“Sounds fun,” I said.

  “It was.” His weary use of the past tense made me think that Kleist’s time with the Mechanicals might be coming to an end. He carefully sealed Bodkin’s chest and moved on to Filament. The older bot remained inert.

  “Are they going to wake up?” I asked.

  “Soon,” he said. “Consciousness takes time to put itself back together. Meanwhile it’s your turn.”

  “My turn for what?”

  “Story time,” he said. “Tell me how you became such a gifted bot guardian.”

  “There’s not much to tell, and I don’t like flattery.”

  Kleist gave me a strange, appraising look. “Listen. I should say this before they all wake up. Bodkin and Filament are excellent performers, both of them, but I have never seen anyone like Halley. Everything she does onstage is a blaze of light.”

  “Not surprised,” I said, “and you’re perfectly welcome to flatter my kids.”

  “Your kids,” he said. “Exactly.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Yours are different. Halley told us about her siblings. Your first fostered bot graduated from U Mars? Passing as human the entire time? Astonishing.”

  I must have made a face.

  “Relax,” he said. “The troupe knows how to keep each other’s secrets.”

  “Good,” I said. “Be sure to keep that one in particular. And I can’t take credit for it. Halley’s talent for performing didn’t come from me, either.”

  “Maybe not,” he said, “but please keep doing whatever it is that you’re doing. Bots who spent their formative year aboard the Needle go on to flourish like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and I was a Maker.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and meant it, but I still needed to immediately change the subject away from myself. “Have you ever seen a baby bot recover from fragmentation?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you think it’s possible?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Juveniles haven’t established sufficient internal coherence until the age of majority. Why do you ask? Is that what happened to the inert chassis in your copilot seat?”

  “Never mind,” I told him.

  “Do you want me to take a look? Run diagnostics?”

  “I said never mind.” I didn’t want his confirmation bias anywhere near Agatha.

  “Acknowledged.” The ex-Maker put Filament back together and then cracked open Torque’s chest.

  I couldn’t watch, so I grabbed the NASA transcript from the keepsake box and started reading to him.

  “I doubt that he can hear you,” Kleist said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, and kept reading. The first trio of lunatics used stars and their own bare eyeballs to navigate through the void, which I very much respected. I gave each of them a silly voice.

  Okay, proceed to Menkent.

  Nobody in their right mind would pick that one.

  Menkent’s a good star!

  I sure wish you’d get out that star chart.

  Can’t see a thing, huh?

  No.

  Did you look in the telescope?

  In the sextant, yes, but I can’t see it in the telescope.

  Shoot, I forget, I think that’s gray Gienah.

  You like that, Neil? You want us to record that star?

  Go ahead.

  Okay, Z torque is plus 0.152 instead of 122; I suppose that’s close enough. Now then, you got those numbers written down, Buzz?

  Copy.

  Okay. If I remember right, I think you’re just supposed to torque without further ado.

  Okay, here we go. Proceed. Torque.

  That was where his name came from.

  He didn’t respond to it now.

  Next I told Halley her favorite fairy tale, “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces,” reverse engineering a bedtime story into a wake-up story. She used to make me repeat this one over and over again. Our record was twelve times in a row—one for every dancing princess. She liked to keep the bulk of it unchanged and then invent new endings. I hoped that she would wake up and take over, right on cue. She didn’t. I finished the story myself.

  “The youngest princess discovered the invisible soldier and shoved him overboard. His heavy armor dragged him all the way down to the bottom of the underground sea. Then the sisters finished their work without interruption. They danced all the haunted shoes to pieces, releasing the ghosts trapped inside each sole, and lived happily ever after.”

  Next I pulled up the script of Twelfth Night and stumbled through a scene to make the other two Mechanicals feel included.

  What relish is in this? How runs the stream?

  Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.

  Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep;

  If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

  Wrong choice. It was time for the kids to stop dreaming and wake up. I waved the script away from my eyes and picked up the NASA transcript again.

  Okay, now I’m going to verify with the third star, and let’s see what that star’s going to be. Okay, and Atria is there in the sextant. Well, you know, it’s not right in the middle of the sextant. Have you ever heard any rules on what constitutes a good third star check?

  Torque chimed in with the next line: “No, all you’re really doing is seeing that you’ve got the right stars.”

  I pressed my face against the top of his cold metal forehead. “Whopseedoo.”

  * * *

  Bodkin stretched. “That was disagreeable. Where are we now?”

  “My ship,” I said. “Welcome aboard the Needle.”

  “Thank you, Captain Lir,” they said, “but what became of our own?”

  “Gone,” Kleist told them. “I’m sorry. Angels wrecked the Green Room. Lunar rangers impounded the wreckage.”

  “Then we’ve got nothing,” Filament said. “No ship, no stage, no props, no puppets… and no fabricator big enough to remake any of those props or puppets.”

  “No sentient casualties,” Halley added. She flexed her wrists and fingers before switching to Starling. “No permanent injuries, either. Sounds like a win to me.”

  Bodkin made a low humming noise like a distant engine. “They say that Shakespeare’s company escaped a vile landlord by stealing their own theater, piece by piece, on a single winter’s night. They uprooted and rebuilt. We can do the same.”

