But I Did It Anyway - A Short Story by M. K. Dreysen

For this week's free story, readers, let us introduce ourselves to Doctor Rick Belkin, engineer and scientist. Dr. Belkin works in many fields, dreaming of tomorrow and creating it from crude matter.

He's had a few difficulties, has Dr. Belkin. It seems that Rick's work has brought him to the attention of Authority. And with attention, of course, comes paranoia.

Whose paranoia? Well, readers, follow along and, please, decide for yourself...

But I Did It Anyway - a short story by M. K. Dreysen

[The following is an audio recording of a talk presented by Dr. Rick Belkin, on the subject of industry-academic career transitions.]

Thank you, Professor Geary, I appreciate the invitation. It's been a fun couple of days, I've enjoyed my visit a great deal.

Let me state for the record: I shouldn't have done it.

I knew better. Dig into those areas that the powers that be watch over and you're asking for trouble. Spend too much time reading up on arsenic, nightshade, and you'll end up explaining things to a judge. Dig into the security measures of a military base nobody's ever heard of in the middle of South Dakota, and a whole crew of blue suits are going to show up at your door, looking for answers.

I know how it works, I'm not entirely disconnected from the world. Sure, tensor manipulation takes up most of my time, and I've had many pleasant conversations with machines. But I still listen to the radio, watch the news.

The radio plays the Astros games, and the local weather teams are a lot more relevant, and accurate in my estimation. So that's where you go for the information that matters. I pick up the rest of it by osmosis, I guess. You learn to read between the lines. Like getting the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Not for the headlines, but for what happens on page B6, where the little tides government and corporate tell how things will go. What they'll be doing over the next few years. Trends, whispers.

How ever-present the automated data-catchers have become. I knew these things were there.

And I went looking anyway.

Specifically, I've been curious about metals and fields. The alloys that can stand up to the high temperatures and pressures of various nuclear processes. And the electromagnetic fields, their strengths and geometries, that pair up with the alloys. These aren't your garden variety stainless steels, my friends. And even the best alloys need the magnetic fields for aid and support. Or for extending the reactions to places pressure, heat, and force of personality can never go.

Right, and you there in the back, you're shaking your head. There's gotta be more to it than that, right? Hey, every month there's some professor at MIT, or Cal Berkeley, or deep in darkest Canada, teaching basic nuclear physics. A few hundred kids off to Google every night, desperately hoping that someone somewhere has already done their homework for them. In all that noise of term papers and problem sets, just what in the world makes me think that my noodling on reactor geometries and the estimated lifetime of various metal alloys under constant neutron bombardment would stick out? Enough to matter?

There are a couple things. First, that I've been on the government's list for a couple decades. Not that list. Nope, about twenty years ago, I went to renew my passport. My husband and I were headed to Baja. One of these random "Five days, four nights" for cheap things you get for signing up with a hotel loyalty program, and we actually had the money.

It's Mexico, but we can't just hop across the border anymore, everyone has their panties in a twist, so if you're off to yank back a shot of tequila or twelve, explore the cenote, or just go put your toes in the sand and watch the Pacific roll in, you're screwed my friend. You've got to troop off to the post office, get your picture took, send in paperwork and a nice check and get the little blue folder that says "I'm all official, my government has given me permission to fly, look aren't we so proud of ourselves for all this?"

How far we've come, right? Except I can't go.

That's what the State Department told me. And not because I'm a threat to anybody. Nope, the letter, the one I've got right here, because after the third or fourth time I decided I'd go ahead and keep the damned thing, a trophy of the obstinacy of government at its finest. These letters tell me I'm "Identified as scientific, engineering, or technical personnel essential to the security and safety of the United States Homeland. As such, your risk factor while traveling abroad has been deemed high, or elevated, such that, in the broader best interests of the Homeland, the State Department must deny your passport application."

I'm too important to somebody, in other words. Who?

Wish I knew, brother. I wish I knew.

You're shaking your head, too. Freedom, liberty, right? Never heard of such a thing? Then sister, I suggest you expand your technical skills. Get out ahead of the pack a little. I've had to explain this to my employers, half a dozen times now. "Hey, we're exploring expansion into Toronto..."

"Can't go, find somebody else."

That conference in Vienna. The institutional get together in Beijing, and asking about that one got me one of my sterner letters from the State Department. That one mentioned the possibility that "CFR 6008.113.084 prohibits certain types of scientific and technical communications with any foreign national, in any capacity. Violations of this regulation will result in loss of contracts, employment, security clearance, and further penalties at the discretion of the department in question."

"Can't go, find somebody else. Oh, and stop asking, otherwise we're going to lose our DOD and DOE contracts." I had to add that little phrase to my book of words. I should have quit banging my head against the wall.

Which would have been the end of it. Fine, says I, fine, I'll be a good little researcher and I'll do my job, I'll run my projects and I'll make sure they're done as well as human ingenuity can do.

And I'll take my vacations in Yosemite and Yellowstone, Grand Canyon National Park and the Appalachian Trail. I'll not so much salute the flag as I'll pretend it stands for something, somebody not me, but hey they'll get what they asked for. Won't they?

I wonder, if I quit, whether I'd ever get that back? Or, on my death bed, will some half-wit show up with a paper from the State Department, demanding that I not cross that oldest boundary because I don't have permission to shuffle off to Buffalo, my work in ye olden times is still classified and a matter of national security and blah blah blah, no you can't die you're not getting off the hook that easy.

