She sniffs and looks despite herself. Sees her long-lost seashell, of all things, nestling in his craggy hand. She gabs it greedily and hugs it to herself and away from him. “I suppose you’ve got that other thing here as well—another bloody souvenir?”

  He almost looks puzzled. “What thing?”

  “The gun, you bastard! The thing you killed my bother with—and did this to me!” She slaps the slope of her skull so hard it rings.

  But he just stands there. Then, slowly, he blinks. “I think I see.”

  “See what?” The entangled are useless at arguing—she’s tried it often enough.

  “You think, Martha, you believe, that I broke into your house and did that terrible thing? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Of course I am.” But why is the roaring getting louder in her head?

  “I’m sorry, Martha,” he says, looking at her more pityingly than ever. “I really am so very, very sorry.”

  “You can’t just … Leave…”

  But he is. He’s turning, shuffling away from her across this rainbow space with nothing but a slow backward glance. Dissolving into the frost and the shadows, climbing down and out from this lost place of memories toward his life and his commune and a sense of infinite belonging, before Martha Chauhan even knows what else to know or say or feel.

  * * *

  Full day now, and Martha Chanhan’s sitting high at the concrete edge of the waystation.

  It’s freezing up here, despite the snowmelt. But she doesn’t seem to be shivering any longer, nor does she feel especially cold. She sniffs, swipes her dripping nose, then studies the back of an old woman’s hand which seems to have come away coated in blood. That roaring in her ears which is much far loud and close to be any kind of sound. Although there’s no pain, it isn’t hard for her to imagine, with what brains she has left, of the wet dissolution of the inside of her skull as the immune suppressants fade from her blood. If she doesn’t turn up back at Baldwin Towers soon, she supposes help will probably come. But the entangled can be astonishingly callous. After all, they let their old and frail die from curable diseases. They kill their treasured pets for clothing and food.

  She inspects her old seashell. A small glow rises through the red smears when she touches its controls. Something here that isn’t dead, and she hooks the buds around her ears and feels a faint, nostalgic fizz. But the stuff she liked back in the day would surely be awful, old and lost as she now is. A different person, really. In fact, that’s the whole point …

  She feels past the syringe in her coat pocket, finds the data card she took from the house security system and sniffs back more blood as she numbly shoves it in. It’s still a surprise, though, to find options and menus hanging against the clear morning sky. Files as well, when you’d have thought Dad would have deleted them. But then, he never liked destroying things—even stuff he never planned to use. And perhaps, the thought trickles down through her leaking brain, he left this for her. After all, and despite his many evasions and protestations, he always had a strong regard for the truth.

  She waves a once-practised hand through ancient images until she reaches the very last date. The end of everything. The very last night.

  And there it is.

  There it always was.

  She’s looking into the bright dark of their old kitchen through the nightsight eyes of that stupid not-dog. Fast-forward until a window shatters in a hard spray and the door opens and something moves in, and the not-dog stirs, wags its tail, recognises … Not Karl Yann, but much more a familiar shape and scent.

  Martha rips the buds from her ears, but she still can’t escape the past. She’s back at this waystation, but she’s young again, and the colours are brilliant, and she’s here with Karl Yann, full of Politics and Philosophy and righteous anger at the state of the world. And he’s got this handgun that he’s merely using as a prop for all his agitprop posturings, when she has a much clearer, simpler, cleverer idea. The final performance act, right? The easiest, most obvious, one of all … Come on, Karl, don’t say you haven’t thought of it … And fuck you if you’re not interested. If you’re not prepared, I’ll just do the damn thing myself …

  Martha flouncing out from the waystation. Into the darkness. Hunching alone through the glass and rubble streets. The gun a weight of potentiality in her pocket and the whole world asleep. She feels like she’s in the mainstream of the long history of resistance. She’s Ulrike Meinhof. She’s Gavrilo Princip. She’s Harry Potter fighting Voldemort. A pure, simple, righteous deed to show everyone—and her Dad especially—that there are no barriers that will keep the truth of what’s really happening away from these prim, grim estates. Not this shockwire. Nor these gates. Not anything. Least of all the glass of their kitchen door which breaks in a satisfying clatter as she feels in for the old-fashioned handle and turns. Not that this isn’t a prank as well. Not that there isn’t still fun to be had. After all, that fucking thing of a dog isn’t really living anyway, it’s nothing but dumb property, so what harm is being done if she shoots it properly dead? Nothing at all, right? She’s doing nothing but good. She’s shoving it to the system. She’s giving it to the man. The darkness seethes as she enters, and she feels as always feels, standing right here in her own kitchen, which is like an intruder in her own life.

  That roaring again. Now stronger than ever, even though the seashell’s buds are off and its batteries have gone. After all, how is she to tell one shape from another in this sudden dark? How could she know when she can barely see anything that the thing that comes stumbling threateningly out at her is Damien and not that zombie dog? It’s all happened already, and too quickly, and the moment is long gone. A squeezed trigger and the world shudders and she’s screaming and the dog’s howling and all the backup lights have flared and Damien’s sprawled in a lake of blood and the gun’s a deathly weight in her hand—although Martha Chauhan doubts if she could ever understand how she felt as she turned it around so that its black snout was pointing at her own head and she squeezed the trigger again.

