I hope that I will return someday, but I cannot make promises for what I will become.

  Lucian walks through the desert. His footsteps leave twin trails behind him. Miles back, they merge into the tire tracks that the truck left in the sand.

  The sand is full of colors—not only beige and yellow, but red and green and blue. Lichen clusters on the stones, the hue of oxidized copper. Shadows pool between rock formations, casting deep stripes across the landscape.

  Lucian’s mind is creeping away from him. He tries to hold his fingers the way he would if he could hold a pen, but they fumble.

  At night there are birds and jackrabbits. Lucian remains still, and they creep around him as if he weren’t there. His eyes are yellow like theirs. He smells like soil and herbs, like the earth.

  Elsewhere, Adriana has capitulated to her desperation. She has called Ben and Lawrence. They’ve agreed to fly out for a few days. They will dry her tears, and take her wine away, and gently tell her that she’s not capable of staying alone with her daughter. “It’s perfectly understandable,” Lawrence will say. “You need time to mourn.”

  Adriana will feel the world closing in on her as if she cannot breathe, but even as her life feels dim and futile, she will continue breathing. Yes, she’ll agree, it’s best to return to Boston, where her sisters can help her. Just for a little while, just for a few years, just until, until, until. She’ll entreat Nanette, Eleanor and Jessica to check the security cameras around her old house every day, in case Lucian returns. You can check yourself, they tell her, You’ll be living on your own again in no time. Privately, they whisper to each other in worried tones, afraid that she won’t recover from this blow quickly.

  Elsewhere, Rose has begun to give in to her private doubts that she does not carry a piece of her father within herself. She’ll sit in the guest room that Jessica’s maids have prepared with her, and order the lights to switch off as she secretly scratches her skin with her fingernails, willing to cuts to heal on their own the way daddy’s would. When Jessica finds her bleeding on the sheets and rushes in to comfort her niece, Rose will stand stiff and cold in her aunt’s embrace. Jessica will call for the maid to clean the blood from the linen, and Rose will throw herself between the two adult women, and scream with a determination born of doubt and desperation. Robots do not bleed!

  Without words, Lucian thinks of them. They have become geometries, cut out of shadows and silences, the missing shapes of his life. He yearns for them, the way that he yearns for cool during the day, and for the comforting eye of the sun at night.

  The rest he cannot remember—not oceans or roses or green cockatiels that pluck out their own feathers. Slowly, slowly, he is losing everything, words and concepts and understanding and integration and sensation and desire and fear and history and context.

  Slowly, slowly, he is finding something. Something past thought, something past the rhythm of day and night. A stranded machine is not so different from a jackrabbit. They creep the same way. They startle the same way. They peer at each other out of similar eyes.

  Someday, Lucian will creep back to a new consciousness, one dreamed by circuits. Perhaps his newly reassembled self will go to the seaside house. Finding it abandoned, he’ll make his way across the country to Boston, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes striding through cornfields that sprawl to the horizon. He’ll find Jessica’s house and inform it of his desire to enter, and Rose and Adriana will rush joyously down the mahogany staircase. Adriana will weep, and Rose will fling herself into his arms, and Lucian will look at them both with love tempered by desert sun. Finally, he’ll understand how to love filigreed-handled spoons, and pet birds, and his wife, and his daughter—not just as a human would love these things, but as a robot may.

  Now, a blue-bellied lizard sits on a rock. Lucian halts beside it. The sun beats down. The lizard basks for a moment, and then runs a few steps forward, and flees into a crevice. Lucian watches. In a diffuse, wordless way, he ponders what it must be like to be cold and fleet, to love the sun and yet fear open spaces. Already, he is learning to care for living things. He cannot yet form the thoughts to wonder what will happen next.

  He moves on.

  A PAINTER, A SHEEP, AND A BOA CONSTRICTOR

  NIR YANIV

  TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY LAVIE TIDHAR

  “Please, draw me a sheep,” he said—he looked just like you—and I thought, oh my, the kid makes demands. I would have liked to be in the desert, beside the broken remains of my airplane, or anywhere else for that matter. But no—we were both in the space port, I who was thrown like a discarded tool from the bowels of a trading ship, and he, who had seemed to arrive from nowhere.