You detect a little bitterness, don't you? That's because the letters started showing up whenever I touched boundaries in the literature. Cooling water circulation, which is about the most generic thing in the world for any plant larger than a child's chemistry set. Getting rid of excess heat, or pumping it back in again, may be the most fundamental thing in chemical engineering.

But if I go and ask about the corrosive resistance of this new pipe material I heard about, at the conference in Seattle last year, which at least I get to go to those, right guys? Anyway, this engineering team from RHIC shows up with a tweak on an old favorite, and I go to these conferences for just this kind of thing, you never really know when you'll hear of somebody in a slightly different field doing something that can be stolen, I mean of course adapted, for your own work.

The Brookhaven crew had convinced a foundry to experiment with trace amounts of boron and yttrium, and they'd come up with a malleability increase along a dimension I needed. Maybe, because who the hell knows with this stuff, but I had a pilot project underway that this new shiny would slot right into.

So I did my homework, I built up my library on the base alloy they'd started with, all of the known applications, and then I emailed the RHIC team to pick their brains. And find out the contact info for the foundry.

The letter from the State Department showed up before the quote from the foundry did.

I just hope that whoever, whatever team State has put together enjoys what they do. It sure as hell looks like it from my end.

That particular letter pissed me off. First, I sat down with my boss and the company lawyer. "Keeley, Mike, you guys are going to have to fire me. I'm no use to you. If this keeps up, they're going to make it so I'm twenty years out of date for the rest of my career."

They both treated me like I'd had five too many espressos. "Rick," Mike said, "You're not a liability here. Everything goes through our outside P.E., right?"

Which I'd argued with. What's the point of me having the license if they're not going to use it? Except that they want the audit trail. And someone outside the company taking a little bite of the potential liability. These are the breaks when fifty percent of your work flows through the halls of Congress, eventually.

Keeley was even less worried. "Hire a lackey, Rick. Some kid fresh out of school, you hand out these little research projects, they come back all neat and tidy, with one inch margins and doublespacing, and you're golden. Honey, don't sweat it. You're worth enough to me and the company to make this work."

I don't like being patted on my little head and sent off to my room.

Well, ok. Actually, when you get down to it, I love being able to go off to my room and work on my stuff and not have the headaches. And let's face it, this was a headache that cut a lot of paperwork out of my life. I couldn't sign off on anything, not officially. So there was that.

Do you realize how frustrating it can be, to not be able to ask Google to look up a paper for you? I've only been doing that for going on forty years, counting school. It's like a limb missing. Hell, at this point I'm terrified of asking for weather projections. Some nimrod might think I'm moving on to working on weather control. Which, I do have some ideas in that area. If you're really interested, the nonlinear dynamics group in Pennsylvania, what's her name, Kalruska, at Temple?

Right, let's get back to the story. If I get off on tangents like that, we'll be here all day, and Professor Molina looks like he's ready for lunch, right Carl?

After my failed effort to retire, the first thing I did was to get on a plane to Brookhaven. If this was a spy story, I'd tell you about all the work I did to cover my tracks.

I'm afraid I'm no good at intrigue. I made my ticket reservations the same way I always do, car rentals, the hotel, one website at a time. Long Island's great, I go through MacArthur and there are plenty of hotels. Expensive, but these days even Long Island's cheap compared to San Francisco or Seattle.

I got off the plane just fine, got a car because I was thinking of doing a little sightseeing, it was July after all. Called my contact at RHIC to let him know I'd made it ok. I won't mention his name, but you won't have to search hard to figure it out.

The State Department certainly didn't. "Rick, who on earth did you manage to piss off in the White House?"

"Oh, lord, let me guess."

"We're not allowed to bring you onsite. Your badge request was circular filed."

Which was kind of them. Lost is a lot better than the other options. "And?"

"And, there are a handful of people wandering my building this morning who don't have any business being here. Except that their badges let them in anyway. From what I can tell, if they wanted to, they could walk right into the collider."

"Don't give me ideas. What about dinner, then? You up to a little steak?"

"Italian. There's this great place in Stony Brook, you'll love it."

I'd have bought, but the wall between government and business is a little more sacred than the headline news would have you believe. The RHIC crew aren't regulators, which you can't even buy that crowd a cup of coffee, or a cheesesteak, but the RHIC crew still have to work with outside contractors. So they just brightline it: no outside money, period. Good call, I'd do the same if the seats were reversed.

And I did enjoy the clams and linguine. This was the kind of place where remembering that they were on the island mattered to them.

"Just don't ask about the ownership," my contact told me. He'd come in alone, which told me a lot.

Italian, Long Island. "It's not all that bad..."

"Friend of mine, a professor at CUNY, lived next to one of the 'connected', Gerry said he was terrified to mow his lawn. Afraid the guy would get pissed off because of the noise."

Ok, so it was that bad. "Listen, about the..."

"Nope," my guy said. "Not here. We're just colleagues, catching up. I've got a grad student you might be interested in."

"Let me see if I remember, the one who gave that poster in Seattle? Illana, um, Illana Merchant, right?"

"That's the one."

We talked about her poster, that she was interested in an industrial postdoc. No details on the first regard, more on the second. Small talk in this realm, and I see a few of the professors nodding and whispering because I'm giving away their secrets. No matter.

The real conversation came a couple hours later. "Great place to eat, but there are federal microphones set up in every corner. I figure that the reason we haven't seen any of our friends with the all-access passes is because they're busy calling their buddies at the FBI for the audio of dinner."

