"Back,” she said. “Hurt."
Alex turned his lips down and kneaded the muscles in her shoulders and sides. Shekinah moaned. It felt good. Like the comfort Alex would never give her. Dim images of many nights spent trying to get him to stay, of crying alone afterwards, came to her.
Shekinah whirled to face Alex. Her claws shredded his clothes. She clung to him as he tried to scramble away, as his smell went to fear. But she could smell his need, too. She shrugged out of her thin dress. She clung to Alex, digging in her claws. He tried to push her away. He grew hot and hard, on her belly.
Shekinah pulled herself up and dropped down on him, feeling his heat, feeling him fill her. She groaned and threw her head back, shivering in comfort.
Alex's scent changed again, from fear and arousal to something deeper and more complex, something she had smelled on him before. When the words were hard, when she did not remember them.
But she writhed against him, and for a time they moved as one. Alex even gripped her to him, towards the end. Then she cried in the explosion of comfort. Alex made a low noise. His eyes spilled water.
Shekinah released him, strengthless and satisfied. Alex laid by her for a moment, then pushed himself away. He smelled strongly of that low scent and of fear as he picked up fragments of his clothes.
"Thank,” Shekinah said. The sound he used when she brought him food. Another sound he tried to teach.
Alex looked up. His little eyes were round. “I'm sorry,” he said.
Shekinah didn't know what he meant, so she closed her eyes and went to sleep.
When she woke, she was in the little room with the window that looked out over the gray land and night sky with sun. She remembered the night before. She smiled.
When Alex opened the door, later that day, there were two other men with him. They wore clothes that smelled like the new place, like cool stone. They smelled slightly of fear.
She went to Alex's arms, but he pushed her away, making lots of noises, beckoning her to follow. She did not want to play, but Alex stunk of fear. She followed.
He took her to a big room where there were many shiny things. She looked at her distorted reflection in some of the things. Alex talked to another man in the room. The noises he made were fast and low. Shekinah caught her name, and a few of the noises: more, small, fun. Alex kept looking at her when he spoke. He showed his teeth, but he did not smell happy.
A strange feeling came to Shekinah. She had not made him happy. She had failed. It was a dark, terrible thought. Images of sharp pins and headaches came. Before and after. The feeling of being changed.
Was he going to change her again?
Shekinah smelled something familiar-yet-not. It took her a few moments to realize she was smelling herself, her own fear.
Alex and the other man stopped and showed their teeth. They looked at her. Their teeth were like a cat's, bright white and sharp.
Shekinah backed away, but the other two men caught her arms. She struggled against them, but they were very strong.
She felt a sharp pain in her arm.
Then Alex's face, bending over hers.
Then nothing.
* * * *
In the smartfog, Adele fell towards Venus. Beside her, Alex looked intently forward, his face painted by the reflection of brilliant white clouds. He darted a glance at her, twitched an uncertain smile, and looked forward again, chewing his lip.
What's the matter? Adele thought. Don't tell me the ship is a no-go, and I came up to the Moon for nothing.
Venus's bright clouds stripped away as they fell, revealing a city of neon-lit crystal perched on top of the world. They swooped through forests of tall, long-needled trees and approached the city. The sun hung low on the horizon, spread wide and golden in layers of haze. It cut through the transparent towers of the city, painting them with a soft, warm light. The city glowed, as if in distant memory, Vaseline smeared on the lens of reality.
They flew between the towers, slowing to show beautiful details: etchings in the diamondoid in a neo-art-deco style, heroic men and women of science struggling to turn the gears of immense machines, sunrises dawning over rolling perfect fields, antique spaceships thrusting towards stylized planets.
Adele and Alex soared above the city to a room at the top of the highest tower. It looked across spires of tapered grace, and arches of mathematical perfection, down a broad avenue that led into the city, gleaming and perfect and clean. Inside, a man and a woman reclined on a couch, holding hands.
"Excellent work. Very detailed."