  Kleist said nothing. He seemed relieved to see the Mechanicals awake again, but he also shied away from any talk about the future. The pseudo-puppeteer was clearly distancing himself.

  Torque paced up and down the ship, getting used to his limbs again. He noticed the empty brig and glanced at me, the tilt of his head a question mark. I nodded. Then I looked away. Yes, Daris is gone. No, I don’t want to talk about it.

  Not even with me? Sparkles asked sweetly.

  Especially not with you.

  I motioned for Torque and Halley to follow me to the copilot’s chair.

  “Halley, this is Agatha. Your little sister.” That was difficult to say. “She heroically broke herself into pieces.”

  Halley touched Agatha’s face. “I’m so sorry.”

  “She’s not gone.” I pulled up a map of Agatha’s various fragments. “See? The pieces of her keep moving in unison. Like schools of fish.”

  “Or swarms of bugs,” Torque added.

  “How old is she?” Halley asked.

  “Seven months,” I admitted.

  “Oh,” Halley said.

  I gave her a look. Don’t say it, said the look.

  She refrained from pointing out what everybody knew.

  “We have to find Cosmas,” I insisted. “This is his field of study. Agatha needs his help, and he probably needs ours, since he sent a bunch of cryptic messages right before disappearing. Are you sure that you haven’t heard from him? Nothing at all? Not even a random gift without a note?”

  Halley shook her head. The gesture was imprecise, the degree of rotation slightly different each time. As an actor she had rehearsed the way humans move. “The last time Cosmas and I swapped letters was almost a year ago, and those were just birthday cards.”

  “We do have two more siblings,” Torque pointed out. “What about Zip and Isosceles?”

  I pulled up some maps. “Both of them work for Phoebe, and right now Saturn is on the far side of Sol. That’s a long trip. Several months. We would need safe harbor along the way or risk running out of air. Plus, there’s no guarantee that we’d find any messages from Cosmas when we finally got there.”

  “I don’t suppose that you’d be willing to check in with Isosceles via stream?” Halley asked. “Much faster.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “The last time our whereabouts leaked onto the stream it sparked a war in heaven and ruined your puppet show.”

  Torque adjusted the nav map. “I vote for Saturn. It would be nice to meet more of the family, and there are fewer sunnies so far upwell. Sol would look like just another pinprick in the sky.”

  “True,” I said. “Plenty of other religions flourish out there, though. Some people believe that dark matter is made out of ghosts. Others worship Jupiter’s big red storm like it’s Odin’s empty eye socket. Or the life-giving Eye of Ra. Or the all-seeing asshole of Shirime. There’s no escape velocity from myth.”

  Halley spoke slowly and softly. “So you don’t think we should head for Saturn?”

  “No. Maybe?” I squeezed the empty coffee bulb. Soft metal dented in my hand. “I don’t know, and I’d rather not admit that, but I’m used to thinking out loud around you—all of you, whichever one of you is here and listening to me—because mulling over judgment calls might help show you how to make your own tricky decisions someday, and also because it helps me think to hear my own thoughts and imagine what you might make of them, except I don’t want to know what you’re both making of my thought process right now because I still don’t know what to do, and I don’t know whether or not I should even admit that. Maybe it’s still instructive for both of you to hear me fail to make an important choice? So strange to have more than one kid on board. A good kind of strange. Because you’re already a crew. I need to be a captain worthy of that.”

  The kids looked at each other, and then back at me.

  “May I have the pilot’s chair?” Torque asked. “I can come up with a few different routes to Phoebe, just to see where that would take us.”

  I drifted away from the console and let him take the chair.

  “Why don’t I check with the rest of the troupe?” Halley suggested. “I’m guessing that they’ll want to tag along, wherever we decide to go.”

  “Okay.” I took a shaky breath. “Good plan.”

  The plan got derailed when Filament screamed.

  “What is that thing?” He pointed at the Damian statue like it was Banquo’s ghost. “Where did it come from?”

  I really didn’t want to talk about this, but I also needed the screaming to stop. “It’s just a statue. A tribute. I fostered twins. One of them drowned. The other made this.”

  “I’ve seen it before!” Filament’s voice was still too loud. “In dreams. When those lunatic rangers knocked us out, I dreamed about this bot!”

  “No,” I told him. “Absolutely not. Utterly impossible. My ship is not haunted. You are not seeing ghosts. Drowned fragments of Damian are not haunting your dreams.” I moved right up close to Filament’s face. “Understand?”

  “Not really,” he whimpered.

  Halley gently pushed the two of us apart. “Did the dream bot say anything?” she asked. “Did he tell you his name? Maybe it was Cosmas. I hope so. He’s been sending messages to the rest of the family, but so far I’ve been left out.”

  Filament shook his head hard enough for neck servos to whine in protest. “No names. No messages. He just looked at me and then dissolved. Fungal stuff is supposed to do that. Dissolve. Rot and then turn into other things. Dreams are supposed to only happen in the privacy of my own head. Subroutines recombine experience to make new kinds of sense. Privately. This happens to all conscious entities whenever they become slightly less conscious, right? It’s very alarming to see a piece of my own dream right in front of me when I’m entirely awake!”