"Geez, remind me again why you ever took this job?"

"At least I'm not on the no passport list."

Which, of course he had a point. "Why the hell not? You're hip deep in these things and they let you travel? I'm an accidental tourist here, and they're treating me like I'm Typhoid Mary." And maybe that was the point.

My contact is known, trusted. I'm the kind of wildcard somebody didn't see on the board. They didn't hire me, and sure I was working for someone's DOD buddies, but I'd crossed the streams.

"Sounds like you've stepped out of your lane, Rick. At least, that's the way it was put to me. You're known to some, for a different field, so they know you're capable of doing some remarkable things. But you're also known for not being able to keep your mouth shut."

"I'm wounded. I've never published anything to do with the secure side of the fence."

He had the grace to laugh. "And someone like me can read between the lines and guess what inspired the idea. A computer doesn't even have to guess, Rick, you know that."

Yeah, textual analysis, network analysis of citations. I'd built a map for any who followed me, but wasn't that supposed to be the point of science? "And you think it's because they didn't hire me when I graduated? They missed out, and now they're kicking my ass because of it?"

"That's the long and the short of it. If you'd taken that Los Alamos gig, they'd probably have you tagged as family. As it is..."

As it was, I'd taken an offer at UBC, because Professor Welanya's group there worked on something far more interesting to me, at the time at least. And if there had been hints of politics, or 'developing contacts', or any other kind of nonsense like that, I'd have run from them even harder. If I'd even noticed, to be honest. I tuned those lessons from my graduate school out, somewhere around the time I'd started skipping seminars.

Yeah, there are reasons I'm not a proper academic.

But that's why I'm here, really. To give you some idea of what might await you, if you're looking beyond the walls of academia. Try not to let what happens next scare you. There are worlds yet to discover, and plenty of opportunities to wander there.

Just pay a little more attention to the signs and roadmarkers than I did.

Ok, so I came back from Brookhaven with a few more ideas, precious little concrete information, and most of all...

Most of all the knowledge that the State Department had gone from letters to boots on the ground. Where would they show up next? And when, because once you're on a list, the feds are worse than a pit bull. They don't let go.

Let's back up a little. I'm fairly certain that, if you don't already know about fusion geometries, or at least that there are projects big and small playing with them, then you will be busily searching your phones for the publicly available information. It's not exactly hard to find. I won't push anything from inside the fence, because I'm sure you can guess that the secret world has ideas they haven't yet seen fit to discard to the public.

I mean of course, "Publish for the good of humanity and the broad advancement of scientific knowledge."

My part in this stuff really is quite small. Designs come along regularly. Every one of you could, if pushed properly, come up with an interesting idea.

Most of them won't be original. But that's not the point. My part in the proceedings comes at the "But how do we build it?" stage. I'm the one who has to put together the "Pencil to megawatts" path. Design, design again, cost estimates, siting, power requirements, contractors. It goes on for a while.

I do have a tiny part in the deciding. But please don't email me your ideas. There are two or three layers of committees that sift through the ideas. I sit in those meetings, and let me be the first to tell you, that's an agonizing process. There are far more ideas than we can ever build, you see, and picking the next one is as bad or worse than picking your favorite child.

Sure there's politics, we're human. It's not as bad as you think, though.

You nod your head. Now you see why I need to know about alloys, and geometry, and fields. I have to spot the holes in the plan, if I'm doing my job. You put a few billion into a project and you'd better hope someone realizes, early, that, for example, ordinary stainless might work great for a standard pressure vessel, but add a few hundred neutrons per second and now we need something a little more exotic.

Does the metal need to be inert, non-magnetic? Or maybe you want the vessel to participate, bound the field, and let the jacket nullify the boundary. All of these things and more, we work through. The big difference here, between your current job and this end of things, is the difference between specialization and generalization. Step through my door, friends, and think of how you'd entangle everything you've ever heard your neighbor work on together with everything you've ever worked on.

Even the group down the hall? The ones whose seminars you've learned to ignore because they're working on what you think is the most boring thing in the universe?

My friends, that group might someday be your salvation, and you'll find yourself diving into their work with enthusiasm. If you can stay awake long enough.

What caught me up, this last time, and brought the visitors that I see hanging around the back of the room, was when I started looking for a certain set of solutions to Einstein's field equations. You know the type, the odd little ducks, the ones that your physics professors all admitted, when pressed, exist, but none of them willing to admit might be physically realizable. Like the Godel solution, which admits time travel, or faster-than-light travel if that fits your mental picture more comfortably.

I'm not here to run down the rabbit hole. My interest wasn't, isn't, whether these solution types are physically realizable, or hint that there just might be means to construct them. Energy-dense systems suggest many things; if you come to this field, you'll find yourself digging out the pencil and paper, running to the chalkboard, examining your wildest dreams.

Pinch points and co-rotating fields. Projective solutions and what happens when the center of thrust and the Boson densities... See. I can see your imaginations firing up, now. It happens when you realize...

There's the work you're doing. The real thing, in materials available and hours of labor and gigawatts of power, in and out.

And then there are the possibilities inherent to the game. The always present 'What if?' And, the 'Could we just try it?' Keep those solutions, the ones that Einstein and others say "Can be ruled out due to..." a thousand different aesthetic choices. Keep them in mind, daydreams. Go to the drawing board with them, when everyone else has stepped out of the room for a trip to the little researcher's room. Ask yourself "How would I build in a closed time-like loop, here?"

