have used Broglio Port in Kenya. I’ll have to take the tunnel to London. Only takes an hour. Then... well, more travel.”

I walk her through the house. Her pod waits on the street. She says “Bye, sweetie. It is so good to see you! We wasted so many years. I wish–”

“At least there’s plenty of time in the future,” I say, and hug her. She turns, tears in her eyes, jumps into her pod, waves, and is gone, leaving me bewildered and happy as all get out. The best birthday present I could have ever asked for.

My cohorts are on the front porch.

Obek says, “Who was that?”

“My partner, Irene.”

“Why was she crying?”

“We haven’t seen each other in a long time, and she had to leave suddenly.”

Amanda asks,“Do you love each other?”

“Yes, we do. Very much.”

I shake off my yearning for more Irene. About now, we would be laughing hysterically.

The party is a great romping success. The Jump for Joys, our jazz quartet, rings swing and bop through the neighborhood, and more people drop in, drawn by the music.

Everyone delights in the apparent strangeness of my new friends. I doubt that any guests make the connection between them and the sinister, inhuman J’s portrayed in the media, or would have cared if they did. We make merry until dawn. All remnants of ennui run off and hide.


METHANE RAIN FILMS my porthole.


WE ARE RAMBLING on one of those fine, brisk autumn days when it seems as if the entire sky has taken flight. Leaves wrenched from trees, flocked by the wind, dash downward to scud along street. Thin sunlight makes dog-walkers, stroller-pushers, stately embassies, and high, white clouds sharp-edged, yet almost transparent, as if the world and we are flimsy as watercolors, and as dissolvable.

My memory, at 130, is a kaleidoscope, a vast rich cape swirling round me, coloring all I sense. Every new snip of sensorial input shifts the colored chips to line up in unique configuration, fed by bits of time. How are these visions brought forth; how summoned? Not by me; not by my conscious self. However it works, memory is definitely one of the things that makes me human.

“What’s that?” asks Olek, pointing to a long, winding drive guarded by a two-sided wrought-iron gate that opens in the middle.

The kaleidoscope shifts, then holds. We are on Massachusetts Avenue, my personal lifelong memory treasure-trove. “Why, we’re at the Naval Observatory! I worked here as an astronomy grad student, about a hundred years ago. One of my first memories is coming here as a child. That night was magical. There was a blizzard. My father brought me; we had to walk. My mother worked there. I saw the Moon; Mars; the rings of Saturn.”

They gather round the black obelisks that anchor each side of the gates, and touch the round USNO Seal. “A woman holding a planet while she flies through the air,” says Amanda, “her clothes all rippley from the wind. It says” – that half-closing of her eyelids, so swift that it is barely more than blink – “‘Adde gubernandi studium: Pervenit in astra, et pontum caelo conjunxit.’ ‘With the captain’s care, the stars are measured, the sea and heavens married.’ The woman is Urania, muse of astronomy.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I say.

“Beautiful,” she echoes. I can hear that she still wonders what beautiful really means and what else might be beautiful.

Jack stares at Amanda for a long moment, and then, with a jerk, his feet are moving, and then, his hands and head. He looks like a perky marionette. I can see him dancing a hornpipe on deck, long ago, while the Captain marries the time and space using perfect time, as determined by the Naval Observatory, and a sextant, then commands Two degrees south by southwest!

Xia mimics him, and then they all do, as if they are a chorus in an old Broadway musical. A few passers-by clap; someone tosses us a few bits. I am laughing in the autumn afternoon; laughing, as the transparent phenomenal world pulls me too into the dance.

And then, by degrees, back into the sky. Back to space, where it all started, for me, wondering, How does one navigate spacetime? Who does the perfect measuring? And what, exactly do they measure?

What will the touchstone be, in the future?


I HAVE FELT this much joy only when my children were born. But where am I?


THE USNO DIRECTOR and I are old friends. I give my kids a private tour. Washington, D.C. is not the best place to observe space, but conservation efforts have lessened light pollution tremendously in the last century, and cleared the sky of chemical pollutants.

