She took a long time replying to those words. “That’s, um…”

  “Where you are. Yes.” Charity’s med facility, Chelan Heights, was on that vector. “A lot fewer people there,” he said ruthlessly, his heart breaking slowly.

  More lag. “I’ll find you a pilot. Can I call you back?”

  “Operational security is well and truly buggered on this one,” Bashar said. “Doesn’t matter who’s listening in now. Just use the usual address. It’ll find me.”

  More lag, emotional again, he thought. “All right,” she added after a moment. “It will be okay.”

  “I love you, too. It’s been a good life.”

  He set about calling his daughter at work in Seattle. Bashar knew he needed to warn Sooboo to get out of whatever J. Appleseed subbasement she worked in these days. Just in case none of this made a damned bit of difference and the rock came down hard there after all.

  X: OBSERVING HER FATHER’S MINDLESS DECAY FOR SOME YEARS NOW

  Samira Bashar Oxham felt her earbud buzz again. She ignored it again. Whoever it was had to be an insistent bastard. Not to mention in possession of some righteous comms code overrides. J. Appleseed wasn’t the easiest organization in the world to just call up.

  She was tracking a bug in the mass accounting somewhere within the final three years of heavy lift launch budgets under the now-defunct Green Space project. It was quite unclear if the bug was a numbers problem on the data analysis side, or someone had been filching ground-to-orbit throw weight by the tens of kilograms per flight. The GSO-26 through GSO-28 mission series were all suspect.

  Even though the last launch, GSO-28-09, was six years in the past, this continued to be an issue. The possibilities for espionage from black cargo were immense, for one thing.

  Dataflow ghosts spun around Sabo, weighted by relevance and degree-of-confidence, interconnected with thin webs of color- and intensity-coded audit trails. At the moment, she was most interested in the physical audits, actual weights-and-measures checks on launch payloads. Translucent virteo images of men and women in bunnysuits stuttered in the background, synthesized from the GSO launch facility’s ubiquitous surveillance. Much as would be found in virtually any industrial premises. She could almost smell the ozone-and-cleanser scent of a highly secured facility.

  Her own workspace wasn’t nearly that secure. Just a base model productivity pit with drink dispensers and a cocoon bag, like any wage slave anywhere. Even if she slaved for something different from most office drones.

  Sabo’s earbud buzzed again. Same haptic encoding as the last two attempts. The damned thing was stupidly retro, but it had its uses.

  “Sweet Jesus and the twelve,” she muttered, finally tapping in the call. “What!?” The sharp bark disturbed the data that swirled translucent around her.

  “My dear Sooboo.” An eerily familiar voice crackled on the other end of a low bandwidth circuit afflicted by lightspeed lag. Or at least, filtered to sound like it.

  “You…” That voice was the touch of a warm autumn wind, the scent of samosas crackling in oil over a wood fire—a key to memory. Her father’s face. His dense, old arms around her as a little girl. Her parents laughing over some joke too ancient even for the expert systems in the datacloud to explain. “I thought you were dead,” she snapped. Hoped, more like it, but even now, Sabo could not say that to her father.

  No one else had ever called her “Sooboo.” Even some black hat messaging her with a voice simulator wouldn’t have known to do so. It was better than any password. The ultimate in know-your-neighbor security.

  Her father was a man whose first posthumous biography had been written a decade before she was born. Sabo should have known better than to believe he was gone from the Earth. Bashar was fucking immortal, insofar as she could tell.

  “Life is more convenient that way,” he admitted.

  That was her dad, all right. Classic Bashar. Funny as a thrown knife, serious as a heart attack. “What in the name of Wall Street do you want?”

  More line crackle, more lightspeed lag. “I’ve only got a little time. Listen…” he drew a long breath. “Get out of Seattle. Now. This minute. Get the hell away from Elliott Bay. At least thirty miles north or south if possible. Behind the highest elevation you can find. Do not head east.”