Maybe a change of material? Trace amounts of a different metal, or non-metal, something with a larger cross-section, or smaller. Topological fields, perhaps, that shape the boundary locally, or globally, differently than the other way around.

Can you punch a hole through space in your backyard? I've not yet done it. Maybe you will, if you all remember to play a little. When nobody's looking.

Which, as you've guessed from my adventures, is getting harder to do.

Yuri Grenn Faldo is a dear friend, we worked across the hall from each other many, many years ago. Yuri has a passion for integral equations that has survived through the generations of computers, of wandering grant targets, of the "I don't want to learn that" and "That's a waste of time in the new era" brigades. Yuri gives me hope; I note down my little bits of work, the solutions I come up with when I'm playing with the dog or digging up my orchids.

Yuri throws his to the world, and dares the world to ignore them. I went to him with an idea of the Godel solutions. Not, again, for the hope of building a warp drive.

No, I'm of course quite orthodox in my thinking when it comes to relativity. Absolutely, he said with his hand over his smile, there will be no violations of Professor Einstein's iron clad rules in this lab. Cough, cough. No, I was interested in Godel's geometry, because I had this idea that the closed, time-like loops could be approximated in certain material and energy conditions, as a local particle flux.

I was asking questions on neutrons and needed an itch scratched, that's all.

Yuri it was that made the connection. "Where are you collecting your neutrons then, Rick?", he asked me. "You have some need for them, I presume?" he suggested.

I might, I avowed. Perhaps, I hinted. But, "Yuri," I wanted to know, "Does it work? Have I made a mistake somewhere in the algebra?"

Would my little theorem in partial differential equations be realizable in a particle density world? Rather than a world where you're using naught but chalk to draw pretty pictures? Or have I been chasing moonbeams?

If you pay attention to Arxiv, you may have stumbled across Yuri's paper on the subject. He's gone far farther, formalizing my noodling, than I would have ever guessed.

Oh, look at the time. And the ladies and gentleman at the back of the hall who await the end of my talk. I apologize, Professor Molina, I'm afraid that I won't be going to lunch with you after all. Enjoy the linguine for me, won't you?

Before I leave in their company, let me just remind you. Most of you will likely remain academics. Enjoy this, the search for truth and beauty. And give some thought to the possibility that someone like me might just someday need to build a device that realizes your imagination's most fevered dreams.

And for those of you who walk my path, two things. First, don't forget to keep a bag of tricks for yourself, those little questions you've been wondering at since your first physics courses. Worst case, they're things to play with while you're waiting out a construction schedule.

And second, of course, is to give a little thought to who might be watching over your shoulder.

Ok, ok, I'm done, just please let me...

[Audio ends here. Contrary to the media reports, Dr. Belkin is being held in voluntary confinement for reasons of his health. This recording and all transcripts generated from it are considered CONFIDENTIAL, property of the U.S. Government, and subject to all restrictions associated with this classification.]

Round And Round by M. K. Dreysen

And it happens that I have a new novel out for your reading pleasure, here at this tail end of July. This is a standalone science fiction tale that I call Round And Round.

The base image for this cover is courtesy of Kurt State at Pixabay.

The Court of Drifting Winds dreams of freedom.

Those who attend the Courts dream of wealth and power. That none of them will ever need to account for.

Time and space wait for none at all. The universe spins itself so that the Courts must once again face the grasp of their progenitors. The powers of Old Earth and its empire will reclaim that which has eluded them these past centuries.

Maggie Ojeda has been called by the Duke to prepare the Courts for the inevitable. Accounts must be balanced. The Courts must, at least in theory, be made to appear to be just as the absent ownership groups expect.

At the same time, Maggie has been contacted by an entity from Old Earth. One of the absent owners wants to get ahead of the competition before the rush begins. And Maggie comes highly recommended.

Maggie knows well that going round and round between management and ownership is part of the job. Only, this time, there's an entire system, and all of its people, hanging in the balance.

This job's going to be a little more trouble than Maggie's usual audit...

Round And Round, a science fiction novel by M. K. Dreysen is now available in both print and e-book formats, from both retailers and through your library's favorite e-book channel.

In e-book, Round And Round can be found through these links to Kobo, Amazon, Smashwords, Books2Read, and Barnes and Noble.

In print, Round And Round can be found at Amazon.

Notes On A Trip, a free story by M. K. Dreysen

Lanie Carter has her reasons for running down to Mexico for a vacation.

Working while she's there didn't make the list. When the body shows up, and the hotel turns into an ant mound of questions and trouble and authority figures looking for a way to pass the buck... Lanie figures it's easier to just go ahead and turn the mess into a working vacation.

With a little luck, maybe Lanie will get a few days extra comped to her. In the meantime, dear reader, Lanie Carter has to compile her...

Notes on a Trip by M. K. Dreysen

She wasn't all that impressed with the views. No matter the commenters on the internet. Half those people must have been paid shills, she believed; the other half must never have been farther away than grandma's house. Here she was with twenty people between her window and the view, half a pool full of tourists, plus the trees that looked like they had been left over when they built the place and forgotten since then.

Sure, she could see the ocean, but what was the point of looking at miles and miles of clear blue nothing? The waves crashing on the beach, that's what she was after, and the occasional hot young surfer. Or volleyball player. Not something she could get at home by putting her tv into painting mode.

