“I might have a chance to get out there before I go to bed.” If he wasn’t going to move, she would swing around him. She glanced up at a convenient branch, to find two long-jacketed kids hanging over her, one girl, one boy. How long had they been there?

  Phineus shook his head. “She doesn’t miss, Dunya. That’s why I’m afraid of her. I was hoping she’d make a mistake and get herself in trouble. Instead of killing you, she recruited you. And here I thought you were on my side.”

  Before Dunya could move, the two kids grabbed her and swung her into the leaves.

  * * *

  To her surprise, there were fish here. A carp bumped its snout into her mask.

  Within five minutes of grabbing her they had bound her, put her into a mask and air supply, tied her legs to an elastic band, and sucked her down under a water drop. It was half local water supply, half wildlife reserve—and now her prison. Phineus had not looked her in the eye as the Green Burnings had done their work, but just before the water had closed over her head, he had muttered, “The new administration will free you.”

  He had made her complicit with his plot. Only his success would bring someone here to keep her from suffocating. If he failed she would be left here to become food for these fish.

  Dunya breathed slowly and carefully. She had no idea how much air she had, and struggle would just shorten the time she had left. She’d curled herself down a couple of times. She could find no way to influence her bonds. She could only plan for what she would do if someone rescued her, or compose her soul for death.

  The facemask, with its blinking indicators, smelled old. It had to be from the stolen emergency kit. So it was designed for vacuum, not underwater use, yet another thing to worry about. It did have an eyeball-controlled display that she ran through. No comm, and no “cut my bonds” command. It did have an inventory list of the kit of which it was a part, some things marked as “exhausted” or “damaged-unrepairable.” It included two spacesuits, of which this was presumably one, an exoshelter, fuel cells, enough procal bars to live on for a few months while awaiting rescue … and a full emergency airlock. Without her consciously willing it, the faceplate showed her an exploded view of the airlock and listed all of its many components. Good to go, it told her with satisfaction.

  Phineus had gotten the Green Burnings to steal the old emergency kit because he wanted the airlock. Dunya was sure of it. That the kit had been stored near the Imperial Valley airlock was just a distraction. Miriam was wasting her time there.

  But he needed a place to link inside and outside. Asteroid environments didn’t survive by being easy to punch through. Dammit. It was one thing to resolve to be calm and meditative and accepting. It was another to keep on doing it. Where was Bryn? Why wasn’t he around, at least to comment mordantly on affairs? Her husband had been increasingly given to mordant commenting. Doing something about things was less his line.

  But she was being unfair. He worked with cultural development in various asteroids, as far sunward as Phobos. He was respected, and busy. When he came home he was loving, attentive, and everything he needed to be.

  And then he was gone again. And she found herself just as happy. Could she imagine some other man who she would want around more? Sometimes she thought she could. But she, too, was too busy to spend too much time on that.

  Bryn’s absence was equally hard on Bodil, of course. So she ran with losers like Unray, getting rudimentary political education with the Green Burnings. That seemed a reasonable explanation. Nothing to do with anything Dunya herself had done.

  Did this facemask have a setting that sucked away all illusions? Clever, some of these old gadgets. A rough way to die, though, facing the absolute truth about everything you’d been so careful to keep under control.

  She thought about Bryn’s own dusty and peppery scent, which had eventually faded from his side of the bed, careful though she’d been not to move anything, and only breathe it when she absolutely had to. She’d smelled something else recently, associated with quite a different man. Peppery as well, but damper, and tanged with … cilantro. She remembered the noodle shop she’d parked herself above to get a drop on Miriam.

  Phineus had shoved leftover containers under his cushions. From that same place, Cairngorm’s.

  He was working with his airlock somewhere down in Xanthus. The crust was thinner down there, sure, but it was still nothing you could just hack through.