Xia is all over the ancient 26-inch Alvin, turning the huge gears, sectioning it in her head, I am sure, into a series of infinitely finely shaved views, rotating it, inferring the insides – correctly, of course – by what the outside does, from the evidence. She could take that memory to the market, and, though it would be massively expensive, and a long, slow process, she could print out another 26-inch Alvin.

“Jack, look at Mars. Asaph Hall used this very telescope to discover the moons of Mars in 1877.”

“I would like to go to Mars.” He has a nice tenor voice and perfect diction.

I notice that no one but me is surprised that he is talking.


DISORIENTING, TO HAVE more room.


“TIME FOR THE bedtime story,” Xia announces, striding through the house rattling a tambourine.

“Knock it off,” yells Amanda, but they all gather in the living room with wine or tea. Olek lights candles. In the distance, a bicycle airhorn blares. A dog barks.

On the first night, I begin with, “On Europa, there is a geyser a hundred miles high,” one of my mother’s stories.

“No! You went to the Moon. To Mars. Tell us about that!”

Over the next few months, we discuss space travel. How to make more of our solar system’s planets and moons habitable: Enceladus, Europa, Titan. How long it might take to get to a habitable exoplanet, how we can predict what conditions would be like and how to prepare for all contingencies in many different environments. What an expedition would need in its tool kit to cover all the possibilities.

They absorb information swiftly, voraciously – science fiction, science, documents and videos about past and present space exploration and colonies. The most recent research, the most cutting-edge bionan applications. Fictional ships that are like neural networks, wombs that supply everything the intrepid space explorer might need to travel to likely exoplanets at just-below-lightspeed. A briefer jaunt to Europa might use laser propulsion or, as a backup, massive self-mending nets that collect matter to be used as fuel. Olek says, “Dark matter collection might be the ticket.” I am really not surprised how easily, casually, and, I’m pretty sure, undetectably they hack into the separate top-secret nanonets of all the industrialized nations, where military and manufacturing secrets are stored.


“Velcro ourselves to spacetime somehow... it moves past us.”

“No, no... change to light...”

“We are light...”

“Not what I mean...”

“Maybe we’re there and back already...”

“Not funny.”

“Listen! With this warp drive, we stay in the same place... get in touch with this woman at Georgia Tech.”

“Amanda, would you mind helping with this genetic work?”

“I’m already doing most of the...”

I’m dizzied and dazzled. They ignore my question. I’m not here. I’m some kind of slow matter.

I am the superfluous human.

The not-at-all impartial observer.

The walls, floors, and ceilings of several emptied rooms are now completely committed to astronomy, physics, and engineering classes, many of them Olek’s, only run and absorbed in a blur. Big data scrolls in rapid-pattern colors and sounds, discrete flashes of information, tones like weird organ music. They sit as if hypnotized, absorbing the latest journals as avidly as a child would suck down boxes of peppermint candy. One day, when I am there, wondering if I should download apps or take neuroplasticity drugs that would allow me to distantly understand or approximate what they are doing, droplets of light float from the ceiling like snow. As one, they undress rapidly and lie on their backs; the droplets meet their skin and dissolve into it. Their skin glows for a second when this happens, in rainbow colors.

I undress too, but my skin remains blank. Drat.


YOU GOTTA HAVE a dream.


“DO YOU DREAM?” I ask Amanda, as she mashes up some strange, healthy, awful concoction in the kitchen with my grandmother’s mortar and pestle. Everyone eats her food without reaction except me, though I try to be polite and do feel better. I think.

“What is a dream?”

“It’s kind of like seeing a vid in your mind while you sleep.” She looks at me, startled. “That would be very strange. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of vids? Are they always the same?”

“Some are the same. When I was a child, I dreamed that I was falling from a high tower. A lot. I always woke up just as I was going to hit the ground.”

“I wouldn’t like that.”

“I didn’t. But dreams can be anything. Anything at all.”

“Hmmm.” She steps out the door into her garden apothecary, musing.


I AM SITTING one morning on my sleeping porch when I hear footsteps and other rustling sounds behind me. When I finish my sesshin and rise, I see them all sitting behind me. I walk to the doorway, lean on the doorjamb, and watch. Eventually, one after the other rises and walks past me and down the hallway. I smell coffee.

