corner of lips. She reeled from the flood of new senses, alien experiences all around her, the physical changes that her body itself had gone through.
“I—” And she heard, felt the difference of her voice. She attempted to modulate the sound with her ancillary vocal cords, but she had none.
“Hmm?” He looked at her with kind, gray eyes. “Cat got your tongue? Who are you?”
“Maire.” She sat up in her chair, eyes wide, surveying the people around her. “Who are you?”
He chuckled. “The name’s Michael Balfour. I bet you’re wondering where you are.”
She nodded.
He took another sip, swallowed. Napkin. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. See all these people?”
At tables, in twos and threes: a young couple, hands held, the woman’s now displaying a silver ring on one, a black glove on the other, another at a table of books and laughter, red curls and sighs, the two at the counter talking so closely they could have been one, muddy brown and blonde intersecting in gray streaks, a white dot, a single dimple. A spattering of others, reading, watching the moving images projected on the wall, sipping, sipping.
“This is heaven.”
The word meant nothing to her.
“Heaven. Dig?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and Michael wondered exactly how a species could have no concept of heaven but could still exhibit the same mannerism denoting confusion as his once had.
“We’ve been watching you for a long time, Maire. Coffee?”
She looked down at the steaming cup he held between mocha fingers, the nails bitten in true Delany fashion to the quick. Her new fingers were tipped by the same translucent (chitin? protein?) shields, each with a setting moon crescent at its base. “No. Thanks.”
He sipped. “Took us a while to make contact. We’ve been waiting out there, dabbling here and there. You’re an interesting species.”
Cup to tabletop. She was trying not to breathe too much, breathe too quickly. Her chest hitched under her blouse as she attempted to spread her gills plate, but it was no longer there.
“I myself only arrived in-system about forty-thousand solar cycles ago. I wanted to check to see what my kids had made. I must say, you’re among the most interesting pattern variants yet.”
“You’re a god?”
Michael smiled. “Not quite.” His smile opened to a grin. “I know what you’ve done to your gods before, and I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. Just consider me a neighbor. A cousin, sort of.”
“What are you? What is this place?”
Hands folded on the table. “You have no concept of virtual worlds; I’ve done my homework. Guess I’d better start by telling you of a
sky blackened by war and disease and centuries of gaiacide. The only lights studded the rim of the launch tunnel, and even they were murky in the dead air of the dying world.
“Almost time, Michael.”
“Yes.”
“There’s still time to change your mind, you know.”
He shook his head across his pause. “I can’t go.”
The earth shuddered beneath them almost imperceptibly. Men in clean suits ran to the vehicles and sped away from the edge of the launch tunnel, forty miles away. Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and wiped away the stale sweat that had collected on his eyebrows and in the hollows of his eyes.
“Starting final countdown sequence. Any more to board?”
Expectant eyes regarded him with almost pity. He shook his head.
“Shut down the upload link. Irrigate the lines and initiate primary engine test sequence.”
The earth began to resonate with the power of the massive engines that lay hundreds of miles beneath the surface. There could be no turning back now.
“Test shows positive across the board. Waiting for coordinate lock.”
The binoculars went back to his eyes. The edge of the launch tunnel looked deceptively calm, bereft of the hundreds of clean-suited workers that had toiled over every inch of its interior for decades.
“Coordinate lock achieved. Planetary position is a go. Launch window open. Launch on your order, sir.”
Michael nodded his understanding. All hope for the continuation of the human species lay in the precious golden machine bundled safely within the launch vehicle. Millions of emulated humans living emulated lives in emulated worlds where the emulated sun still shined and the emulated water was still pure. Someday they would come home. They were the ark. When the planet had finally healed, they could come home and live again.
“Engage Gauss cycle in launch tower.”
“Gauss engaged.”
“Engage primary thrusters.”
“Primary thrusters engaged.”
With this machine, all hope lay.
“Launch.”
“Launching vehicle.”
The binoculars revealed a tunnel entrance that flickered with the Gauss cycle. Michael held on to the bunker wall with one hand to steady himself; the ground beneath them shook noticeably and fiercely. Never before had a vessel of such size or power been launched from the planet surface.
“Gauss cycle at max. Vehicle launched.”
Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and replaced them with blackened blast goggles. The vehicle emerged from the launch tunnel with a stark white ferocity that painfully illuminated the bunker interior and flash- reddened Michael’s face immediately. The sound and heat and light were unbearable even from forty miles out, but then it was gone, and the vehicle was out of the atmosphere.
“Launch successful. Vehicle has broken orbit.”
“All right. Good.” Michael regarded his launch crew. “Start the disassembly process. Everything has to be taken apart before we abandon the city. There’s sure to be a resistance attack now that they know we’ve
launched, and that’s where the story really begins.”
He regarded his empty cup, motioned for the server. She smiled, one bullet-hole dimple, and went behind the counter for another pot.
“We’re here to bring you home.”
“Where’s ‘home?’”
His fingers tapped one through four on the plastic tabletop. “I wasn’t even supposed to be on the probe. I guess one of my over-eager or over-compassionate technicians must have ghosted my pattern while I wasn’t watching. They always had far more respect for me than I had for myself. Difficult to believe in yourself when you’re nothing more than a fourth-gen clone.”
The dimpled server returned with coffee. On her way back to the counter, her hand went to her partner’s back, lingered as she whispered something to him. Maire saw: the scar on her fingertip, the prominent bridge of her nose, the way her lips brushed his ear, brushing and whispering, perhaps the scent of smoke, perhaps the taste of him.
Maire absently rubbed the place where her hearts should have been.
“I know of your ambitions, Maire.”
She frowned.
“I built a machine that would save a world. And this is what it made, a thousand variants of my species scattered about our universe, a million variants spread across a million timelines, forevers expanding and contracting, and here, only here, have I found anything remotely resembling me. You know how hard it is to talk to crystals? To bioneural sludge? To control that evolution, to hope beyond hope that somewhere, somehow, things