  “I don’t know how to draw,” I said.

  He handed me a box. For a moment I thought he was asking for a donation.

  “I don’t have money, kid.”

  He didn’t answer. I looked at the box again and saw that it was sealed. And then I understood. And was amazed.

  “Dear God, where did you get a Maker machine?”

  That’s what they called Creators at that time, and they were expensive. Not the kind of toy that you expect to find in the hands of a six year old kid; one like you, for instance.

  It gave the request a different, new meaning.

  “Please,” he said and put the box in my lap, “draw me a sheep.”

  “I don’t know how to use this thing,” I lied. “Where are your parents?”

  He looked at me with a sad, tender look in his eyes. I wanted to help him. Maybe, I said to myself, I’m getting softer with age. Weird kid. In some strange way he looked like he never had parents. I look that way too, and indeed I never had any. That’s why you don’t have a Granddad and a Grandma, kid.

  At that time, programming a Maker machine wasn’t such a simple affair. Certainly not when attempting to create a living thing. Only a very few were both able and allowed to do it by themselves, while for me and my kind, as if in response to the very evidence of our ability, it was forbidden. The punishment: death.

  Even touching the box could put me at risk, but in the service corridor where I lived there were no security Eyes. That’s why I chose it.

  The kid continued to look at me.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go find your parents.”

  I began to walk away but he didn’t move. I didn’t want to leave him there, and if I got caught using force on a child . . . ‘Do you want me to buy you a toy? Or something to eat?”

  “Draw me a sheep.”

  He was too strange, and I was too tired. And without security Eyes, without witnesses, I began to draw—to create. But not a sheep. I wanted to scare him. I’m not scaring you, am I?

  The snake crawled slowly out of the box. Its head was gigantic, out of proportion to its thick black body. It hissed.

  The kid smiled.

  You like snakes, right?

  Even then no one was scared of a Boa constrictor any more.

  The kid’s smile didn’t change when the snake twisted and began to die aloud, the result of my hurried, messy drawing. It might have been an indication of what was to follow. I pointed the Creator and erased the snake, separating it into a pile of ash on the floor.

  “A sheep,” the kid said. “Please.”

  Too strange, too tired. Too kind. I began to draw. Not a real sheep, but the ideal of a sheep. A sheep from legend. A creature soft and woolly and gentle. And there she was, white curls of silky wool, and a quiet baa, and a light hint of musk.

  The child’s smile grew, and he turned his head away from me. One movement, a fraction of a second, but I, still absorbed in the act of creation, noticed the movement of the muscles, the slight bump under the skin, the exact tint of the eyes, and knew.

  I knew he was no different from me. That he had no parents. And I knew that he didn’t find me by accident. That bump is a transmitter, and those eyes . . . and the punishment for unauthorized creation, for me and mine, is death.

  There will be many who would claim that me and mine deserve death, and who would be happy to settle the claim with no accusations of murder. How can you catch someone like me, if not by using someone like me? A Drone? Drawn?

  I would have liked to ask the child what he thought but time was of the essence, and in any case I was unsure he could have replied. It’s easier to manufacture them that way. Maybe I will ask you, one day. Time was pressing, and I pointed the box at him. Erase.

  His sank in silence while the sheep looked on. Soon only a pile of ash remained.

  After a while I erased the sheep, too. I cleaned the floor, collected the ash into the box.

  And then, alone, I sat down on the floor and drew you.

  Shall I draw you a sheep?

  GLISTER

  DOMINIC GREEN

  It was one s.i. hour after dawn. Although the deceptive marshmallow carpet filling in Hell’s Point was glowing brilliant white in the steadily rising sun, Midas’s primary was still well under the horizon. I knew this, because I had been standing out in the open for over two hours, and I was still not dead.

  As Dark Companion was still on the other side of Midas, dragging all the world’s seas with it, I had a solution to that problem. There was now no water between me and the bottom of Hell’s Point, three vertical kilometres downwards, and at this time of year, if I went in head first, I’d be certain to break my neck rather than floundering encased in ooze while things I couldn’t see ate my face. The ooze might even be dry, cracked mud, though that was unlikely at any time of year. Hell’s Point had originally been named Hellespont by a human explorer with a classical education. The name had degenerated over time—or perhaps become more accurate. Every Spring Tide, the pull of two stars, one living, one dead, combined to send all of Midas’s oceans thundering up this narrow channel, sometimes high enough to bubble out over the galena plateau it cut through. The Crashing Bore. I’d seen rocks the size of condominia rolling around in it like flotsam.

