“I see,” she said. The nausea, the sense of dislocation, wouldn’t leave her—disgust for him, for this life that trapped her, for everything she’d turned into or been turned into. “I see.”

  “Do you think I like it?” His voice was bitter. “Do you think it makes me sleep better at night? Every day I hate that choice, even though I wasn’t the one who made it. Every day I wonder if there was something else the Board could have done, some other solution that wouldn’t have robbed you of everything you were.”

  “Not everything,” Catherine said—slowly, carefully. “We still look Dai Viet.”

  Jason grimaced, looking ill at ease. “That’s your body, Catherine. Of course they weren’t going to steal that.”

  Of course; and suddenly, seeing how uneasy he was, it occurred to Catherine that they could have changed that, too, just as easily as they’d tampered with her memories; made her skin clearer, her eyes less distinctive; could have helped her fit into Galactic society. But they hadn’t. Holding the strings to the last, Johanna would have said. “You draw the line at my body, but stealing my memories is fine?”

  Jason sighed; he turned towards the window, looking at the streets. “No, it’s not, and I’m sorry. But how else were we supposed to keep you alive?”

  “Perhaps we didn’t want to be alive.”

  “Don’t say that, please.” His voice had changed, had become fearful, protective. “Catherine. Everyone deserves to live. You especially.”

  Perhaps I don’t, she thought, but he was holding her close to him, not letting her go—her anchor to the flat—to the living room, to life. “You’re not Johanna,” he said. “You know that.”

  The strongest of us, Johanna had said. She didn’t feel strong; just frail and adrift. “No,” she said, at last. “Of course I’m not.”

  “Come on,” Jason said. “Let me make you a tisane. We’ll talk in the kitchen—you look as though you need it.”

  “No.” And she looked up—sought out his lips in the darkness, drinking in his breath and his warmth to fill the emptiness within her. “That’s not what I need.”

  “Are you sure?” Jason looked uncertain—sweet and innocent and naïve, everything that had drawn her to him. “You’re not in a state to—”

  “Ssh,” she said, and laid a hand on his lips, where she’d kissed him. “Ssh.”

  Later, after they’d made love, she lay her head in the hollow of his arm, listening to the slow beat of his heart like a lifeline; and wondered how long she’d be able to keep the emptiness at bay.

  * * *

  “It goes to Prime,” Cuc said. “All the data is beamed to Prime, and it’s coming from almost every ship in the ward.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lan Nhen said. She’d plugged her own equipment into the ship, carefully shifting the terminals she couldn’t make sense of—hadn’t dared to go closer to the centre, where Outsider technology had crawled all over her great-aunt’s resting place, obscuring the Mind and the mass of connectors that linked her to the ship.

  On one of the screens, a screensaver had launched: night on a planet Lan Nhen couldn’t recognise—an Outsider one, with their sleek floaters and their swarms of helper bots, their wide, impersonal streets planted with trees that were too tall and too perfect to be anything but the product of years of breeding.

  “She’s not here,” Cuc said.

  “I—” Lan Nhen was about to say she didn’t understand, and then the true import of Cuc’s words hit her. “Not here? She’s alive, Cuc. I can see the ship; I can hear her all around me…”

  “Yes, yes,” Cuc said, a tad impatiently. “But that’s … the equivalent of unconscious processes, like breathing in your sleep.”

  “She’s dreaming?”

  “No,” Cuc said. A pause, then, very carefully: “I think she’s on Prime, Cousin. The data that’s being broadcast—it looks like Mind thought-processes, compressed with a high rate and all mixed together. There’s probably something on the other end that decompresses the data and sends it to … Arg, I don’t know! Wherever they think is appropriate.”

  Lan Nhen bit back another admission of ignorance, and fell back on the commonplace. “On Prime.” The enormity of the thing; that you could take a Mind—a beloved ship with a family of her own—that you could put her to sleep and cause her to wake up somewhere else, on an unfamiliar planet and an alien culture—that you could just transplant her like a flower or a tree … “She’s on Prime.”

