“Sarkka was lying, Emma. There was no avatar. He killed Singleton and the mercenary.”

  “I could ask the city police to look into it. But given the diplomatic angle, I think it would be better if you did.”

  “I hope that is not a threat,” Marc said, finding a new depth of Antarctic chill.

  “I don’t want to go public with this. Too much information has already spilled out. But this is too important to ignore.”

  “The Jackaroo would not breach the accord,” he said.

  “We don’t know what they would do,” I said, and would have said more, but he cut the connection then.

  He called back the next day. I was aboard the largest of the farmers’ ships by then, and Terminus was dwindling astern. Varneek had failed to find any fragments, Marc said, but he had found traces of fused silica and traces of doped fullerenes and an exotic room-temperature superconductor.

  “Are they from an avatar?”

  “If they were not, I could tell you. As it is, I can neither confirm nor deny that the traces Varneek found in the room matched the fragments of the avatar already in our possession.”

  So I had my answer.

  “It won’t make any difference,” Marc said, after I thanked him. “Even if we’d caught the avatar with blood on its hands, nothing would have been done beyond lodging a formal protest. Because the accord is useful to us. Because no one wishes to disturb our relationship with the Jackaroo.”

  I told him I understood, and asked about the search for the prospector, Suresh Shrivastav.

  “The investigation has been closed. I’m sorry, Emma. Even if you capture Sarkka, it won’t save your career.”

  “This isn’t about my career.”

  “In any case, good hunting,” Marc said, and cut the connection.

  And now, six months later, we are chasing Niles Sarkka’s ship towards the coal-black gas giant. He’s just a couple of million kilometres ahead of us and, as we have long suspected, will soon enter into orbit. We caught up with him because we continued to accelerate after his ship turned around and began to slow. Now we must shed excess delta-vee by dipping into the outer fringes of the gas giant’s atmosphere, an aerobrake manoeuver that will subject the ship’s frame to stresses at the outer limits of its tolerance.

  The farmers’ ship isn’t equipped for a thorough planetary survey, but the instruments we’ve been able to cobble together during this long chase have not detected any source of electromagnetic radiation apart from the pulse of the planet’s magnetic field, and limited optical surveys have failed to spot any trace of artificial structures on any of the moons. Which does not mean that there isn’t anything there. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Our survey capabilities grievously are limited, and if Niles Sarkka is right, if this is where the last remnant of the Ghajar or some other Elder culture is hiding out, it won’t want to be found.

  And if the code has given Sarkka the precise location of some base or spider hole, we’ll be right on his tail. Fortunately, he’s no more than a point-and-go pilot. It’s obvious now that he didn’t do anything to counter our tactic because he wasn’t able to. With the end of the chase in sight, I’m beginning to feel that we have a chance of catching him before he can do any real harm.

  I think he knows that the game is up. That’s why he has been trying to make a deal with me, and by extension with Rajo Hiranand and the rest of the farmers’ council. In our first conversations, he assumed moral and intellectual superiority, claimed that his actions should be judged by history rather than by mere mortals. Now, he’s offering to share the greatest discovery since the Jackaroos’ fluttering ships appeared in Earth’s skies.

  “A straight fifty-fifty split, Emma,” he tells me, as we cross the orbit of the gas giant’s outermost moon. “I can’t do better than that.”

  “Fifty per cent of nothing is nothing, Niles.”

  “I will find them. They led me here, after all.”

  Niles Sarkka claims that he talked to Suresh Shrivastav before he left Libertaria to meet with Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton on First foot. He says that the prospector told him that he hadn’t stumbled on the code by chance. No, he’d been heading home after searching a couple of worldlets in Terminus’s outer belt when he’d detected a brief, transitory pulse of broad-spectrum radio noise—a squeal like a God’s own fire alarm, he said. It had grabbed his attention and he’d swung around and made landfall on the worldlet and hiked across its arctic surface to the crash site, following a faint but steady pulse. No other code has ever been so marked, and Niles Sarkka is convinced that someone or something led Shrivastav to it. Not the Jackaroo, but one of the Elder Cultures. He also believes, without a shred of evidence, that this Elder Culture wants us to find them. That they want to help us, and tell us all they know about the plans of the Jackaroo, and the true history of the wormhole network.