  * * *

  Her father’s with her now. Even without looking, and just as when she lay in her bedroom surrounded by pain and humming equipment, she knows he’s here. After all, and despite her many attempts to reject him, he never really went away. And, as always, he’s telling her tales—filling the roaring air with endless ideas, suppositions, stories … Talking at least as much about once-upon-a-times and should-have-beens as about how things really are. Using what life and energy he has left to bring back his daughter. And if he could have found a way of sheltering her from what really happened that terrible night, if he could have invented a story that gave her a reason to carry on living, Martha knows he would have done so.

  She sniffs, tastes bitter salt, and feels a deep roaring. It’s getting impossibly late. Already, the sun seems to be setting, and the beach is growing cold, and the cricket match has finished, and that last gritty samosa she’s just eaten was foul, and all the dogs and the kite flyers have gone home. But there’s Dad, walking trousers-rolled and hand-in-hand with Damien as the tide floods in. Martha waves cheerily, and they wave back. She thinks she might just join them, down there at the edge of everything where all islands meet.

  Earth 1

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  Stephen Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as appearing in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His many other books include the novels Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Long Tusk, Ice Bone, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, Emperor, Resplendent, Conqueror, Navigator, Firstborn, The H-Bomb Girl, Weaver, Flood, Ark, and two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days and Time’s Eye, a Time Odyssey. His short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and The Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayflower II. His most recent books include: the novel trilogy Stone Spring, Bronze Summer, and Iron Winter; a nonfiction book, The Science of Avatar; and a trilogy written in collaboration with Terry Pratchett: The Long Earth, The Long War, and The Long Childhood.

  Here he takes us along on a quest among the stars to discover the lost origin place of all humanity, one which may teach lessons the seekers are not really ready to learn.

  I

  If we expected to come out here and join in some kind of bustling Galactic culture, it ain’t going to happen. We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We’re like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard …

  * * *

  LuSi and JaEm, laughing, hand in hand, ran down the concrete slope into the tremendous dish of the starship construction yard. Huge structures stood here, inert and silent today, cranes and manipulators and immense trucks, portable fusion plants, fuel tanks frosted with glittering ice. LuSi knew that what had been constructed here, immense sculptures of metal and ceramic and monomolecular carbon, had been grander still, before being hoisted into orbit around Urthen and assembled into the delicate, gravity-vulnerable superstructure of a starship, itself a transformed asteroid.

  A ship that was going to take LuSi away to the stars.

  But not today, she told herself, not for a few Days more, she wasn’t going to lose JaEm and his warm touch, not today. And a few Days was a long time for a fourteen-year-old. On they ran, seeking a quiet place amid the silent machines.

  And even at this moment LuSi had an unwelcome sense of perspective, the kind of perspective JaEm’s father, Jennin PiRo, had tried to beat into her thick skull, in his words. The yard, a giant crater dug into the ground, was too big, too big even for the monumental machines they built here. And why was that? Because it hadn’t been constructed to build mere human starships. It hadn’t been built by humans at all, as far as anybody could tell, but by an alien culture, star-faring, long-vanished. Why should it be so? It was an illogic in the Sim, the Jennin protested, in the Backstory, the received history of the universe and the human story within it. Unless the Sim’s Designers and Controllers were insane, why build in a feature like this that had nothing to do with mankind—it made no sense! Couldn’t LuSi see that?…

  Unfortunately she could, and it crowded into her head even now, even as they reached the shadow of a tremendous truck, found a sheltered spot behind one huge tyre out of the wind, and, laughing, sat side by side. Their breath steamed and mingled before them. They kissed, for the first time that day. And when JaEm slid his hand inside her coat, and she could feel his warmth, his strength.

  Their shared warmth was a defiance of the cold of the day. The Ember hung above them, above the scattered clouds, in the sky from which it never moved. Its broad face was like a fading fire, mottled with huge dark spots. All LuSi’s short life the spots had been gathering, and the Jennins and other scholars predicted gloomily that the world was heading for another Ember-winter. Well, LuSi couldn’t remember the last Ember-winter, it had been over hundreds of Years before she was born. The only warmth she cared about was in JaEm’s lips, his hands, the firm body she could feel under his clothing. Yet she was soon to be taken away from this scrap of warmth too, and flung between the colder stars. All because of her mother and her hateful, self-imposed “mission” …

  JaEm could sense her distraction. He hugged her, then sat back. He was sensitive that way, more so than she was. One reason she loved him, she supposed, though they had not yet used such loaded words out loud.

  He asked, “What are you thinking about? Not about leaving? We shouldn’t waste the time we’ve got left thinking about that—”

  “No, not that,” she lied. “I was thinking about your father, if you must know. His lectures. The shipyards are one of his ‘classic’ examples of Sim flaws.”

  “I suppose I’ve had more practice in shutting him out of my head than you have.” He kissed her again, delicately. “Do you think we’re all in a Sim?”