  “In a terminal or as the power source for something,” Cuc said, darkly.

  “Why would they bother?” Lan Nhen asked. “It’s a lot of power expenditure just to get an extra computer.”

  “Do I look as though I have insight into Outsiders?” Lan Nhen could imagine Cuc throwing her hands up in the air, in that oft-practised gesture. “I’m just telling you what I have, Cousin.”

  Outsiders—the Galactic Federation of United Planets—were barely comprehensible in any case. They were the descendants of an Exodus fleet that had hit an isolated galaxy: left to themselves and isolated for decades, they had turned on each other in huge ethnic cleansings before emerging from their home planets as relentless competitors for resources and inhabitable planets.

  “Fine. Fine.” Lan Nhen breathed in, slowly; tried to focus at the problem at hand. “Can you walk me through cutting the radio broadcast?”

  Cuc snorted. “I’d fix the ship, first, if I were you.”

  Lan Nhen knelt by the equipment, and stared at a cable that had curled around one of the ship’s spines. “Fine, let’s start with what we came for. Can you see?”

  Silence; and then a life-sized holo of Cuc hovered in front of her—even though the avatar was little more than broad strokes, great-great-aunt had still managed to render it in enough details to make it unmistakably Cuc. “Cute,” Lan Nhen said.

  “Hahaha,” Cuc said. “No bandwidth for trivialities—gotta save for detail on your end.” She raised a hand, pointed to one of the outermost screens on the edge of the room. “Disconnect this one first.”

  It was slow, and painful. Cuc pointed; and Lan Nhen checked before disconnecting and moving. Twice, she jammed her fingers very close to a cable, and felt electricity crackle near her—entirely too close for comfort.

  They moved from the outskirts of the room to the centre—tackling the huge mount of equipment last. Cuc’s first attempts resulted in a cable coming loose with an ominous sound; they waited, but nothing happened. “We might have fried something,” Lan Nhen said.

  “Too bad. There’s no time for being cautious, as you well know. There’s … maybe half an hour left before the other defences go live.” Cuc moved again, pointed to another squat terminal. “This goes off.”

  When they were finished, Lan Nhen stepped back, to look at their handiwork.

  The heartroom was back to its former glory: instead of Outsider equipment, the familiar protrusions and sharp organic needles of the Mind’s resting place; and they could see the Mind herself—resting snug in her cradle, wrapped around the controls of the ship—her myriad arms each seizing one rack of connectors; her huge head glinting in the light—a vague globe shape covered with glistening cables and veins. The burn mark from the Outsider attack was clearly visible, a dark, elongated shape on the edge of her head that had bruised a couple of veins—it had hit one of the connectors as well, burnt it right down to the colour of ink.

  Lan Nhen let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “It scrambled the connector.”

  “And scarred her, but didn’t kill her,” Cuc said. “Just like you said.”

  “Yes, but—” But it was one thing to run simulations of the attack over and over, always getting the same prognosis; and quite another to see that the simulations held true, and that the damage was repairable.

  “There should be another connector rack in your bag,” Cuc said. “I’ll walk you through slotting it in.”

  After she was done, Lan Nhen took a step back; and stared at her great-aunt—feeling, in some odd way, as though she were violating the Mind’s privacy. A Mind’s heartroom was their stronghold, a place where they could twist reality as they wished, and appear as they wished to. To see her great-aunt like this, without any kind of appearance change or pretence, was … more disturbing than she’d thought.

  “And now?” she asked Cuc.

  Even without details, Lan Nhen knew her cousin was smiling. “Now we pray to our ancestors that cutting the broadcast is going to be enough to get her back.”

  * * *

  Another night on Prime, and Catherine wakes up breathless, in the grip of another nightmare—images of red lights, and scrolling texts, and a feeling of growing cold in her bones, a cold so deep she cannot believe she will ever feel warm no matter how many layers she’s put on.