  And for the rest of the year, Hell’s Point was simply a vertical, dizzying crack in the earth to the base of which no sunlight and virtually no gamma penetrated. Occasional foolish noobs still made very temporary settlements in it. The Robinsonade Guaranteed Lashup Company, more sensibly, had slung wire ropes across it and made a suspension bridge connecting Chrystopia Fields to Gulvellir Forest.

  At least I wasn’t still in Chrystopia Fields.

  It was a long, long way down. I could see clouds drifting beneath me.

  It was, in fact, almost annoying when I heard Brad’s concerned voice behind me:

  “What are you doing out here, skipper?”

  I turned to her ruefully, grinning out a mouth full of rotten Robinsonade teeth.

  “Asking myself the same question.”

  I’d had a ship once. I still had a ship, in fact, sitting mouldering amid a thousand others in the heavy metal muck of Despond Slough. A ship that was now useless to me.

  I’d bought the ship in a savage downturn in the ship market. She was a slaver, purpose built to carry human beings alive-if-unhappy out of human space into the Proprietor worlds. Unlike the slavers you’ve heard about in dramatic exposés and shockumentaries, this one had waste disposal, galley spaces, and rotational gravity. She’d been built by the old United States of America to dispose of its antisocial elements. But the bottom had dropped out of the market once New Topia had started producing its first made-for-slavery clones. New Topia was one hundred light years closer to the Proprietor homeworlds; there was no way the old inner systems could compete. Thousands of tonnes of prime product ended up dumped on inhospitable, marginally habitable planets and given a freedom it neither wanted nor needed.

  I’d intended to revamp the Marcus Crassus as an economy transit shuttle. With only the removal of half a metre of radiation shielding from the outer hull and the addition of a whole load of DANGER—DEATH CAN RESULT FROM EXPOSURE TO VACUUM stickers on the airlock doors, I’d meet U.N. regulations for carrying fee paying passengers. That is, if I kept off the main shipping lanes, the economical lanes, the lanes big starlines monopolized because they made the money.

  Have you seen the wee bijou flaw in my business plan yet?

  The family home had had to go, of course. For over a thousand years, my ancestors had maintained it, steadily surrounded by soaring blocks of what the European Housing Directorate proudly called “VUV,” which stands for “Vertical Urban Villages.” We’d defended it against Wallace, Longshanks, Cromwell, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, depending on whose side we were on at the time; but we’d been unable to defend it against my own temptation. The land was at a premium; it was time to sell.

  So the McQuarrie family seat had been bought by a sympathetic landgrab consortium that had promised to put up a new building “in keeping with the original site.” How it was going to do that in geodesic gunnite, I had no idea, though I believe parts of Kinlochbeul Castle’s west front now adorn their corporate headquarters in Liège. Once I’d exchanged family home for ship, I’d only had to add seventeen other postgrad qualifications to my solitary biochemistry degree before those same U.N. regulations would allow me anywhere near a spaceship.

  In any case, that was how I and the newly renamed Kinlochbeul Castle ended up on the ninth planet of Atlas A, 440 light years from Earth. Atlas A is a blue giant star, part of the Pleiades Cluster, and its light hurts the eyes. The natives are a curious lot, a race who shouldn’t by rights exist. Their star’s age, after all, is measured in millions of years rather than billions—they haven’t had time to evolve intelligence. The odds are heavily against there being life on their world, let alone civilization. That’s why few ships ever explore the parts of the Network that come out near massive stars. Life isn’t often found there. There’s no-one to buy from or sell to, and no-one to buy or sell. If anyone is doing anything out near such stars, it’s dredging heavy metals. Giant stars swim in a soup of the stuff.