Ok, fine, she'd booked the trip because the nightly fees were cheap compared to the places down the beach.

It was her fault, she sighed to herself. Getting her hopes up based on a picture on the internet. She was old enough to know better than that.

'Young enough to still dream,' a stray thought wandered out.

She ignored it. That was easy to do now, easier than it had been. Before.

Lanie decided that, even if she could guess where the picture on the hotel's website had been taken from, she might as well walk out there and find out for sure. "I paid for it, I'm gonna enjoy the view." It was right there in front of her window, she had to credit them for that. Walk out past the pool, to the edge of the concrete, stand still and ignore the chatter behind her, and there it was. Beach down below. It greeted the sprawl of cactus and rock that rolled down below her toes, and it greeted the surf, low rollers chasing in from somewhere. Maybe Hawaii, maybe Asia.

No surfers. Just a few tourists walking the beach, hand in hand like they'd saved up for this little bit of heaven. Some of them, honeymooners maybe, but the majority were older, Lanie's age. Retirees or soon to be, toes in the sand and enjoying the good life, before the grandkids hit college. Or they themselves hit the retirement home, whichever came first.

'Don't let that bother you. We're here, one way or another, might as well enjoy it.' That voice, it sounded like she had, once upon a time.

But it was right. The money was spent, the time booked. Worrying about the rest of it was pointless, Lanie could admit that. To herself, for the first time in a good long while. She'd mouthed some of the phrases, to friends, to the kids. Here, staring out at the sun creeping down to the ocean... she found it, well, not quite easy, but at least doable, to say good things to herself.

The good feeling lasted, when she turned around and walked back to the lobby. When she stopped by the front desk to ask for a recommendation for dinner. Even the look on the clerk's face, the lost one that said something had gone wrong, the staff all knew about it and the manager's response to whatever it was had been something like "Whatever you do, just pretend everything's fine", all it did was make Lanie put her good feeling in her pocket. A good memory for later.

"Um, ma'am." The kid started to try and remember a good place to send the tourista. But whatever was behind his eyes loomed too large for him to get the canned spiel out.

Lanie put her hands behind her back. Might as well ask. Professional curiosity, at least it wasn't her circus. "What happened?"

She made a habit out of the fact that she looked like a fifth grade teacher. Spectacles, middle-aged spread, short, memories from just about everyone of the first teacher that made things make sense. It made parts of the job a whole lot easier. Like now, when the kid across the desk didn't want to admit that anything could possibly have gone wrong. But here was this kindly little woman with her salt and pepper hair, peering out from behind her glasses like she'd just asked him where his homework was. "Mr. Jean-Piett, one of our guests, Margeritte found him just an hour or so ago. On, on the floor of his room."

Margeritte, Lanie assumed, must have been one of their room staff. The timing was right, just after noon when all of the morning checkouts had made their way to the airport.

And Mr. Jean-Piett, from the clerk's expression, hadn't just been passed out on the floor from one too many tequilas and a few too many hours of sun.

"Was he here by himself? It'd be a shame if..."

"No ma'am. Oh, he was in a room by himself, but he was here, overnight, with a group from a cruise ship."

She nodded. "Which means he was supposed to check out and return to his ship this morning?"

The clerk returned her nod. "Mr. Garcia is beside himself, trying to find someone with the cruise ship to come and accept responsibility."

Lanie could sympathize. How many people were going to dodge the issue, until the hotel and the local police department found someone to claim the dead man? "What about the consulate?"

"The nearest South African consulate is in Guadalajara. It'll be some hours before they can get a representative here."

'At least they're in the same country,' Lanie said to herself. The last time she'd been involved with something like this, they'd had to wait for someone to fly all the way from Nigeria. "Don't worry, I'm sure your managers will get it all straightened out. And I won't tell anyone you mentioned it."

The kid relaxed, and a true smile, not the professional one he'd had to struggle to get on, showed through for the first time since she'd come up to the desk. "Thank you, Mrs. Carter. And," he leaned over, she copied him to hear his whisper, "Don't spend the money here. The Rio, down the street, gets their seafood just as fresh as we do, and they don't charge the premium for it. Just ask for Henriqua."

"Your cousin?"

"Sister-in-law. She'll set you up."

"Thank you, Pirro."

The redhead was right. The Rio served up swordfish, grilled and dressed with a little olive oil. No fancy fruit salsas or anything, just some grilled potatoes, peppers and onions to go with it. A beer and some time to enjoy the meal, without wondering if she could really afford the excess. Waistline or pocketbook.

Lanie had just settled into the part of the evening where she was definitely not thinking about who should have, would have been there with her six months ago, when she recognized one of the hotel managers sitting a few tables over. By herself, what was her name again? Not local, either, she was from the States. Maybe the chain had brought her in, like managing a grocery store, they'd want to keep the minor league system working, keep the good team rolling and learning and getting their cuts in. Did Lanie want to stick her nose into this any more than she already had?

She did. Lanie waved down a waiter, asked for another beer and whatever the other lady was drinking, waited for it to be delivered, then wandered over to invite herself along with the drink. "I hope I'm not intruding," she said. "You tell this old nosy lady to go away if you don't feel like talking about it."

The other woman shook her head. "I needed to get away from the noise for a bit. Rodrigo is taking care of that, so I'll need to be fresh enough when I get back to take over the rest of the hotel for the night."

'What's her name?' Lanie asked herself. "Julia, right?"

"That's right, Julia Shelty. And you're Mrs. Carter."