  Miles? Miles? Who the fuck talked about miles anymore? Except century-old men with bad attitudes.

  Her own anger, never far from view, bobbed to the surface. “Now? I’m busy, God damn it. What are you on? I don’t hear from you for over ten years, Mom won’t talk about whatever happened between you two, and you call me up and tell me to leave town now!?”

  Something blipped hard on the line, interference or monitoring, Sabo couldn’t tell. Again that lag. Was he bouncing off a daisy chain of comsats? With her father, anything was possible.

  “I’m coming home the hard way, Sooboo. Nobody’s going to like this splash.”

  She groaned. “Oh, god, Dad. Are you nuking Seattle?”

  “Just about. Get out.” Another deep breath. “Please.” That was followed by a burst of static.

  Sabo hadn’t heard her father say “please” since she was four years old. “Bugger off, Dad. Call someone who gives a shit.”

  He had no answer, just more static and the kind of voice ghosts that turned up when the latency went off the map and the circuit wasn’t sufficiently filtered to compensate.

  She cut the line and went back to the mass accounting data. After a couple of minutes chasing phantoms in the visualization, she gave up and instantiated a window into the current open source low earth orbit tracking.

  If something was moving out of place up there, maybe, just maybe, she’d take her father seriously.

  He’d said “please,” after all.

  And Elliott Bay.

  Really?

  * * *

  Many hours later, the mining package skipped roughly across the upper atmosphere. Behind him, and immediately above him, Bashar could see a blaze of heat and light. “It’s shallow angle entry with a semicontrolled glide,” he told himself out loud. Small reassurance.

  At least Moselle and Lu couldn’t get at him here. Slightly more reassurance.

  The noise was ungodly. To think he’d complained that space was silent. Even inside the cockpit, enclosed in the pressure suit, the howling and buffeting threatened to stun him. Bashar repeatedly shut his eyes and tried to meditate. This was about as effective as doing so in the middle of a firefight, but it was still more constructive than screaming his head off in pain and terror.

  He was out of comms, as well, for the duration. Too much interference from the raw chaos of the burn, as well the mining package’s ablative coating ablating, or whatever it was doing. Not to mention the racket onboard would have kept him from hearing anything anyway.

  Did people ride this down at other times? That would explain the cockpit. A potentially less traceable surface insertion than a fall bag or a glider either one, especially when the lucky pilot bailed out at a fairly low altitude and deployed a wingsuit or microlight glider.

  Bashar refused to wonder if he would survive the ride. That hadn’t been much of an option from the beginning of this misbegotten affair. What information Charity had come up with before he’d lost comms hadn’t been helpful. Using the boosters in a decaying orbit wouldn’t do much, she’d told him. Minor course adjustments intended to ensure the attitude of the mining package was correct when it encountered the thicker layers of the atmosphere. Even Bashar knew how critical that was. And the rock had no capacity for large-scale course redirects—that was done with the initial positioning, which had been completed long before he’d even gotten into orbit. Otherwise he could have just flown it into the Canadian Rockies or something.

  Any control he achieved would be with the airfoils in atmosphere.

  So Bashar divided his time between not-panicking about the rough ride and a hunt for the autopilot, or whatever autonomous system managed the lower stages of descent. The late, unlamented Bibendum had made it clear they weren’t controlling that from orbit.

  He wound up unhooking every component that was obviously not a flight control. Five pieces of rack-mounted equipment in all. Loose they were a terrible hazard, so he slotted them back into their racks reversed. The empty circuit connections stared at him like baleful silver eyes.

  When the mining package stopped jouncing and howling so much, and the fire above his head guttered to mixed streaks of brightness and ash, Bashar figured they had gone from a ballistic mode to at least semi-controlled atmospheric flight. He took over the joysticks to see if there was anything like wing bite.