"EA Games already had most of the templates."
Alex gave a nervous little laugh. “Of course."
Their POV whizzed up and around the planet, from dayside to night. Dayside showed grasslands and deep-green forests, punctuated by bright blue lakes. Nightside showed frozen lakes and dead gray forest. At the terminator, the trees slowly came back to life, the lakes slowly melted.
"Which is why the cities are at the poles,” Adele said. “There's no good mechanism for increasing rotational speed, but with the limited axial tilt, polar cities will have a sun that's always just above or below the horizon."
"Climate?"
"We'll have to leave some reflectance in the upper atmosphere to get the poles to shirtsleeves."
"The equator?"
Adele shrugged. “Best guess says it won't be fatal on the dayside."
"What's not fatal?"
"Not much over fifty or sixty degrees C."
Alex nodded. “Sounds great. When do we start?"
Adele glared at him.
"What?” Alex said.
"You just don't understand, do you? Three thousand years, Alex!"
"So?"
"So all of this is guesswork! Get out the rabbits’ feet, because you're going to need them. The bio you saw is guesses and BS. Nobody knows if we can really make trees that'll survive a Venusian night, so you might end up with a dead planet. And then there's the carbon problem. I'm still working out whether it would be better to bind it and railgun it out—which increases our chances of being detected—or split it and oxidize it out. No matter what we do, the nano probably won't be stable for three thousand years, not even if we run cold backups in orbit and reseed."
Adele expected Alex to wave a hand and tell her it didn't matter, but he only sighed. She turned off the smartfog and they were back in Alex's drab gray cubicle. He hadn't even customized his wallscreens. He sat on an unmade bed.
"What's wrong?” Adele said.
"Nothing."
"Is it the ship?"
Alex shrugged. “Do you want to see it?"
"Sure."
* * * *
* * * *
Alex took her down to a hallway that looked over a smoothly-sculpted cavern. Two men in bright purple jumpsuits looked down into the dimness, their eyes shrouded by dataspecs. Below them, Alex's ship grew. Its rainbow-slick gray coating shimmered and danced, like a dirty soap-bubble. She could feel the heat of the nano coming through the diamondoid windows.
"Do they know what it is?” Adele said, nodding at the Moonies.
"They think it's a toy,” Alex said.
"Are you sure?"
Alex frowned and handed her a pair of dataspecs. She put them on and looked down at the growing ship. In place of the gray blob, there was a cutaway. And a name.
"Hades? Isn't he Greek?"
"Better than Pluto."
"So are you the god of the underworld?"
"I may be,” Alex said. “Or at least that's what Steven keeps saying. Twenty-eight hundred years is beyond the end of the nano's projected life, even running cold. And there's the radiation."
An image of Alex's body, blue and motionless, came to Adele. Hurtling through space on its unbelievable quest.
"Why are you doing this?” she asked.
Alex looked away. “Most of the ship is a lead matrix, just to protect me from radiation."
The inner shell of the ship highlighted in her da
taspecs. Inside, a body floated in liquid. Nanorepair devices crawled sluggishly through the liquid at only a few degrees Kelvin. An inset showed them comparing Alex's cellular structure and DNA to stored templates, and performing repairs when necessary. “I won't be able to wake up periodically,” Alex said. “Too dangerous. Not that I'd be able to turn around. We're bringing some water to electrolyze into maneuvering fuel, but my landing will be dead-stick."
"Alex—"
"If all goes well, the inner lead matrix will part when I've landed,” Alex said. “If not, there are failsafe saws."
In her POV, new cutaways showed the supercooled fluid draining from the passenger compartment, and a man reclining in a pilot's chair, banking the ship towards the outline of a city.
"Alex, why—"
He held up a hand. “I don't even get to see Alpha Centauri, because we can't get enough velocity. I'm just a parabola to nowhere."
"Alex, with this tech, we could be the most powerful people in the solar system."