  Johanna is not there; beside her, Jason sleeps, snoring softly; and she’s suddenly seized by nausea, remembering what he said to her—how casually he spoke of blocking her memories, of giving a home to her after stealing her original one from her. She waits for it to pass; waits to settle into her old life as usual. But it doesn’t.

  Instead, she rises, walks towards the window, and stands watching Prime—the clean wide streets, the perfect trees, the ballet of floaters at night—the myriad dances that make up the society that constrains her from dawn to dusk and beyond—she wonders what Johanna would say, but of course Johanna won’t ever say anything anymore. Johanna has gone ahead, into the dark.

  The feeling of nausea in her belly will not go away: instead it spreads, until her body feels like a cage—at first, she thinks the sensation is in her belly, but it moves upwards, until her limbs, too, feel too heavy and too small—until it’s an effort to move any part of her. She raises her hands, struggling against a feeling of moving appendages that don’t belong to her—and traces the contours of her face, looking for familiar shapes, for anything that will anchor her to reality. The heaviness spreads, compresses her chest until she can hardly breathe—cracks her ribs and pins her legs to the ground. Her head spins, as if she were about to faint; but the mercy of blackness does not come to her.

  “Catherine,” she whispers. “My name is Catherine.”

  Another name, unbidden, rises to her lips. Mi Chau. A name she gave to herself in the Viet language—in the split instant before the lasers took her apart, before she sank into darkness: Mi Chau, the princess who unwittingly betrayed her father and her people, and whose blood became the pearls at the bottom of the sea. She tastes it on her tongue, and it’s the only thing that seems to belong to her anymore.

  She remembers that first time—waking up on Prime in a strange body, struggling to breathe, struggling to make sense of being so small, so far away from the stars that had guided her through space—remembers walking like a ghost through the corridors of the Institution, until the knowledge of what the Galactics had done broke her, and she cut her veins in a bathroom, watching blood lazily pool at her feet and thinking only of escape. She remembers the second time she woke up; the second, oblivious life as Catherine.

  Johanna. Johanna didn’t survive her second life; and even now is starting her third, somewhere in the bowels of the Institution—a dark-skinned child indistinguishable from other dark-skinned children, with no memories of anything beyond a confused jumble …

  Outside, the lights haven’t dimmed, but there are stars—brash and alien, hovering above Prime, in configurations that look wrong; and she remembers, suddenly, how they lay around her, how they showed her the way from planet to planet—how the cold of the deep spaces seized her just as she entered them to travel faster, just like it’s holding her now, seizing her bones—remembers how much larger, how much wider she ought to be …

  There are stars everywhere; and superimposed on them, the faces of two Dai Viet women, calling her over and over. Calling her back, into the body that belonged to her all along; into the arms of her family.

  “Come on, come on,” the women whisper, and their voices are stronger than any other noise; than Jason’s breath in the bedroom; than the motors of the floaters or the vague smell of garlic from the kitchen. “Come on, great-aunt!”

  She is more than this body; more than this constrained life—her thoughts spread out, encompassing hangars and living quarters; and the liquid weight of pods held in their cradles—she remembers family reunions, entire generations of children putting their hands on her corridors, remembers the touch of their skin on her metal walls; the sound of their laughter as they raced each other; the quiet chatter of their mothers in the heartroom, keeping her company as the New Year began; and the touch of a brush on her outer hull, drawing the shape of an apricot flower, for good luck …

  “Catherine?” Jason calls behind her.

  She turns, through sheer effort of will; finding, somehow, the strength to maintain her consciousness in a small and crammed body alongside her other, vaster one. He’s standing with one hand on the doorjamb, staring at her—his face pale, leeched of colours in the starlight.

  “I remember,” she whispers.

  His hands stretch, beseeching. “Catherine, please. Don’t leave.”