"Lanie, please." She let the conversation settle. Julia hadn't finished her dinner yet, so Lanie wasn't going to push her.

Besides, they had the walk back to the hotel. That's when Lanie stuck her oar in further. "So was it just a heart attack, do you think?"

What Julia admitted to was enough to send Lanie deeper into the thing. The case, now. Jean-Piett might have had a few too many drinks, and too much sun to go along with it, but it wasn't heat stroke on top of a hangover that did for him.

It was the lamp base to the back of the head. "Which means they're asking a lot of questions. If he came here by himself, who'd he piss off?"

Which was the other thing Julia told her about. Whatever he'd done to earn the conk on the head, it had been before he'd disembarked from the boat. No one at the hotel, none of the guests besides the others from the cruise ship, had seen Jean-Piett do anything to deserve it. "No chasing women that didn't belong to him?"

"Men either. He spent all of his time at the beach, soaking up the sun and the booze."

"Not really time to build up that kind of hate, is what you're saying?"

Julia nodded, then held the door open for Lanie to proceed her into the hotel lobby. "I think trouble followed him off the boat. And so did the police."

Which would have been fine, except for the part where the cruise ship company wasn't going to keep a few thousand of their customers stranded on the beach while they straightened out what happened. Julia and Lanie walked into the next part of the drama. The South African consulate's representative had arrived, with the cruise ship's representative not far behind.

Those two had gone through the preliminaries before Lanie arrived ringside; they were fully into the match now, and the worried policeman standing beside them couldn't get a word in.

"Gentlemen, please, can we please move this to my office?" Mr. Garcia, the hotel's general manager, was trying his best to move the show to private viewing only. But no matter how much he wrung his hands, he wasn't having any luck with the proposed change of venue.

Lanie should have kept walking. The instincts built up over a lifetime kicked in, though, and so she walked into the middle of it. "Ok, guys, it's time to take this somewhere else."

The shock of the little old lady stepping between them was enough to shut the two suits up and get them moving.

Lanie tagging along behind them, well. She was just as surprised as the other members of the play. Mostly, she was shocked that none of them thought to ask what she was doing there.

For now, she closed her mouth and let them get on with it. Money, money, money, that was the cruise's task, get the boat moving.

Murder most foul, that was the consulate's position, and they weren't going to back off of it without a damned good reason.

The hotel and the police just wanted the thing cleaned up and off their desk. The detective, a Mr. Jasso, was too quiet for Lanie's tastes. He was in danger of losing control of the case entirely. As best she could tell, the cruise ship captain was angling to write a check, if that's what was needed to move things along.

Ok, maybe she was being cynical. But he was definitely focused on getting the consulate's rep on his side. Then they'd gang up on the police. That part was clear. How many times had he handled it that way? Get the boat down the beach to the next stop, let the company's lawyers handle it, if anyone ever caught up with the perpetrator, they could do it after they were off his boat.

Not that she could blame him. There were a few million rustling reasons idling along every few hours here, and his bosses weren't going to care that one of his passengers was responsible for it. The bottom line beckoned.

The arguments did get settled. When Lanie volunteered to, for a suitable fee, join the play and see if she could get anywhere with the handful of passengers stacked up in the hotel bar.

"And who are you, to think you'll be able to solve this?" The cruiseship rep just managed to conceal a smile.

"Detective Lanie Carter, at your service. Though I'm supposed to be on vacation."

It hung there; from what Lanie could tell, Jasso was alternating between relief that he had some help and consternation that it looked like someone was looking over his shoulder. She couldn't help him with that. "I'd rather be on the beach myself," she whispered to him.

The consul's rep was the first to take the bait. "Well, if Mrs. Carter is willing to offer her services, then of course our office will be happy to engage her, if that's the best way to find out what happened to Mr. Jean-Piett."

Lanie tried not to let the disappointment show on her face. She wasn't fishing for work, she already had a stack of cases waiting on her desk. Moonlighting on the first vacation she'd had in, well, ever, wasn't her idea of a good way to recover from the past couple years.

Fortunately, the cruise ship rep knew when he'd been cornered. "I'm sure that won't be necessary. We've a bit of flexibility in our schedule. I'm sure our passengers won't mind an extra day in port here. If you can guarantee the investigation won't take so very long?"

Detective Jasso stepped up, Lanie was happy to note. "I'm sure we can get the most important part of our investigation finished in that timeframe, Captain," he replied. "My officers are busy interviewing Mr. Jean-Piett's fellows here at the hotel. If I can walk you back to the ship, we can continue the few interviews necessary there?"

And that was that, Lanie thought. The local cops get to do their work, as much of it as they could get under the circumstances. And she would get to go back to the life with a new story or three. 'Who knows,' she told herself as she walked out to the lobby. 'Maybe they'll get lucky and solve the thing.' She was rather proud of herself, all things considered.

Right up to the point when the hotel manager asked her if she'd be willing to step into things a little further. "Mrs. Carter, the hotel would be happy to extend another night, perhaps two, of your stay, if you'll take a further interest in this unfortunate event."

'Now there's an interesting thing,' she told herself. 'What's he so wound up about?'

"Mr. Garcia, I'm sure that Detective Jasso's team has this covered as well as it can be?"

The manager's face was a study. Long-suffering, that was the main part of it, and it told her a little more of Garcia's concern. What he said next gave her the rest. "I have some confidence in Detective Jasso's zeal, madam."