"And do what? Bring our gun to the fight? Drop bombs on them from our secret base on the Moon?"
In a sudden blinding flash, Adele saw them doing just that. One on Washington, one on Winfinity City, one on Hollywood. She shook her head. Even if they won, it was back to the same old game. The same old insanity.
"I'm going,” Alex said.
Adele nodded. “I know."
Alex watched the package fly free from the tether. It moved so slowly he couldn't tell the actual moment of release. It was small, only the size of a car. Gradually, its relative speed increased. It fell towards Venus.
I could wait, Alex told himself. I could send monitors to see if the package begins replication.
He shook his head. Even with the spoofing he'd bought, somebody would know. Somebody would talk. They'd ask about what he'd sent. And maybe they'd uncover the truth.
Newsbits floated in his dataspecs. martian terraforming accelerates. new keys to habitable space. nanoroids: resources in the asteroid belt. Every title tagged to one of the many companies Alex and Adele owned. So many companies these days. All running happily like bacteria. The lengths they'd pushed Nanolife and the Moon-geeks had given them breakthroughs to make life better, both on Earth and in space.
Maybe we could challenge Winfinity.
But that would mean staying. And waiting. And missing the grand ending. Winfinity was nothing more than an aberration, the corporation that ate the United States. In three thousand years, they'd gone from pyramids to nanotechnology. In another three thousand years, surely they'd conquer their own internal demons.
Alex imagined coming back to a system transformed. Three blue-green worlds to choose from. Maybe more. And perhaps indescribable wonders.
Maybe there would even be a world where Shekinah could fly.
She was still on the Moon. Alex had asked Steven to take Shekinah on their generation ship. He imagined her soaring in the skies towards the center of the habitat, where gravity was light. She would like that.
Alex went back down the ribbon and took a fling out to where his ship Hades waited.
A day into his fling, Adele called him.
"You're clean,” she said. “There's no activity in any of the infoswarms."
"Good. Mission accomplished."
Adele went silent. In his dataspecs, her lips pursed, like a child pouting when it didn't get its toy.
She's beautiful, he thought.
"They'll notice you're gone,” Adele said.
"Of course. That's okay."
"What if they look for you?"
Alex sighed. Old conversations, well-worn into familiar grooves. He was the only one who knew the trajectory. And he'd be running dark and cold. “Let them."
Adele just looked at him.
"Goodbye,” Alex said. “And thank you. For everything."
"You can stay,” Adele said. “You don't have to be with me. We don't even have to change the world anymore."
Alex shook his head.
"I love you, Alex,” Adele said.
Alex froze. He felt a slow shiver work down through his body. He opened his mouth, but no words came out.
"I can't,” he said, after a time. “Stay."
Adele looked down. “It's that thing. That chimera."
"Shekinah."
"Whatever! Of course you love it! You made it into what it is!"
"I don't...” I don't love her, he wanted to say. It was an obligation. He couldn't let her go. And she had so much potential. He imagined what she could be, in three thousand years.
"You don't what?” Adele said.
Alex sighed. “Goodbye, Adele."
Adele glared at him for a moment. Then cut the connection.
When she tried to call him back, Alex didn't take it. He had said all he needed to say. All that he could.
When he neared the Moon, he called Shekinah. She ran towards his POV, grinning. “Alex! Missed you!"
"Missed?” Alex said. Rafael and Steven were teaching her more words.
"Missed, missed, missed!” Shekinah said, spinning happily.
"I missed you, too,” Alex said.
"Love you! Love love love!"
Of course, Alex thought. They had to teach her that word. He doubted if she really understood what it meant. The geeks muttered about braincase size and brain morphology, and shook their heads. Like a child. Seven or eight years old. Unless we do more radical work.
"Shekinah, I—"
"Love you! Come see.” Shekinah wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes, as if embracing him.
"I have to go away,” Alex said.
"Come see me."
"I can't. I have to go. Rafael and Steven will take care of you."