In the kitchen, breakfast is sizzling, popping, toasting. Jack serves it with wordless grace in the garden. Bees tend tall, ruffly red hollyhocks. A stone fountain burbles. My friends gather round and breakfast in burbling, leaf-waving, buzzing communion  . I see a curtain pulled back from the second floor of my neighbor’s house. Marge Degato peers out at us, then drops the curtain.

The next morning, Mike Degato, an old, young-faced, bulldoggish man, knocks on my front door. “Hello,” I say, a bit surprised. “Come on in. Have a cup of coffee.”

I wonder if he and Marge are miffed about not being invited to my birthday party. I know that they would not have enjoyed such a party, even though they maintain themselves in sparkling midthirtyish mode, which I find weird, since they are about eighty. But I suppose that my appearance, a ‘vibrant’ (I hope) round hundred, tall and skinny, with chin-length white hair and bangs, is just as weird to them.

“No thanks. I’ve had my coffee.” He plows ahead. “I just want to know who-all is living here.”

“Why? Have we been bothering you?”

“No, but – well, Marge has this silly idea that they’re a bunch of goddamned J’s.”

The AP issue is heating up. Hysteria, demonstrations, the works. I’ve come across hundreds of channels calling for them to be killed, or at least isolated. It reminds me of the sci-fi movies I saw when I was a kid in the 1950’s. A great hue and cry. More frightening every day.

I laugh. “That is silly! To tell you the truth, Mike, I haven’t been feeling too well lately and I’ve taken in some young professionals to help out. I’m not sure you know, but the house is zoned for a rooming house.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“Has been since 1973. I’m permitted for twenty, but I’m keeping it at four. After the yard is finished they’re going to paint the house. It’s not nanotech paint like yours.”

He presses his lips together and nods. When he bought his house, he had come over and offered to buy my ‘teardown.’ When I look at his young, smooth face, I think ‘Slippery slope.’ And he thinks that he’s ‘human,’ of course.

“How’s Pamela doing at law school?” Pumped full of the latest competitive smart drugs, I’m sure.

“Oh, fine, fine. Well, I’ll report back to Marge. Sorry to bother you.”

When I close the door, I’m in a cold sweat. When you kill an AP, do you kill a person? Not in Mike’s eyes, I’m pretty sure. And not in the law’s eyes, either, although one case is now making its way to the Supreme Court. He could probably have my house confiscated and snap it up at auction.


INTERNATIONAL RIOTS OVER the burgeoning population of AP’s. For all the usual reasons.

We watch as we eat noodles that Amanda ingeniously, though not entirely deliciously, made of purslane. THEY HAVE NO SOULS, read many signs.

“I think they probably do,” says Xia, grabbing noodles with chopsticks. I listen hard, look at her closely, but neither hear nor see any trace of irony.


THEY ARE MAGICAL, these kids. The essence of humanity. In any space or time.


SYB WAKES ME one night with an especially urgent bark.

I raise my head to see white beams of flashlights sweeping the back yard. I yell through the screen, “What’s going on?”

“Police.”

“What are you doing?”

“Can you come to the front door, please?”

“Have your ID out.”

A young woman with a badge stands at my front door. “What’s this about?” I ask.

“Your neighbor called and complained that an AP was in your back yard.”

“Has anyone actually bothered this neighbor? Trespassed on his property? Broken into his house?”

“No, but we are on orange alert because of the demonstrations. Someone set the Albanian embassy on fire.”

“Oh. Well, you can tell that Sybil, here” – (I am holding her by her collar while she growls) – “definitely lets me know about any threats. I’m fine.”

The policewoman says, “Can we come in?”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“I have certain emergency powers right now, yes.”

“What emergency powers, in particular?”

“For one thing,” she begins, but an older guy behind her cuts her off.

“Ma’am, sorry to interrupt, but this is Doctor J. She’s lived here since... since...”

I laugh. “He’s right. I’m old as dirt and I’ve lived here for a hundred and thirty years.”