  Something splashed above her. A larger fish? Since the carp, she hadn’t seen much more than larvae. But now it was dark, and she couldn’t see anything. Someone yanked on her. She stretched up, then was pulled back by the cable holding her bound feet. She sensed swearing, hearing nothing. Arms reached far in, grabbed her, and pulled hard. She rose and rose … and finally pulled free. Then she was lying on a seeping bank of wildflowers. Her facemask was pulled off.

  “Momma!” Bodil said. “Are you still breathing?”

  * * *

  Unray had given Bodil her mother’s location. He was out of the loop as far as Green Burning tactical operations were concerned. But someone had felt it right to tell him that his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend’s mother had been captured and imprisoned in a water tank in the cedars.

  You found virtue in the oddest places.

  “I guess they sometimes hide stuff in here,” Bodil said. “Contraband. Not usually people, though.”

  “What’s that?” Dunya looked at a bundle of steaming leaves that lay amid dew-covered yellow flowers.

  “Mom! You have no idea how hard it was for me growing up, to have a mom that didn’t know anything.”

  “God, of course I know what it is. Should I eat it, or nap on it?”

  It was the wrong tone to take, even if she was newly resurrected and should be cut some slack. Bodil pushed her lower lip out and looked about to cry.

  Dunya hugged her daughter. “We’re on a mission,” she whispered. “And we have a lot to do. Unwrap it.”

  “You’re cold.” Bodil pulled off her jacket and put it around her soaked, shivering mother. Then she dropped to her knees and unwrapped the leaves, letting steam rise into the dark air.

  This lozenge cake was traditional Boscobeli food for a journey. The leaves were from a modified fig and added a spice to the outer layers of the dough, which cooked enzymatically when tugged in just the right way. Dunya had never cared for it, finding it too sour for a decent dessert, and, uncooked, too hard as a pillow, the use the ancient and fictional tradition had for it.

  Of course, a people defined itself by those things no sensible individuals would pick on their own. And Bodil was Boscobel born and bred. So Dunya sat on a branch in a world she had not chosen, happy to be alive, and shared the almost inedible cake with her daughter.

  * * *

  Bodil had figured it out instantly. Any airball had an expulsion pore, through which the waste rock had been expelled. And above that, a series of baffles. All safe, no danger from the ancient weakness.

  Except that, at the base of Xanthus, the baffles had collapsed into useless piles of cracked rock, another sign of the deferred maintenance that put the entire world at risk.

  Dunya climbed down the tumbled slabs alone. Bodil had gone to find Miriam. She wouldn’t succeed, of course. But Miriam would find her. Dunya only hoped that would happen before she got herself into serious trouble down here.

  One other thing Bodil had learned from Unray: there was no one from the Green Burnings down here. They’d gotten irritated with their mysterious guru, and had dumped Phineus in preference to mixing it up with their competitors over in Five Boughs. After that, a party. Phineus was on his own down here.

  It didn’t really matter. He could take her easily. She had to wait for Miriam, who knew what to do. Miriam would have told her that herself.

  She couldn’t listen to Miriam, even though what Miriam had not actually said made perfect sense. Phineus was still her client, making bad choices. Even as she knew she had to stop him, she recognized him as her responsibility.

  There he was, working with a small light. The airlock was in. She could see the rubble from the sealed pore all around it. Being so small, it had to be secret. It could fit, at most, two people at a time. It was next to impossible to get an army in position and deployed using that. But, as she had learned from both Phineus and Miriam, next to impossible was a Martian’s favorite spot to get a seat.

  She thought she was moving quietly. Phineus heard her, and jerked around. The light caught her.

  “Aren’t you cold?” he said. “You’re all wet.”

  “Oh, how thoughtful, Phineus,” she said.

  He muttered something.

  “What?” she said.

  “I said I’m sorry. It had to be done.”

  “Please stop, Phineus. Just stop. Do you really think you’re still going to get a force of Martians in here?”

  He shook his head. “You think what you see is what there is. I have support, here in Boscobel. It’s really my place, not yours.”