  “Okay, Fil,” Halley said, her voice soothing and almost singing. “Why don’t you log into Kinfolk and play for a bit?”

  Filament floated into a corner. His posture relaxed as he settled into the stream. I kept an eye on him anyway, worried that his streaming might include more ghostly visitations.

  “What’s Kinfolk?” I asked Halley.

  “A game,” she explained. “It’s set on Terra. Sort of. A fantastical, nostalgic version of Terra rather than an empty, blasted landscape under the storm clouds. Players pretend to be anthropomorphic foxes and go on quests together.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sounds fun. Is there any sort of visual interface?”

  “No,” Halley said. “Just talking and listening. Call-and-response. Making stuff up and having adventures. Filament introduced me to it, but he only ever plays one game at a time.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Halley, how many of those games are you playing right now? Tell me the truth. Please.”

  “Four,” she admitted. “One of my foxfolk characters is rescuing a singing fish at this very moment. Another is fighting to protect travelers from bandit reindeer. A third is challenging a salamander to a ritual contest of insults, and a fourth is trying to break a malevolent hearthstone in a cursed fireplace before the fire can escape and incinerate a whole village.”

  I absorbed this news and managed to respond without shouting. “So you’re telling me that nothing ever has your full attention?”

  “That’s true of everyone,” Filament protested from his corner. “Especially biological people. If you gave something your full and undivided attention, it would pull focus away from your heart and lungs, and then you would keel over.”

  “Autonomic processes don’t count!” I protested.

  Filament curled up into a ball, which made me feel terrible.

  Halley tapped my arm. I assumed that she was going to chastise me for yelling at her friend, but she didn’t. “Tova? Something odd just happened. The salamander said my name. Not my character name. He said Halley. No one in Kinfolk should be able to guess my real name.”

  “Log out,” I told her. “Right now.”

  “Wait…,” she said. “He’s trying to tell me something.”

  “I don’t care what that imaginary salamander has to say. Get out of the stream!”

  Halley’s eyes refocused. “He gave me a message. ‘Tell Captain Mom to loot the body.’ Then he dove into a river and swam away.”

  * * *

  No one had ever called me Captain Mom except for Agatha. No other talking animal in Kinfolk had ever called Halley by name before. Someone knew things that they shouldn’t be able to know. Maybe it was Cosmas. Maybe the first-class messenger he’d sent still had a message to deliver.

  My boots clomped across the Needle’s outer hull.

  “You should have let me go out there.” Torque’s voice buzzed in my helmet. The comlink was hardwired to my suit tether rather than broadcast.

  “Or me,” Halley added. “Much safer. We don’t need to breathe.”

  “You also don’t know what you’re looking for,” I told them both.

  “Do you?” Torque asked.

  “I will when I find it.”

  The coffin bolts came loose. I diligently collected each one, because I wasn’t about to leave a piece of metal behind for some other ship to smack into. Space might be big, but astronomically tiny odds are not the same as zero, and sailors need to do right by each other.

  I opened the coffin and exhumed my colleague. Nest had respectfully zipped up the corpse’s suit and reattached the helmet before stashing him here. I kept the suit zipped and searched through its outer pockets. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to wrestle the whole frozen corpse of Michael Kuneo out of his clothes.

  The first pocket was empty.

  The second held a standard kit for sealing minor leaks.

  The third had a yo-yo tucked inside. It was painted green like a turtle shell, the white string unwound and carelessly tangled.

  “Found it!” I said. “Now I know where we’re going.”

  6 Unless Acted Upon by a Force

  THE YO-YO BELONGED TO Cosmas. I bought it for him on the Borealis boardwalk, just a few hours after the manufacturers claimed Damian’s chassis. A stall was selling trinkets for some sort of fundraiser, but I couldn’t remember the worthy cause. Medical research, maybe? Help us fight mysterious illnesses afflicting the children of Sycorax. According to rumor, a whole host of alien viruses had been hatching from the local Uranian ice. Rumors were usually nonsense, though. Cosmas picked out the yo-yo. I showed him how to use it.

  “You’re a world,” he said. “That’s an elevator.”

  “Exactly,” I told him. “Just like the one that still climbs up to Zahir Station. We passed it on the way here, remember?”

  Cosmas nodded. For the next few weeks he was obsessed. The kid wanted to master yo-yo tricks in all sorts of different gravities, so I burned a whole bunch of fuel accelerating and decelerating on the long route back to Phoebe. Then his obsession abruptly ended. We focused on handwriting to further develop control of his hands and fingers. The yo-yo went away somewhere, and I never saw it again.

  Until now.

  * * *

  Needle burned sunward at speed. We lined up our trajectory, triple-checked the math, and jettisoned the coffin to honor Michael Kuneo’s final wish. His body would dive into Sol.

  “Should we say something?” Halley wondered.

  Everyone looked at me. The captain. The one responsible for any and every sort of ceremony that might take place aboard my ship.

  I cleared my throat.