Amund had never bothered to watch the full video. Inspired by the enthusiasm, he took the challenge and felt impressed, but not as awed as his new friend sounded. No, she was what impressed him. “You seem like such a bright, excited person,” he told her in his reply. “My advice? Get the fuck out of that cavern. Go out and live anywhere else that will take you.”
That message went home, and after that, nobody called to him.
Which was perhaps what Amund wanted all along.
It was impossible to guess what his companions would talk about on any day, or even inside a single minute. Topics varied widely, crazily, often shifting in mid-sentence. But Amund knew that he wouldn’t understand much, and the subjects’ importance would evade him. Yet that ridiculous noise became a reliable joy in a small, painful life. Two gods shooting the shit, and sometimes, now and again, offering up words that fascinated the human in their midst.
Those gods weren’t having sex. But Rococo’s lust was aimed at Mere’s blatant indifference, and his frustration was another reliable joy.
Maybe all that would change when they reached the rivers. An entire world as their playground and out of sight of the doomed man, the gods would take their pleasures by any and all means. Imagining sex with Mere. That was another trusted pleasure. She was a wise god who didn’t want Rococo, and of course she didn’t have desires for a mortal beast like Amund. Mere had lived happily among aliens. She even married a few of them. This female deity seemed capable of any perversion, which meant that she was saving herself for the rivers. Her next husband was a ten thousand kilometer ribbon, and how could anything as small and ordinary as Rococo feel reason to be optimistic? But freed from hope, Amund could spin endless fantasies about the god-machine.
Not a terrible fate, all in all.
Then the rivers started to murder each other. An entire world was burning, and that’s when Amund honestly contemplated the cold bottle. Suspend his life, and with him unaware, they would land beside the first streakship. That vessel was safe enough, protected by hyperfiber and aggressive banks of defensive lasers—two features missing from their minimal ship. Frozen, Amund would endure one kind of dreamless nonexistence, and if he woke again, they would be approaching the Great Ship, most of his life left to be lived.
Except he never mentioned the bottle.
And the others didn’t offer.
The following times were interesting and awful. Morning began with breakfast and premonitions of disaster. A comet shard was about to strike their thin, low-mass hull. Amund knew it, and later, he was equally sure that a nuclear weapon would meet them. The sense of doom gave each moment its spark, and every minute crossed felt like victory. And the human was surprisingly fond of this new life, fear churning emotions while his thoughts kept bending in fresh, peculiar ways. He didn’t waste neurons dwelling on bottles or his left-behind life. It was an endless, secret joy to stretch out on the padded mattress, watching gods struggle with events beyond their control, maybe beyond their understanding.
One hundred million kilometers out, Mere looked at him and then looked away, telling the wall, “Bottle time.”
Bombs and the need to make hard maneuvers left no choice. Amund had to be frozen and wrapped in protective garb, then loaded with the rest of the essentials inside the crash vault. He was one kind of dead when the ship suffered a string of attacks, and then the vault was on the ground and the hyperfiber door was blown clear. The defrosting took hours, his last breath still inside the soft pink lungs. Alien air was allowed past preset filters, and a wardrobe of smart clothing swaddled him, helping lift his temperature to happy human norms.
A fiercely hot hand touched his forehead. A mother’s gesture, and Amund recoiled.
Mere said his name.
“Who?” he asked.
The vast eyes blinked, startled.
“Who are you?” he asked.
But he couldn’t fool the tiny god. She laughed, warming him with her gentle pleasure. Then with a minimum of sentences and a few hopeful nods of her head, she explained what had to be done if they were going to survive.
“Wait,” Amund interrupted.
She stopped talking.
“The old deal is shit, isn’t it?”
“And there’s no good reason to slaughter you,” she teased.
Rococo was standing close but not standing with them. The man obviously wanted to add his genius to the conversation, but he managed to keep his machine tongue quiet.
“If we go home,” Amund said to Mere.
“If,” she agreed.
“I want to ride inside the bottle.”
“With the rest of your days ahead,” Rococo interjected.
The man was unlikable. But Amund nodded as if those were the wisest words ever spoken, and then he did what he had never done before. One of his cold hands reached out, touching smooth hot skin and the very sharp cheekbones of a face that couldn’t be more amazing.
“That’s not why,” he told Mere.
“No?” she asked.
“No,” he confessed. “I just want the chance to stop thinking about you.”
9.
“I’m looking forward to sleeping with you.”
Those words were buried inside the noise about protecting them. But having said them, Amund didn’t repeat himself, not even in the most tangential, cursory fashion. That first night, after their kit provided dinner, the three of them sat on the open deck. Nobody spoke. The only noise was the