  She tried not to think about how much he was right. “Contingent support. If-you-win support. If there’s any problem, it will vanish. I walked right in here. The gang you trained up is gone, you’re here alone. That should tell you something.”

  He’d never done his own dirty work. First he’d sent Dunya into Miriam’s path in the hopes that Miriam would take her out, then he’d used his gang. Now he was pretending to be too busy to bother with her. No wonder he’d left Mars. He just wasn’t up to it.

  “There’s no way to advance on Mars,” he said. “Everything’s owned or closed off. The only way to get somewhere is to come out here. There’s a lot of unrealized value in the asteroids.”

  If he was arguing, there was a chance. But it was too late for him. At the last instant it seemed he knew that, because he stopped and stared at her. Before he could say anything else, Miriam dropped from somewhere overhead and kicked him in the head.

  Not straight on, though. Phineus reacted fast. He tilted his head so that the force of her kick grazed past, then tried to help her on her way with a slap at her heel.

  Miriam was fast too. She spun and landed in a crouch.

  Dunya wished she could help. But she knew all she could do was get in the way or become a hostage.

  The struggle was brief and vicious. Then Phineus whipped a rock at Miriam, and when she dodged he rolled and launched himself into a black gap among the dry roots.

  Without hesitating, Miriam went after him. Both vanished among the rocks.

  Dunya stepped down to the airlock. The least she could do was deactivate it while Miriam did her work.

  “I need to return that in good working order,” Strop said. He stood among the rocks, looking miserable and sweaty. Stumbling around in the high-gravity area in the dark wasn’t usually his way of getting things done.

  “Did it get too public?” Dunya said. “Too hard to deny?”

  She hadn’t expected him to answer, and he didn’t. He lumbered forward and slapped a Maintenance Required sticker across the airlock.

  “What’s going to happen?” Dunya said.

  “I can at least tell you something that won’t happen. No Martian vessel will approach Boscobel. If one does, it will get a warning shot, and know to go elsewhere.”

  “Thus ensuring no one ever has to testify to who knew what.”

  He shrugged. “A lot of people would prefer that. You might even be one of them. If Phineus is still alive, he won’t get a trial either. He’ll be expelled. He can go to Mars, where they’ll kill him. Or he can go somewhere else. Not our problem. I do need to say that your inability to control him will be a black mark on your record. Not a lot I can do, but I’ll put in a good word for you.” He smiled at her.

  She’d take a shower when she got home. That might do something about the greasy film he left on her, even as he was helping her out.

  “As staff is rotated off the entry and departure airlocks to be re-vetted and cleared, coverage will be affected. Pretty much anyone who wants to get out of Boscobel without interference will be able to do so.”

  She glanced up. Bodil stood on a rock high above. She smiled and gave her mother the thumbs-up.

  “Go ahead,” Strop said. “Get your girl home. I’ll pick up our unfortunate Martian invader.”

  She’d have to use Bodil to communicate with Miriam and get her off Boscobel. Too dangerous for Dunya to do it directly. That was too bad. That woman was someone to know.

  Someday, she guessed, Bodil would want an off-Boscobel school. Deliberately exposing her daughter to Miriam’s influence would be dangerous, of course. But she had heard that there really was nothing like a Martian education.

  She climbed up the shattered slabs of rock, back toward the trees she had come to rely on.

  The Irish Astronaut

  VAL NOLAN

  The lyrical and compassionate story that follows takes a man to Ireland to perform a last sad duty for a fallen comrade—one that may ultimately prove as important to the living as to the dead.

  Val Nolan lectures at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His fiction has previously appeared on the Futures page of Nature and in magazines and newspapers such as Cosmos, The Irish Times, and The Daily Telegraph. His academic publications include “Flann, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: O’Brien’s Surprising Synthesis” (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Flann O’Brien special edition, 2011) and “If it was Just Th’ ol Book…: A History of the John McGahern Banning Controversy” (Irish Studies Review, 2011). Forthcoming work includes “Break Free: Understanding, Reimagining, and Reclaiming Stories in Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory” (Journal of Graphic Novels and Comic Books, 2014) and a chapter on Lost and Battlestar Galactica in Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture (McFarland, 2013). He is a regular literary critic for the Irish Examiner.