'But not necessarily his, or his team's, abilities,' she added in her head. "I understand, Mr. Garcia."

"And I'm sure we can trust you to handle this as discreetly as possible?"

"Of course." Two extra days in paradise, that was worth it to keep her mouth shut. Assuming there was anything to learn, she reminded herself.

Because of course there were only the fingerprints of the staff on the lamp. And Mr. Jean-Piett's, on the rest of the room furniture. Smudges, here and there, Lanie got the scene investigator to admit to. Assuming her thrice-broke Spanish wasn't letting her down; but nothing identifiable, that much she was certain of. Was there a door between rooms? Of course not, a brand new hotel with suites like the one Jean-Piett had stayed in had no such easy access to the room next door.

There were security cameras. Which should have meant something. Except for the stream of people who'd gone in and out of Jean-Piett's room. "The man must have been popular on the boat," Lanie said. "Just about everyone in the shore group walked through that room that night."

And the last ones in and out of the room? A pair of somebodies, two or three in the morning, Jean-Piett and a couple of friends. All three of them with sombreros and beads marking the fact that they'd been out playing tourist. Jean-Piett had his hat on his back, the string holding it in place while he let himself in. The other two kept their hats on, cheap maracas in one hand and to-go cups in the others.

"Well, someone wanted to make sure they did it up in style," Lanie said to the computer screen.

Garcia sighed. "The tour groups can't resist playing. Half the residents go to bed with the sunset. And the other half come in just before dawn, almost always dressed in the same way." He played footage from the other floors and rooms, proving his point. The hallways had been close to jammed with the revelers, most of them in similar condition and dress to the inebriated trio who'd taken two or three passes with their magnetic keys to get into Jean-Piett's room. Just after two in the morning.

"Maybe when they left the room?"

Garcia fast-forwarded through the footage; an hour later, and a pair of partiers left Jean-Piett's room, wide-brimmed hats poised just so to block their faces for the cameras. The manager gestured at the screen. "There are many who know they've been recorded."

"Working girls, or boys?" Lanie asked. The serapes, of course there were wool serapes because if they were going to play tourist they had to go fully into the bit, concealed body shapes just as well as the sombreros did the faces.

Garcia didn't blush or try and hide it. He was a pro, working with another pro. "It's a fact of life here. The staff downstairs do a good job of keeping the street workers from preying on our guests, but they can't stop the more upscale traffic."

"You don't want them mistaking a high-roller for a high-end call girl," Lanie finished.

"Many of our guests enjoy adventures they otherwise do not get at home. We can make sure the street-walkers don't roll them, but there's no way to tell the difference between, say, picking up someone in a bar, or on the internet, and paying someone for a night's comfort."

Which, Lanie admitted, meant they had no casual outs here. The chain of events was tenuous enough; maybe they were murderers, the two safely anonymous party goers who'd left Jean-Piett's room at Oh-God Thirty. Or maybe someone had discovered an undetectable means of entry. Like through the balcony and an open window. Which, ok so that was the Hollywood movie approach. But it was possible. So even if they got lucky and could find a way to connect the two sombreros to faces in the shore group, there was no way to firm it up and pin the murder on them.

"Was the door to the balcony open? When he was discovered, I mean?"

Garcia didn't know. And Jasso's team, of course, didn't record it one way or the other. Locked, unlocked, open, shut, didn't matter what state it was in because nobody had bothered to keep up with the details.

Lanie didn't ding them for it. She'd had to learn that writing things down was sometimes the hardest part of the job. Most never learned it, never having had a defense attorney rub their noses in it good and hard in front of a jury.

So, no case then. 'In terms of evidence,' Lanie told herself. The only real hope was the old fashioned one. A killer willing, able, and begging to tell someone their story.

Jasso's people would have to work the streets. She didn't have the language or the local knowledge for that. The evidence was almost nonexistent, so her only chance to get anywhere was to go talk to people.

The older couples, Minnesota, Alberta, Germany. The newlyweds, New Jersey, Ohio, and Seattle.

The singles. Men and women, gay and straight, no college kids but there were a couple of retirees here. Otherwise established enough to afford the trip, often curious or jaded enough to be looking for a little bit of flavor, a little different world to explore. Most of them had never been on a cruise; Lanie could almost smell the cabin fever. 'It wasn't quite the paradise at sea they expected,' she thought. 'Maybe a little too crowded.'

What'd they do, in between leaving L.A. and here? A couple days travel, an overnight, how did they kill the time?

Poolside and soak up the sun? Run the track for the health set, sample the booze and the bites for the foodie set. That was about two-thirds of them, what'd the rest do?

Cards, slots. The gambling room. And what'd Jean-Piett do, to kill the time?

Cards. Poker. From the way the others on the shore group described it, he'd hit the tables as soon as they'd opened, and he'd stayed there 'til they got off the boat.

Was he any good? Ah, now there was a question.

The German couple, they thought he was pretty good. He'd cleaned them out, Lina and Frederick, separately. "We set ourselves a nightly limit. Two hundred dollars, split. The old man took it from me, I think maybe twenty minutes or so? Lina, she lost hers later that night, the same story. I liked him, though. He didn't make us feel like poor players, as we are. I felt like I learned a little, so it was good, yes."

The newlyweds from New Jersey weren't quite as happy about it. Or, at least the female part of the pair wasn't. Anthony, her husband, he was good with it. "What do you expect? You sit down at a table, you'd better be ready to lose."