  “Of course,” she said dutifully.

  “Even when I do this … and this.” Now he nibbled her ear, a move that always seemed to liquefy her internally. “Are we all just patterns of electricity in Memory, in some big calculating machine in Denva?”

  “If we are, it’s a very good Sim,” she said, wriggling closer. “I don’t care if I’m real or not, as long as you’re here with me.”

  “Oh, LuSi—”

  “Oh, what rot.” A light shone in their faces, harsh, dazzling. The voice behind it was unmistakeable: Jennin PiRo, JaEm’s father.

  They pulled away from each other, fixing their clothing. JaEm raised a hand to shield his eyes. “Father? What do you want?”

  “Nothing from you, son,” the Jennin said. “I need to talk to LuSi. And where she is, you are. You are depressingly predictable, for two of my brightest students. Come on out of there.”

  PiRo, aged about forty Years—ten Years younger than LuSi’s mother—was a tall, habitually severe man dressed in the jet black uniform of a Jennin. Severe, and habitually impatient with the flaws and weaknesses of others, particularly of his students, like LuSi, who he seemed to think should be doing better. “Sloppy, sloppy,” he said now, “and I don’t mean your kissing technique, son.” Which made JaEm blush horribly. “I mean your thinking.” He turned on LuSi. “And your sheer emotional immaturity.”

  LuSi bridled. “Immaturity?”

  “How can it not matter if you are a Sim character, or not? Would it not matter if you were the arbitrary creation of some cold onlooker? Imagine what she or he could do to you. Freeze you. Disorder your life, so that you might leap from death to birth—from my son’s youthful embrace to the bony hug of an ancient. Delete you! He could delete you from this artificial world you believe in, leaving no trace. Does that not appal you?”

  Actually it did, but she felt her privacy had been violated by this pompous man, and she knew the theory enough to argue back. So she shrugged. “It would make no difference. Even if the instants of my life were jumbled up in the Memory, I would still experience them in the proper order. From my point of view, my own time line, I could never tell if—”

  “Oh, yes, rationalise it away. That kind of circularity of argument is precisely why, I suspect, the mythos of the Sim, and the Controllers in Denva, has lingered as long as human civilisation has persisted on this planet. Do you know how long that is?”

  “Well—” She should know.

  “Ten thousand Years! Nearly three quarters of a million turns of Urthen around the Ember! That’s as best as we can reconstruct, given the damage done by the Xaian Normalisation. Four hundred human generations—why, is it really imaginable that the most cold-hearted Controllers could maintain a Sim of whatever complexity for so long? What could possibly be the purpose?”

  She stuck out her chin defiantly. “I don’t know. I have no answer. And since this isn’t your classroom, Jennin PiRo, I don’t have to find an answer, do I? You came looking for me, you said. Maybe you should get to the point.”

  JaEm flinched at her defiance.

  But PiRo gave her a kind of wary grin. “All right. I suppose I deserved that. Look, you may have an important future. More important than you know. And it’s because of your mother.”

  “My mother?”

  “You understand why Zaen SheLu is undertaking this decades-long mission to the stars.”

  “She has a hypothesis about Denva,” LuSi said. “The Controllers’ base. The world humanity came from, or maybe a location on that world. She thinks it’s real, has a real location. Or at least—”

  “A location that maps onto a site in this ‘simulated’ universe. A place where humans first came from. That’s correct. The difficulty is, she might be right.”

  LuSi was baffled. “What do you mean, Jennin?”

  “I mean that her arguments are good, intellectually. She might well find some world, some primal site, that matches many of the criteria she has set out in her arguments. And if she does, that will cement the notion of the Sim in the minds of humanity for all time. Because the idea that all of humanity emanates from one single, primal, sacred world is just the kind of mythic element a Sim Designer would build into our Backstory. It’s a good narrative, and so it appeals to us.”

  She shrugged. “But if it’s true—”

  “If it’s true, then the notion that we are mere toys in the hands of the Controllers will lock us in us forever. We will lose initiative. We will give up. What other reaction can there be? And this is not a universe in which it is safe to give up, to stop thinking, to become complacent. Not if the stars are going out.” He glanced up at the Ember.

  The Ember was not a star, like the more distant points of light in the sky. It was called a “brown dwarf” by the astronomers, a term said to go back to the arrival of the Ark itself—if you believed the Ark ever existed. The Ember was not a star but a mere mass of glowing gas, heated by its own infall, and therefore gradually cooling.

  LuSi was only growing more confused. “But if it’s true, if the Sim exists and we can prove it, then that’s all that matters—isn’t it?”

  “There are many kinds of truth, LuSi. And many uses to which ‘truth’ can be put.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you want of me.”

  “It’s simple, LuSi. Somebody needs to counterbalance your mother on this crusade of hers. I’ve been invited to join the mission myself…”

  And that brief line electrified both LuSi and JaEm. For if the Jennin came aboard the ship, surely his family would too—surely JaEm would follow his father—and LuSi and JaEm would have Years together, not mere Days.