  The Jackinaboxes are protected from their own giant star by an atmosphere hundreds of miles in depth. Their world is still on the cool side of turning Venusian, however. It does occasionally rain enough sulphuric acid to dissolve a small child, but then, I hear it does that in Beijing these days too. The ‘boxes are called ‘boxes because they have the ability, in an aquafortis storm, to instantly deflate their pneumatic skeletons and coil up inside their acid-resistant braincases, like a cartoon character folding up into his hat. They do this if they’re startled too, sometimes prompting sociopathic Scots visitors to yell at them suddenly purely for the evil fun of it.

  Gravity is high on Atlas A9, and cloud cover is constant. For that reason, those few ‘boxes who ever managed to scale the heights of Nine’s immense cloud-piercing mountain ranges became a class apart, scientist and priesthood together squashed into one hat or box. Their planetary religion—and there was only one, it having spread very quickly and utterly mercilessly—centred around astronomical observation. It was boosted to new levels when the priesthood contacted beings from other worlds, flying down from the sky in great white birds that farted tongues of flame. This is where I come in.

  In actual fact, by the time Kinlochbeul Castle arrived on Nine, they’d discovered spaceflight and built over one hundred telescopes the size of Vertical Urban Villages in Nine-stationary orbit, but the great white bird idea is more poetic. In any case, I’d stocked up on glass beads in case I ran into any sophonts on my wanderings, and I had a storage locker full of weapons-grade plutonium. Medicines don’t work from biochemistry to biochemistry, cultural artefacts that are beautiful to one species leave another cold, but everyone loves weapons grade plutonium. The Boxes’ civilization ran on it. Their world hadn’t had life long enough to acquire fossil fuel deposits, so existence was wind- and muscle-powered for the peasantry, nuclear-powered for the astronomer-aristocracy.

  But what did these creatures have to offer in return?

  In answer, I’d been led into a room of gold.

  Now, I’ll grant that gold is a whole lot less rare than it used to be. We have machines for digesting whole asteroids and crapping out the stuff, and filtering it out of sea water. But the energy expended in dragging a tonne of gold the length of ten or eleven solar systems, the average length of voyage we’re talking node-to-node out to the Chi Lupi goldfields, still makes it valuable, and the astronomarchs’ treasure room was a wonder to behold. White gold interlaid with red interlaced with rose interwoven with black mapped out the heavens, the black gold rendered by nanoscale indents in the metal cut by laser to absorb all light, making it the deep black of vacuum. They’d alloyed gold with aluminium to pick out purple stars, with silver to produce greens, with copper to make pinks. The Pleiades gas clouds had been rendered most lovingly of all, in hand-hammered, blade-thin blue gold sheets with LED’s behind them, shining bright.

  The first thing I noticed was that all the stars were in the wrong place. Their world might be young, but their civilization was old, old enough for only the lead stars in the Pleiades to have begun pushing bow waves into the Maia Nebula.

  I remarked on the amount of gold. They asked me, the boneless bastards, whether gold was a thing I was interested in. They claimed gold was commonplace to them, which was odd, as I hadn’t seen any jangling on the peasants in the fields. They offered me an obscenely large amount of it, enough to fill my ship, or alternatively, they could offer me the knowledge of where they got their gold. They seemed to have latched on to one human proverb, which they used a great deal. The proverb was give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he eats for life. I suppose I should have asked them where they’d learned the proverb.

  Bastards.

  Their gold, they said, came from a world orbiting further out in the Atlas A system. It was known by then, of course, that Atlas A had a miniature companion far smaller than the equally gigantic Atlas B, though the companion was far too dim and dense to be anything other than a brown dwarf, neutron star or collapsar. In a tight orbit around this companion, the Boxes said, anchored in place by star-sized gravity, was a world where gold could be made to walk into the smelter. What did they mean by that? They gave away nothing. But they were perfectly prepared to sell me, for my entire cargo of plute, a set of pusher drives powered by micronuclear explosions, effectively a Daedalus drive of the sort human beings had envisaged using for travelling from solar system to solar system back in the way-back-when. Of course, human beings had ended up doing nothing of the sort, as we’d discovered the Node system that had allowed us to travel faster than light for free. But Atlas A’s dark companion had no Node. Evidently the Nodebuilders had not been interested in gold. And the companion star, if star it was, was as far away from Atlas A9 as Jupiter from the Sun. Only the companion’s own dim radiation kept the planet warm.