  I’ve told many times that I think that this story is nothing more than a fabulous fiction, and I tell him that again now, adding, just to needle him, “If there is something out there, how about we take all of it, and send you to jail?”

  “You have to tell the farmers about my offer, Emma. You are obligated, as their guest. Also, you should tell your bosses back on First foot, too. Talk to all parties concerned, why don’t you, and get back to me.”

  Well, I don’t want to talk to my boss, of course. I’m in deep trouble with the UN, and haven’t been in communication with Marc Godin or any other UN official since the chase began. But I call Rajo and tell her about my latest conversation with Niles, and his offer, and she says that she must consult with the council. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long.

  “We are not varying our agreement,” Rajo says. “We will capture him, and whatever you find out there, we will deal with it then.”

  I tell her that I’m relieved that she and the council sees Sarkka’s offer for what it is.

  “Did you doubt that we would renege on our deal? Have faith in us, Emma. As we have faith in you.”

  I call Sarkka. His ship is close to the edge of the cold, carbon-black limb of the planet now, and we are in the middle of preparations for aerobraking. He doesn’t answer for more than ten minutes, and when he finally picks up, and I start to tell him that he can’t make any kind of deal with the farmers, he says that it doesn’t matter. There’s something in his voice I haven’t heard for a while. An unsettling manic glee.

  “It’s too late to make a deal. I’ll take it all. Everything here. You are not my nemesis after all, Emma. You are my witness!”

  He signs off and won’t answer when I call back, and then his ship drops out of sight beyond the limb of the gas giant. We won’t see him again until after aerobraking.

  I help the crew finish tying everything down, and then we all strap into crash couches and plug into the interface and watch the black on black bands of the gas giant swell towards us. And just as the ship hits the fringes of its atmosphere, and begins to shudder and groan as deceleration piles on the gees, and the view is washed with violet light as friction with the atmosphere heats the hull of the ship and wraps it in a caul of ionised plasma, one of the crew posts a snatched shot of a shaped rock orbiting at the edge of the ring system. A cone with a flat face. A wormhole throat.

  A moment later, we enter the terminal phase of the aerobraking manoeuver. Plasma as hot as the surface of the gas giant’s star envelopes us and gravity crushes us. I’m trying to breath with what seems like a full pirate crew squatting on my chest, my heart is pounding like crazy, black rags are fluttering in. The ship quivers and groans and is filled with a tremendous roar as it scratches a flame ten thousand kilometres long across the face of the gas giant. And as the plasma dies back and the pull of deceleration fades there’s an alarming bang: the flight crew has fired up the solid fuel motors, finessing our delta vee as we climb away from the nightside of the planet and head out towards the edge of the rings.

  Later.

  We’ve completed our first orbit and failed to find any trace of Sarkka’s ship. There’s only one place he could have gone, and there’s no question about what we have to do, even though we are perilously low on fuel. Now we’re on final approach. We’ve been videoing everything, transmitting it via q-phone directly to Terminus. If we fail, others will follow.

  The black mirror of the wormhole’s throat rushes towards us, and then stars bloom all around.

  Thousands of stars, bright burning jewels flung in handfuls everywhere we look. Stars of all colours, and threads of luminous gas strung between them.

  We’re in the heart of a globular cluster, in orbit around a planet twice the size of Earth and clad in ice from pole to pole. There are so many stars in the sky and they are all so bright and so close together that it takes a few minutes to locate the planet’s sun, an undistinguished red dwarf as dim and humble as any of the fifteen stars gifted us by the Jackaroo, outshone by many of its neighbours. Millions of kilometres beyond the ice-planet’s limb is a cluster of six wormholes, arranged in the points of a hexagon. Sarkka’s ship is moving towards them, riding the blue flame of his solid fuel motor.