“I came to a birthday party for one of her grandkids one time,” says the man.

“Diane?”

“No. It was–”

“Charlie,” we both say together, and laugh. I say, “He’s in Antarctica right now, I think. Doing research.”


Finally the policewoman surrenders.

I yank down all forty-three shades on the first floor, thinking, not for the first time, that I should automate them, make some coffee, and pour in a healthy dose of whisky. In the music room, I pound out some dissonant Monk. Evidence seems satisfying, right now.

First, Amanda wanders in and picks up the guitar. Then Xia on drums, Jack on sax, and Olek on violin.

We get into the groove of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’ and other pieces we’ve played. They only have to hear a tune once. Sounds glorious, but always exactly the same, this time a Nelson Riddle arrangement for Frank Sinatra.

Then I hear a phrase that is different. Jack stops playing. I turn to him. “That’s great! Keep going!”

“It’s wrong. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I just... thought it would sound good. Like I could hear it in my head first and wanted to do it.”

“Listen.” I put the phonograph needle on a Keith Jarrett concert, already on the turntable, and play it for a few minutes, then pick up the needle. “Jarrett made all of that up as he played.”

“How could he?”

“He took chances. He improvised. He made it up.”

“There were other instruments there. Did they all make it up together?”

“Yes. They were having a conversation. They trusted each other. They listened to each other.”

“You can do that?” asks Olek.

“Why not? All the music on all of these recordings and written in these books was made up at one time. It’s how we do things, that’s one way of being creative. Things happen in your brain when you’re creative.”

“Like when you sit,” says Xia.

“Right,” I say. “Some of the same brain changes take place in both activities.”

“I can see them,” Xia said.

I open my mouth to say no way, but process it for a moment. “How?”

“With my eyes,” she says simply. “It’s in your cloud. Right now your blood pressure is 110 over 70, but when I came in it was 129 over 83.”

“What else can you see?”

“I can see,” she says slowly, “that our brains are all the same, and that they’re different than yours.”

“That is because you are APs.”

“When Jack played those phrases, his brain changed.”

I try not to shout, but I do, and they look startled. “Yes! Do you all understand that you are APs? J’s? That we are in danger? You’ve seen the news.”

They look at one another, as if to say, Why is she yelling at us?

Amanda says, “I would never want to harm J’s.”

“Neither would I,” says Olek. “They may be strange, but that’s no reason to treat them badly.”

I’m wondering what I can possibly say or do when Jack says, like a cranky child, “I want to go to Mars.”

“Actually,” I say, as I myself make a new connection, “That sounds like a great idea.”


WHEN I PING Irene, she is, happily, at home. She says, “I was just getting ready to ask you to come to the house for some cookies. Your birthday present is ready.”

“Birthday present! You shouldn’t have.”


I TAKE THE train to Virginia on a gloomy Saturday morning. Long banks of leafless trees flank the train line, dark and silvery at the same time. Moody clouds hang low over the Blue Ridge. I walk the last mile to her white farmhouse on a one-lane road, and only one single-person auto veers around me, holding a woman napping while her auto takes her to her destination: not much has changed in the past eighty years, or a hundred-and-twenty years, for that matter.

I wipe my feet on the door mat, and open the door. “Hey!”

“In the kitchen.” She dusts flour from her hands. “Grab some coffee and we’ll sit in the living room.”

The blazing fireplace, the comfortable chairs, the three hundred-year-old house takes me back to our childhood. Irene curls up like a child, warming her hands around her coffee cup.

“No cookies?”

“I’ve been eating all day.”

“You don’t look well.”

“Ha! I’ve been around the world three times in the past month.”

“You’re getting too old for that.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I want to take them to Mars.”

She laughs as if this is the most hilarious thing ever. “Oh, why not? When?”

“Soon. Tomorrow.”

“Sure. The world’s on fire about them. An abomination, a tragedy, a disaster in the making, the end of the world. Get them out of town.”

“I want to keep them secret until we are on our way.”

“Excellent idea. But why do you want to go? It took years for you to recover from your other trip.”

“It’s something to do.”