"Away?” Soft, plaintive. With her head cocked just so. Suddenly Alex was back at the terrible little show where he'd first met her. His eyes filled with tears. Little rainbows formed on the edges of the dataspecs’ images.
"I'll miss you."
"Come see!” Shekinah cried, beckoning.
"I can't."
Her smile became a frown. “Alex! Want Alex!"
"I'm sorry,” Alex said. Thinking, terribly, But she does understand this. She's making progress.
"Alex come see!"
Alex shook his head. Tears spilled down his cheeks. He didn't try to wipe them away.
"I love you,” he said. And broke the connection.
When the Hades’ disposable booster pushed him back in his seat, Alex still cried. I could stay, he thought. I could go on the generation ship, when it was complete.
But then he'd miss the end.
The cabin grew cold. Needles slipped into his flesh.
Consciousness ended.
It took the Angel of the Moon all morning to climb the one hundred steps to Winfinity's Hollywood office. It was a big white building with pillars out in front. It was new, but it looked old, like things she had seen in history lessons. The Winfinity logo rotated above it, suspended in air.
People came out of the building to watch her. Some wore dark gray uniforms with bright green letters that read win-sec on the front. Others were just men and women in business suits, who watched her for a while and then went back into the building. Their eyes looked thin and angry, but they smelled like fear.
Once, a group of chimeras came out of the building. They all wore the little shiny collars that Paul had told her were for the ones who never worked their way to freedom. Permanent indenture, he called it, the words big and darty in her mind.
The chimeras walked right by her, only glancing. Their eyes were dead and still.
I was like that once, Shekinah thought. Faint images came to her, fragmentary and slow. Dancing in front of an audience in a place that smelled like alcohol and sex. Her second room, the one where she could go out and see the sky. Alex.
She closed her eyes, wishing she could remember his face. The treatments had done bad things to her memory. Alex was a shade, half-imagined. She heard his voice. She-ki-nah
. Shekinah.
I remember what you did for me, Alex, she thought. I will never forget that.
She levered her thin body up another step. Her wings dragged on the ground. She had never felt this heavy before. She remembered soaring through the caverns of the Moon.
People came from the street to cheer her. They projected images of her flying. They projected images of other chimeras, in cages, at podiums, in sex farms. They projected words:
end the exploitation!
stop the cripples!
welcome the angel of the moon.
The people in the gray coveralls took those people away.
She made it into the cool stone lobby as people passed, smelling of hunger. The man behind the desk tried to look through her for a while. When she said who she wanted to see, he laughed.
She waited for a while, then asked again. And again. The WIN-SEC people drew close.
Then, a voice. “I'll speak to her,” it said.
They put her in a lift with two WIN-SEC men, who would not look at her and smelled of terror. Shekinah wondered what they had to fear from her.
She shuffled into a large room that looked out over Los Angeles. They were still fixing some of the buildings from the big earthquake. Evan McMaster, CEO of Winfinity, sat behind a bare stone desk.
"Welcome, Angel of the Moon,” he said. “I've enjoyed many of your videos."
Shekinah paused. She did not expect welcome. But he did not offer her something to eat or drink, like they usually did. His smell was masked with strong fragrance, but there was something like anger underneath.
"Mister McMaster, I ask a favor,” Shekinah said, repeating the words that she and Paul had rehearsed so many times.
His eyebrows raised. “You're not here to raise a chimera army against my oppressive regime?"
"No.” Not understanding completely. Words too fast.
Evan laughed. “That's good. I wouldn't want to lose my emperor's chair."
"Please, I want you to stop production of dumb chimeras."
Evan's eyebrows raised, and he breathed heavily, once. “But chimeras are typically of less than human intelligence."
"They don't have to be."
Evan sat back down and crossed his arms. “And how am I to stop this?"
"I have a list of companies. None of them are yours. You could buy them and shut them down. Or make a law."
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Page 6