  All around me, a babble of cross-talk erupts as the ship’s crew speculate wildly on where those wormholes might lead, about whether the ice-planet is habitable, whether there are habitable planets or moons or planoformed rocks in this system or elsewhere.

  “It’s a new empire!” someone says.

  My q-phone rings.

  “Do you see?” Niles Sarkka says. “Dare you follow?”

  “You haven’t found what you are looking for.”

  “I’ve found something better.”

  One of the crew tells me that we are critically low on fuel. We have barely enough to return to the wormhole from which we emerged. And if we don’t return, the resupply ship will never find us. We’ll be stranded here.

  I ask Niles Sarkka to come back with us, but he laughs and cuts the connection. And then, as he closes on the wormhole throat, he sends a brief video message. It’s startling to see him after all this time. He was once a handsome and powerfully built man, but after six months alone in close quarters and minimal rations he looks like a shipwrecked outcast, long grey hair tied back, an untrimmed beard over hollow cheeks, sores around his mouth, his eyes sunken in bruised sockets. But his gaze is vital, and his smile is that of someone cresting the tape at the end of a long and arduous marathon.

  “I name this star, the gateway to untold wonders, Sarkka’s Star. I came here for all mankind, and I go on, in the name of mankind. One day I will return with the full and final answer to Fermi’s paradox. Do not judge me until then.”

  And then he’s gone. We swing past and fall towards the wormhole that will take us back to the G0 star, and the crew is still babbling about new worlds and stars to be explored, and I think: suppose he’s right?

  Suppose he is the hero after all, and I’m the villain?

  EROS, PHILIA, AGAPE

  RACHEL SWIRSKY

  Lucian packed his possessions before he left. He packed his antique silver serving spoons with the filigreed handles; the tea roses he’d nurtured in the garden window; his jade and garnet rings. He packed the hunk of gypsum-veined jasper that he’d found while strolling on the beach on the first night he’d come to Adriana, she leading him uncertainly across the wet sand, their bodies illuminated by the soft gold twinkling of the lights along the pier. That night, as they walked back to Adriana’s house, Lucian had cradled the speckled stone in his cupped palms, squinting so that the gypsum threads sparkled through his lashes.

  Lucian had always loved beauty—beautiful scents, beautiful tastes, beautiful melodies. He especially loved beautiful objects because he could hold them in his hands and transform the abstraction of beauty into something tangible.

  The objects belonged to them both, but Adriana waved her hand bitterly when Lucian began packing. “Take whatever you want,” she said, snapping her book shut. She waited by the door, watching Lucian with sad and angry eyes.

  Their daughter, Rose, followed Lucian around the house. “Are you going to take that, Daddy? Do you want that?” Wordlessly, Lucian held her hand. He guided her up the stairs and across the uneven floorboards where she sometimes tripped. Rose stopped by the picture window in the master bedroom, staring past the palm fronds and swimming pools, out to the vivid cerulean swath of the ocean. Lucian relished the hot, tender feel of Rose’s hand. I love you, he would have whispered, but he’d surrendered the ability to speak.

  He led her downstairs again to the front door. Rose’s lace-festooned pink satin dress crinkled as she leapt down the steps. Lucian had ordered her dozens of satin party dresses in pale, floral hues. Rose refused to wear anything else.

  Rose looked between Lucian and Adriana. “Are you taking me, too?” she asked Lucian.

  Adriana’s mouth tightened. She looked at Lucian, daring him to say something, to take responsibility for what he was doing to their daughter. Lucian remained silent.

  Adriana’s chardonnay glowed the same shade of amber as Lucian’s eyes. She clutched the glass’s stem until she thought it might break. “No, honey,” she said with artificial lightness. “You’re staying with me.”

  Rose reached for Lucian. “Horsey?”