“You gotta have a dream. That’s what your mother always said.”

“I think that what I learn about them on the trip will give those who want to make sure they have human rights – if any such people exist – some ammunition. They are astoundingly technologically adept. They manage big data. In their heads.”

“So they aren’t just zombie dunces that will devour resources like locusts?”

“They are scarier than that, and much more interesting. They easily manage all kinds of information. If we don’t learn how to partner with them, they could easily cut us out of the management of our future.”

“I see! So you want to have direct hand in ushering in this particular brave new world?” She laughs. “Great idea, Maysie. We can live in infamy!”

“They love me.”

“They love me! I love them!” she sings. “Sure they do. For how long?”

“They’re like children, emotionally.”

“Speaking as one who has raised a lot of children, that’s scary as hell. Remember how they get to be when they’re teens? What are you going to do, Peter Pan them?”

“They’ll be different, that’s for sure.”

“Speaking of dreams, I have something for you. Come upstairs.”

Her huge bedroom, under the eaves, hasn’t changed much since we were kids. Instead of bunk beds, there is a king bed. Another dresser for Brian, her husband, who manages the farm. From hers, she takes down a jewelry box.

“You still have that?”

“You still have a mansion of useless junk?” She opens it, and a ballerina pops up and dances to the music. She roots around and gets out a small box, hands it to me. “Happy birthday.”

I lift the lid and see a tiny starship. I look at her and we both burst into tears. We hug and laugh, then cry again.

It is Stardust, the size of a pea.

“The nanotech seed is inside the replica. There’s a lot more to it than when we stopped. I contracted with a lot of different companies, but it was all compartmentalized, so no one had the big picture. But... it needs to all be linked together. It will be the first fully nano-bio ship ever. I think,” she says, and I see her blink once but don’t pay much attention at the time, “it is fully radiation-proof, which is the big thing.”


THEY ARE ENTRHALLED.

Our small family moves to one of Irene’s guest houses, and they design the ship at our nearby Sterling facility, where they also train. I remain at the house and design the study, which has actually already begun, and stay nervous.

Irene walks in one afternoon. “Why aren’t you training, dear? Getting strong and throwing up in zero g.?”


“I’ll put in my time.”

“I just want you to know that your Fake Folk are really running up a big bill.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call them that.”

“What should I call them?”

“My friends.”

“I’m just yanking your chain. They really are lovely. I think they love me too.”

“Of course they do.”

“I’m not really worried about the money,” she says, sitting across the table from me. “The ship isn’t all that expensive, despite the fact that they’ve nailed the radiation-blocking technology and have included so many nested nanotech applications that I haven’t reached the end of them. If I’m right, it may be the main model for interplanetary travel for decades to come.” She pauses. “Maybe even interstellar travel. I want you to know that it seems to be set up with that possibility in mind.”

I shrug. “You’d never know if we reached an exoplanet. I wouldn’t either. We won’t live that long.”

“Or I might pass you on the way, if we develop an FTL drive. No, really. We’ve had some near-misses. Are they smart enough to design an FTL drive?”

I shrug. “They think differently. I have very little idea what their parameters or limits are.”

Irene laughs. “It wouldn’t be a problem, mind you. I’m actually wondering how to attribute the developments they have incorporated into the ship. They’re not really employees.”

“Why don’t we ask them?”

We take a pod to the facility – a huge metal warehouse with a clean room for nanotech r&d, and a model that displays data when you touch it. The ship will be assembled at a nanotech facility at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallop’s Island, a few hundred miles away, that we will pay to use, along with the MARS launch facility. I haven’t seen it in three weeks. I’ve been busy setting up legal dispositions for the house in case of various contingencies.

When we walk into the warehouse, I’m astonished.

Each of them are displaying their clouds – immense, threedimensional, moving visual patterns, sounds, colors, numbers. The clouds merge, and they are inside the buzzing, crackling, singing manifestation, reaching out and tweaking things here and there. Xia touches a yellow cube, hums, and it changes to a red ovoid. Amanda shakes her head and turns it green; rearranges some equations with a wave of her hand. They murmur and nod.