  By his second week in the village with the unpronounceable name, Dale had taken up with the old men fishing out beyond the rocks. The place was called the Blue Pool and people died there, he was told, freak waves being known to carry them away. Fierce tragic, as his new friends had it.

  “Saw a man plucked from the earth here once,” Gerry McGovern said. “Looked off at a girl in a summer dress and then, well—”

  “Gone?” asked Dale.

  “Gone.”

  “Christ.”

  McGovern blessed himself.

  Beside him, Bartley tapped his pipe upside-down against his hand. “Every one of your stories starts like that, Gerry. Every one.”

  McGovern sneered. “Won’t be long now,” he said to the American.

  “Hopefully,” said Dale, who had been waiting ten days for the parish priest. “I should have called ahead, but … I wasn’t sure.”

  “Bad luck, surely,” Bartley said. He cut thin strips of tobacco from a block with his penknife and rolled the tar curls between filthy palms until the nest was finely shredded. “Though you could hardly blame the Father,” he said. “Tis the first holiday that man has taken since God-knows-when.”

  “Well his timing’s incredible,” Dale said, “just incredible.” He followed the thread of his borrowed line down into the water and watched a tiny ripple stir around it. It was a fine morning on the coast of Ireland, cool beneath a naked sun. Dale felt like he’d been sitting there since he first trundled through the airport, catching nothing and talking about airplanes or weather. Every day he ate his breakfast in the B&B and every night he drank at a small bar in the centre of the village. He had yet to go into the grey stone hills which loomed above the crooked, multicoloured houses. There was just something about them, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “I wonder,” Bartley said, “D’you think they’d ever have one of our lads up there?” He plucked a pebble from the ground and placed it in the bowl of his pipe. “They’re fierce small, you know, because of our planes. They’d fit them tin cans of yours awful easy.”

  Dale laughed. “Height really isn’t…” He looked around. “It doesn’t matter. The program’s shut down.”

  “Aye,” Bartley said, serious all of a sudden. “Because of the crash?”

  “It wasn’t a crash.”

  “The accident then?” He held a match towards his face and cupped both hands above the pipe.

  “Yeah,” Dale said. “Because of the accident.” He drank from the plastic bottle beside him and stared out across the water. As we set sail on this new ocean, he thought …

  “Terrible thing,” Bartley was saying. “Terrible altogether. Did you know any of them boys, you did?”

  “I knew them all,” Dale said. “Davis, O’Neil, Rodriguez…” He took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. It was two years later and the president’s speech still rang in his ears: “Aquarius is lost. There are no survivors.”

  * * *

  Ireland. The slide-rule rigidity of Houston had not prepared him for it. Dale was used to clean lines and order, but this little village was a bow tie of crooked streets knotted where their paths crisscrossed with those of history and want. The first time Dale saw it he had thought it was a theme park. Even after fourteen days on the ground, its true arrangement continued to elude him. One wrong turn, what he thought might make a sensible shortcut, and Dale would find himself on the shoulder of the potted two-lane to another parish, would suddenly be in the company of dirty hens by a half-finished house on the edge of the arid countryside.

  He had taken a room in the centre of the village, on what passed for the main drag. It was a rambling nook-and-cranny job, an anarchic spiderweb of low doors and high ceilings rebuilt and renovated many times. Thomas and Catherine, the elderly couple who owned it, had gleefully explained the building’s history to him; how it had consumed outhouse after outhouse, how it had gone from farmhouse to townhouse, from boarding house to B&B, and Dale was sure his room had once been among the rafters of a forge or stable. Standing in the guesthouse doorway, one could go only left or right—to the pub or the sea—and still Dale always managed to get lost.