  Lucian knelt down and pressed his forehead against Rose’s. He hadn’t spoken a word in the three days since he’d delivered his letter of farewell to Adriana, announcing his intention to leave as soon as she had enough time to make arrangements for Rose to be cared for in his absence. When Lucian approached with the letter, Adriana had been sitting at the dining table, sipping orange juice from a wine glass and reading a first edition copy of Cheever’s Falconer. Lucian felt a flash of guilt as she smiled up at him and accepted the missive. He knew that she’d been happier in the past few months than he’d ever seen her, possibly happier than she’d ever been. He knew the letter would shock and wound her. He knew she’d feel betrayed. Still, he delivered the letter anyway, and watched as comprehension ached through her body.

  Rose had been told, gently, patiently, that Lucian was leaving. But she was four years old, and understood things only briefly and partially, and often according to her whims. She continued to believe her father’s silence was a game.

  Rose’s hair brushed Lucian’s cheek. He kissed her brow. Adriana couldn’t hold her tongue any longer.

  “What do you think you’re going to find out there? There’s no Shangri-La for rebel robots. You think you’re making a play for independence? Independence to do what, Lu?”

  Grief and anger filled Adriana’s eyes with hot tears, as if she were a geyser filled with so much pressure that steam could not help but spring up. She examined Lucian’s sculpted face: his skin inlaid with tiny lines that an artist had rendered to suggest the experiences of a childhood which had never been lived; his eyes calibrated with a hint of asymmetry to mimic the imperfection of human growth. His expression showed nothing—no doubt, or bitterness, or even relief. He revealed nothing at all.

  It was all too much. Adriana moved between Lucian and Rose, as if she could use her own to protect her daughter from the pain of being abandoned. Her eyes stared achingly over the rim of her wine glass. “Just go,” she said.

  He left.

  Adriana bought Lucian the summer she turned thirty-five. Her father, long afflicted with an indecisive cancer that vacillated between aggression and remittance, had died suddenly in July. For years, the family had been squirreling away emotional reserves to cope with his prolonged illness. His death released a burst of excess.

  While her sisters went through the motions of grief, Adriana thrummed with energy she didn’t know what to do with. She considered squandering her vigor on six weeks in Mazatlan, but as she discussed ocean-front rentals with her travel agent, she realized escape wasn’t what she craved. She liked the setting where her life took place: her house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her bedroom window that opened on a tangle of blackberry bushes where crows roosted every autumn and spring. She liked the two block stroll down to the beach where she could sit with a book and listen to the yapping lapdogs that the elderly women from the waterfront condominiums brought walking in the evenings.

  Mazatlan was a twenty-something’s cure for restlessness. Adriana wasn’t twenty-five anymore, famished for the whole gourmet meal of existence. She needed something else now. Something new. Something more refined.

  She explained this to her friends Ben and Lawrence when they invited her to their ranch house in Santa Barbara to relax for the weekend and try to forget about her father. They sat on Ben and Lawrence’s patio, on iron-worked deck chairs arrayed around a garden table topped with a mosaic of sea creatures made of semi-precious stones. A warm, breezy dusk lengthened the shadows of the orange trees. Lawrence poured sparkling rosé into three wine glasses and proposed a toast to Adriana’s father—not to his memory, but to his death.

  “Good riddance to the bastard,” said Lawrence. “If he were still alive, I’d punch him in the schnoz.”

  “I don’t even want to think about him,” said Adriana. “He’s dead. He’s gone.”

  “So if not Mazatlan, what are you going to do?” asked Ben.

  “I’m not sure,” said Adriana. “Some sort of change, some sort of milestone, that’s all I know.”

  Lawrence sniffed the air. “Excuse me,” he said, gathering the empty wine glasses. “The kitchen needs its genius.”

  When Lawrence was out of earshot, Ben leaned forward to whisper to Adriana. ”He’s got us on a raw food diet for my cholesterol. Raw carrots. Raw zucchini. Raw almonds. No cooking at all.”

  “Really,” said Adriana, glancing away. She was never sure how to respond to lovers’ quarrels. That kind of affection mixed with annoyance, that inescapable intimacy, was something she’d never understood.