When they do this, I see no change in the quarter-size ship model, a sleek, beautiful hologram. I figure they are working on deep sub-programs.

“We’ll give you a tour,” said Olek. They show me my own little space, a combo chair-bed-workplace. “All the books, music, movies in the world, too. All of your personal vids, journals, everything we could find.”

“That’s a lot of stuff, considering the attic.” I’d given them permission to create a May wonderland. I had nothing to hide. At least, not from them.

“We could really go on forever,” said Olek, “with the nanotech propulsion system. We also have the potential to use asteroid or interstellar matter as fuel. Perhaps even dark matter, but that’s theoretical.”

Irene and I leave the warehouse without any response from them to her question. As we climb into the pod I say, “Attribute the patents to the inventors, of course. And if we don’t come back – I’m sure that’s what’s worrying you – have papers drawn up so you can recoup our investment and pay all the bills regardless. I would want the rest to go to legal protection of AP’s.”

“What do you mean, if you don’t come back,” she says, “You, my oldest friend and partner in crime? Don’t you want to sit in the living room and drink coffee together five hundred years from now?”

But she knows the answer.

“Why don’t you come with us.”

“Oh... you know. I have too much to do here. Maybe later.”


“THEIR MATHEMATICS ARE wrong. That’s been the problem all along.”

Olek volunteers to return to the house with me one last time. My great-granddaughter and her family are moving in, and their crates clutter the rooms. Syb is with them, and I miss her terribly.

After packing some things for storage, I drift aimlessly through rooms that are like my own body. Can I live on a ship for a year or more? And then on Mars? I remind myself of my neuroscience study with a mental shrug.

We’re in the kitchen having a last cup of tea when we hear glass shattering and rush into the living room. A brick lies on the floor amid shards of glass. A crowd of demonstrators mobs in my front yard, trampling my hydrangeas. “Hey!” I yell through the broken window, and they surge onto the porch, their anti-J signs shouting and flashing.

I call the police and then say to Olek, “Let’s go.”

“I have to get something,” he says, ducks into the kitchen, and returns. We leave by a side door, walk a block, and summon a pod to take us to Wallop’s Island.

It’s as good a way to leave as any.


THE FIRST TIME I see the actual ship, I cry.

It takes a day and a half for it to be towed to the launch site, raised, and attached to the side of the rocket, which dwarfs everything.

I’ve ridden on rockets a few times. I don’t much like it. But once we break free of gravity, the enormity of what is happening is like being reborn as a new person. I overflow with energy, optimism, and deep curiosity.

I look around to the faces of my dear friends.

“We made it,” I say.

We loosen our straps, float free, and hold hands for a moment before returning to our necessary tasks. There is a lot of work, and little free time.

We settle into our routine.

A month out, Lauren, Irene’s daughter, contacts us. “May, Mom has died.”

A fist smashes into my chest. I force out the words. “When? What happened?

“She had cancer. From radiation, probably, from her Mars trip thirty years ago. Nothing worked.”

I feel a strange flash of anger. No proper goodbye.

But closure, plenty of closure. I am living in it. It is all around me. Irene’s work.

It is a bit of comfort. “How long did she know?”

“She found out right before your party. I think that at first she was going to tell you, but then she saw... your friends.”

“And knew I’d come to her. Knew that there was something else we could do together.”

“I think so. She was working on a new idea for a radiation shield. They accelerated that. If everything works, Infinity will make a lot of money. We filed all the patents. You’ll be rich when you get back.” She pauses. “May, this was her dream.”

They are all looking at me sadly. Amanda kicks off and hugs me. “I love you,” she says. They all float round me, hugging and murmuring comforting words.

They all seem pretty damned human to me.


WE ARE NOT much further out when it happens. We are listening for news of ourselves – the ship is newsworthy – when we hear “This is ICN. We have just had a report from Mars. An AP killed a surveyor at Port Giovanni. All twenty-two APs on Mars were apprehended and put to sleep. We will let you know the results of the autopsy.”

Amanda uncurls. I see tears on her face. She says, “I... I think I may be an AP.”