  The problem now was an almost complete lack of navigational instruments. This wasn’t intended to be flown from the cockpit. There was no forward view. All he had was an altimeter, a compass, an airspeed indicator and a GPS readout.

  Which at the moment told him he was at 81,400 meters, headed almost due east, making Mach ten somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

  No one bailed out at this altitude and airspeed. Not anyone who wanted to survive the first step.

  Bashar fought the controls in an effort to keep the nose up as high as possible. He wanted to make the glide path shallower, so as to overshoot the landing zone. Surely he’d already messed up their careful calculations to drop this into Elliott Bay just west of the New Seawall, but he needed to miss by miles. Kilometers. A lot of them, whichever they were.

  His sensorium flickered as text came into being, superimposed on his visual field.

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  cox:: they bombed Schaadts shack

  Schaadt’s? Had Baldie-with-no-name been a victim or the perp? He’d bet vinos-to-dollars he knew the answer to that, given what a slick bastard Baldie had turned out to be. Trail of bodies in his wake kind of guy. Everything at Schaadt’s had been a set up. Lightbull, the hard Greens, did it even matter who?

  No.

  More to the point, Charity’d found some bandwidth that could reach him. Well, he had lost a lot of his burn. But this just wasn’t the time.

  bas:: not now … im saving the world

  cox:: one more thing … samira is getting out of seattle

  His relief at that news was bone deep. His daughter had listened to him. Something had been salvaged. I have won, Bashar thought. At least the smallest and most important of victories. But time was slipping, fast.

  bas:: thank god and all the little fishes

  cox:: love you

  bas:: this isnt goodbye

  God, he wished that was true.

  He kept pulling the nose up. Was he going to make it?

  No matter what happened, someone would have to deal with Lightbull, with the hard Greens in orbit, with the darwin file and the island plagues, with J. Appleseed’s rogue AIs.

  A few governments still had surface-to-orbit missiles. Could he convince the United States Air Force to nuke Orbital Zero? As for the rest of it …

  bas:: dump everything to sooboo … all data … all of it

  bas:: someone has to take on lightbull and finish this

  bas:: ¿¿¿charity???

  bas:: ¿¿¿charity???

  bas:: ¿¿¿charity???

  Had she received that?

  * * *

  At 4,000 meters, the mining package’s airspeed dropped below Mach one. Bashar figured he was close to the Olympic peninsula. Even a hard stop in the mountains there would be better than nailing Seattle. But he was pretty sure he’d clear the peaks, and if he cleared the peaks, he’d clear Seattle.

  Mt. Howard east of Seattle was a little over 2,000 meters. Bashar figured it was even money on striking the Cascades there or just clearing them as well to nail some poor bastard farmer in the Palouse.

  Or his own wife.

  It was nut-cutting time. Ride the rock down, keeping the nose up as hard as he could, or step outside and check the weather? Bashar had no way to know for sure. All he could do was guess. Bibendum had said the suit had basic atmospheric capabilities. He’d have ten or fifteen seconds to figure it out. Must be a wingsuit, since there wasn’t enough mass on the back to hold a pop-up microlight.

  Unfortunately, he knew how to fly a microlight. Wingsuits were a mystery to him.

  Bashar hoped like hell Samira would take the larger problem and run with it as she escaped the drop zone. He wasn’t sure he would ever hit the ground alive. And Charity …

  “I’m sorry,” he said to no one in particular as he popped the cockpit’s hatch, and stepped out into the screaming wind that snatched him away from the rock like the hand of God.

  His suit was smoldering, Bashar realized as he spun high in the air over the rugged terrain of the Olympic Peninsula, buffeted by the searing trail of his erstwhile craft.

  The suit stiffened and puffed to slam him hard where he’d expected to fall. Now he was spinning, not plunging.

  Bashar spread his arms wide like a starfish. Did this damned rig have jets?

  Well, of course it did, for maneuvering in microgravity, but they wouldn’t likely be affecting him here.