  He means well, she knows. All the things that he hid from her, he hid out of love; to keep her alive and happy, to hold her close in spite of all that should have separated them; and even now, the thought of his love is a barb in her heart, a last lingering regret, slight and pitiful against the flood of her memories—but not wholly insignificant.

  Where she goes, she’ll never be alone—not in the way she was with Jason, feeling that nothing else but her mattered in the entire world. She’ll have a family; a gaggle of children and aunts and uncles waiting on her, but nothing like the sweet, unspoiled privacy where Jason and she could share anything and everything. She won’t have another lover like him—naïve and frank and so terribly sure of what he wants and what he’s ready to do to get it. Dai Viet society has no place for people like Jason—who do not know their place, who do not know how to be humble, how to accept failure or how to bow down to expediency.

  Where she goes, she’ll never be alone; and yet she’ll be so terribly lonely.

  “Please,” Jason says.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll come back—” a promise made to him; to Johanna, who cannot hear or recognise her anymore. Her entire being spreads out, thins like water thrown on the fire—and, in that last moment, she finds herself reaching out for him, trying to touch him one last time, to catch one last glimpse of his face, even as a heart she didn’t know she had breaks.

  “Catherine.”

  He whispers her name, weeping, over and over; and it’s that name, that lie that still clings to her with its bittersweet memories, that she takes with her as her entire being unfolds—as she flies away, towards the waiting stars.

  A Map of Mercury

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, Arc, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, Century Rain, and Pushing Ice, all big sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and a chapbook novella, The Six Directions of Space, as well as three collections of short stories, Galactic North, Zima Blue and Other Stories, and Deep Navigation. His other novels include The Prefect, House of Suns, Terminal World, Blue Remembered Earth, and a Doctor Who novel, Harvest of Time. His most recent book is a new novel, On the Steel Breeze. As a professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands for a number of years, but has recently moved back to his native Wales to become a full-time writer.

  Here he takes us to the broiling, inhospitable planet Mercury, in the company of an emissary who must find a way to negotiate with groups of artists who are in the process of renouncing and abandoning their organic human existence altogether.

  When at last his ship had escaped Mercury’s gravitational pull and aligned itself for the long cruise back to Jupiter space, Oleg unstrapped from his launch couch and floated through the cabin until he reached the aft stowage rack where he had slotted the artwork. It had been a fight against temptation, not opening the box until now, but he had promised himself that he would not do so until he had reached space. Perhaps it was unwise to open it at all, and certainly before he surrendered it to his Jovian masters. But he had been given no special instructions in the matter.

  The box was light, almost too light, as if it contained no more than air or packing. Was it a last trick on the world, he wondered? An empty container? A box full of high-grade vacuum?

  He would have to open it to know.

  The container was an unprepossessing object. It was a plain white in colour. Its upper third was hinged and secured by a simple metal clasp. It was the kind of thing, he reflected, in which one might receive a hat or perhaps a new space helmet.

  The clasp released easily under his fingers. He hinged open the top of the box. Immediately beneath the lid lay, as anticipated, a wadding of packaging. He plucked the cottony material away, until a harder form began to reveal itself. It was the upper part of a rough-textured sphere. It was beautifully shaded and coloured—a warm grey, relieved by blue and gold mottling and the circles and sprays of fine white cratering. The polar region glittered with tiny embedded diamonds, signifying motherlodes of frozen water, locked in shadowed craters for mindless aeons.

  Well, of course. It was a globe. The clue had been there in the title all along.

  A Map of Mercury.

  * * *

  He had come in with high expectations—unrealistically high, perhaps.

  The artists kept the place clean. Being cyborgs they could tolerate both the lit and unlit faces of the slow-turning world, but they moved anyway—camping and then travelling on, endlessly. Except for their artforms, littering the crust like Ozymandis heads, they left no trace of themselves. On airless Mercury the shadows of these things clawed out to the limit of the world’s curvature.