“You all are. I was hoping each of you would realize it, but–”

“Why?” asks Jack, as they all gather round me.

“Yes, why?” asks Xia. “Do you know why you’re conscious?”


“Point. I wanted you to know for this very reason, so you could be self-aware; aware of danger. But I want you to know for other reasons as well.”

“If we are AP’s, then we are different. We are more than you, and less than you. Just different.” says Olek, morosely. “Feared and hated by humans. Why? And why is it good to be human?”

I had hoped this would be a moment of joy. But at least it is a moment. “You can all at least entertain the idea that you are APs?”

“Well... I have changed since I came to live with you,” says Jack. “I know that. It happened the day I danced. At the Naval Observatory. When I saw the Seal. It was... a strange combination of things.”

“When I was sitting one morning,” says Xia, “I knew I was alive.”

“When I played for myself,” says Olek. He nods. “It’s good, I think, to know that you’re alive.”

“That never happened to me,” says Amanda. “There was no moment.”

“You created the gardens,” I say.

They all nod. She shrugs. “They were there before.”

“You created new plants.”

I see a slight smile.

“All of you created this ship.”

That was the right thing to say. “We did!” says Xia. “That means–”

Again, they all look at me. “You say it,” I suggest.

Jack does. “We are artificial people. Because of the capabilities we have as APs, we have created a ship that gives us the power to go anywhere. A ship that humans couldn’t create by themselves, at least not as quickly as we have. I don’t have a problem with that.”

I look away from them, out the port, at the stars, thinking that at last I had done something really worth doing. “You can’t go to Mars. Where will you go?”

“You mean,” says Amanda, “Where will we go?”

“The pilot will marry the sea and the heavens, and plot the course,” says Jack, smiling at me. “Will you be our Urania?”

“I can go first. Then we can take turns.”

“Let’s go live on a new moon,” says Xia. “Titan. Europa. All of them! We’ll make everyone on earth understand what the future can be.”

“Or even a new earth,” I say, and see shy smiles. They’ve been thinking about that too.

“Well, maybe,” says Xia. “We think we’re very close to FTL. We do have everything we need here. On the ship. Part of the ship.”

Thank you, I say to my mother, my father, to Irene. Thank you, Galileo, Newton, Feynman, Higgs. To those who conceived of the future humans who will now be my long present. It does not seem like a boring prospect. It seems endlessly fascinating.

“Thank you,” I say to them, clumsily bowing and bouncing off my bunk.

“Music! Champagne!” says Amanda, and claps her hands. A smooth Paul Desmond sax solo infuses time with a spare, haunting cadence.

As we reach for tubes that hold a perfect, just-assembled Dom Perignon, I lift an imaginary champagne flute.

“I propose a toast to wilderness: to unfound planets, unknown life, and to uncounted stars, wilder still.”

In the general hurrah, I am suddenly, deeply alone; as alone as they must have been on the Earth. What have I done? I cry; but not aloud. My chest is wrenched with something more profound, more deep, than anything I’ve ever felt before as sharp, deep loss unfurls, and howls its name, and leaves me in its wake.

I am become a star, a lone, dense orb of leaping, dancing fire that burns with heat untold. Sublimed, all that I ever was, my sweet, old Earth, my heart, my home; I’m left now just a spent, burnt cloud of molecules, trailing a blaze of time, of all that’s lost to me forever.

Olek looks at me, then looks again, across a vast, clear gulf, a new form of space between me and all else that exists, those other burning stars. Unsealing a flap in his shirt, he fishes something out, swims toward me like a wrasse, curls in a crouch and floats, wedged close to me.

“I took this from your windowsill. A bridge perhaps…” says Olek. He gently slips a bit of Earth into my hand: a small, hard piece of dense, pressed time, with its own revelations, its own tales.

My fingers trace its folds – the fossilized trail of something that once lived; the river-smoothed gray ridges--and memories come forth. The scenes, scents, sounds; the shifting, life-filled place that we call memory begins its linking bloom, a counter and companion to infinities both beckoning and cold.

“Thank you,” I say, and touch his cheek then close my hand on stardust.