  His spin turned into a swooping curve. Ahead of him, the mining package left a contrail of smoke and debris as it crossed Puget Sound. Behind him was … he bent his head … smoke.

  No wonder his legs were getting hot. His suit was on fire.

  Damn it.

  Stop, drop and roll wouldn’t cut it. Not here two miles up in the air.

  If he’d simply fallen, he’d have hit the ground by now. Instead, Bashar was in a kind of spiral glide over what looked like the eastern end of the Olympic National Forest. Not a good landing zone for a man coming in hot, hard and aflame. He tried to steer toward Puget Sound, or at least the Hood Canal.

  Looking up again, he watched the mining package drop toward Seattle as the eastern sky faded to dusk.

  “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit,” Bashar said.

  It cleared the downtown skyscrapers like the fist of God, then, also like the fist of God, barely cleared Capitol Hill.

  A cloud of steam and ash shot up when the rock hit Lake Washington. Even as he watched, the blast tore the top off Capitol Hill. Most of Bellevue was toasted, too, surely. But Seattle …

  Seattle hadn’t died. Knocked hard, yes. Fucked, yes. But not dead. And people would come looking now to figure out what happened. Hard people, like the man he had been.

  He had won. His daughter was still alive, and so was Seattle.

  His suit aflame, his eyes full of tears, Bashar turned his face toward the sparkling waters and let himself plunge. Milton’s words came into his mind as he fell.

  I toiled out my uncouth passage, forced to ride the untractable abyss, plunged in the womb of unoriginal night and chaos wild.

  “Good-bye, Samira,” he told the world.

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  Rosary and Goldenstar

  GEOFF RYMAN

  Here’s an eccentric and lyrical alternate history concerning a life path for William Shakespeare different than the one he followed—one that takes him to some very strange destinations indeed.

  Although born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone with his brilliant novella The Unconquered Country that he first attracted any serious attention. The Unconquered Country, one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science-fiction scene of the day and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version: The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy won both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and his later novel Air also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include: The Warrior Who Carried Life; the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was; Coming of Enkidu; The King’s Last Song; Lust; and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” that in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page, www.ryman.com, and which in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. Most recently, he edited the anthology When It Changed; his latest books are the novel The Film-Makers of Mars and the collection Paradise Tales: and Other Stories.

  THE ROOM WAS WOOD—floor, walls, ceiling.

  The doorbell clanged a second time. The servant girl Bessie finally answered it; she had been lost in the kitchen amid all the pans. She slid across the floor on slippers, not lifting her feet; she had a notion that she polished as she walked. The front door opened directly onto the night: snow. The only light was from the embers in the fireplace.

  Three huge men jammed her doorway. “This be the house of Squire Digges?” the smallest of them asked; and Bessie, melting in shyness, said something like, “Cmn gud zurs.”

  They crowded in, stomping snow off their boots, and Bessie knelt immediately to try to mop it up with her apron. “Shoo! Shoo!” said the smaller guest, waving her away.

  The Master roared; the other door creaked like boots and in streamed Squire Digges, both arms held high. “Welcome! Good Count Vesuvius! Guests! Hah hah!” Unintroduced, he began to pump their hands.

  Vesuvius, the smaller man, announced in Danish that this was Squire Digges, son of Leonard and author of the lenses, then turned back and said in English that these two fine fellows were Frederik Rosenkrantz and Knud Gyldenstierne.

  “We have corresponded!” said Squire Digges, still smiling and pumping. To him, the two Danes looked huge and golden-red with bronze beards and bobbed noses, and he’d already lost control of who was who. He looked sideways in pain at the Count. “You must pardon me, sirs?”

  “For what?”

  The Squire looked harassed and turned on the servant. “Bessie! Bessie, their coats! The door. Leave off the floor, girl!”

  Vesuvius said in Danish, “The gentleman has asked you to remove your coats at long last. For this he is sorry.”