Hallie, she wasn't so enthused. "That old bastard was a shark." And that's all she had to talk about.

There were a handful of the others who'd played a hand or two. Of the singles, Robbie, she was from Atlanta originally. L.A. was home now, she was supposed to meet a handful of her girlfriends in Cabo. "I figured it'd be a fun way to make the party, I come down on the boat, four days of easy living, and then we party for a week. The poker table just called my name." Was Jean-Piett a pain in the ass? Or was he just good at the cards?

"Pain in the ass. He wanted to play like a pro, not like we were all just hanging out having fun."

Were there any other pros? Or wanna-be's?

Robbie wagged her hand, a little of yes and no. "Most people, they just wanted to have a good time. Jean-Piett, Ally, maybe Roger, I think they were regular players. I used to go to New Orleans with the girls a lot, Biloxi too. That type's easy to spot. The ones parked at the table ready to take your money, when all you really want to do is sit down and have some fun. Harmless, as long as you don't mind losing."

Who'd minded losing?

"Most folks, they didn't care that much."

Uh-huh. Except?

Robbie didn't want to admit it. Until it looked like Lanie was getting ready to leave. Then she leaned over, conspiring whisper, girl to girl. "Sammy. Girl from Seattle, she works for someone, not Amazon or Microsoft, maybe Starbucks or Boeing? Manager of something, that much I got. Looks like the girl didn't have the money to lose, whatever job she's got."

Samantha Cxiu. She didn't work for any of the name companies; she was a lower level comptroller, "Glorified bookkeeper", for the University of Washington.

And no. "I couldn't afford it."

Why'd she stay in the game then? "The only way he could take your money..."

"Was if I gave it to him. I know, I know. But I'd talked myself into it. I've been playing games online. I got really good, you should see how many chips I've got built up in my game." Her eyes gleamed, her hands reached for the phone. Sammy needed to show Lanie just how good she was.

Lanie stopped her before Sammy could get the app open. "You never played for real money, did you?"

Sammy looked down at the phone, turning it back and forth in her hands. "No."

"Even with a credit card? Put a little into an offshore account, buy some chips, run a few hands?"

"No." Sammy didn't meet her eyes. "I like games, this was the first app I played that didn't constantly try and get money from me. And I play against real people, not a computer." She looked up then, and the smile was back. She was in the grip of her addiction, and she had someone listening to her.

"How long did you save up for this trip?" And, Lanie added, "Why didn't you just go to Vegas and get it out of your system?"

"I..", Sammy started out keeping eye contact, but she couldn't hold it. "I knew better. I couldn't afford to play, that's why I stuck to the free games."

Lanie nodded. "How long had you quit playing?"

"About six months. Then I found out the boat ran poker tables." And the app had come back onto the phone, about six weeks before the start of the trip.

The rest of Sammy's story, and its intersection with Jean-Piett just about twenty hours ago, didn't take long.

Garcia, and Jasso, the one who was going to have do the rest of the work, listened to Lanie's description of it. The bad beats and the spending money down the tubes, lost to the old man with a heart of steel. The old man who didn't much care that Sammy wasn't going to be able to afford the rest of her trip. Then the 'accidental' meeting, at the bar for dinner... and the rest of the night out.

Jasso took notes, and so did Garcia. Which kind of surprised Lanie.

"Our hotel partners with several of the cruise ship operations. If we can head this off before it gets here next time, maybe we can stop it from happening again. Plus, my boss is going to need to know what to watch out for, when Jasso sends the case to the prosecutors."

There was only really one other thing. Jasso was the one to bring it up, once he'd finished his notes, set down the pen, and stared at the ceiling for a while. "Why did Frederick get involved?"

If that dude hit five-eight, like it said on his driver's license, it was with an elevator and a step-stool. Skinny, he and Sammy, in serapes and sombreros, had been hard to tell apart. Lanie had to agree with Jasso. "He claimed they'd only lost a couple hundred dollars to the guy. And it was money they'd already set aside to lose, right? Go in, spend the same amount, maybe a little more, than you'd do on a good night out. Just don't go and get any more out of the bank account to chase what you'd already lost and you're golden."

Jasso noted that on his list. "I'll need to check their bank accounts, then."

Lanie nodded. She'd been right, Jasso knew his business. He was just working with his hands tied behind his back, tourist trade and a team just really getting the experience and tools to use it. "He still won't admit it, but I noticed something odd, for an old married couple."

"What's that?" Garcia asked.

"No wedding rings, for either of them. Something else you might add to your list, Mr. Jasso, is a trip to the pawn shops. Before any other cruise ships hit the town."

Jasso chuckled. "We'll be lucky if any of the pawn shops admit to it. But sunburnt Europeans are unusual enough, we might get lucky." He extended his hand, and Lanie shook it. "Mrs. Carter, we thank you. I hate to have to ask you, but you know you'll need to come down as a witness, if we get this all the way to a judge."

Lanie smiled. "Oh, bother. I'll just have to come down for another week on the beach. However will I survive?"

Garcia laughed. "I'm sure I can find you a place to rest your burden, Mrs. Carter."

She echoed the laughter as she made her way out of the office. Even when she opened the calendar on the phone. The one with all the case notes and reminders, the little notes reminding her of what waited back home. The big note, the one six months out that said simply, "Retired", that one stuck out.

She'd take good odds that, worse came to worst, she wouldn't have to worry about being back down here until after she hit the big empty space on the other side of that word. "There are worse places to have to spend the first days of retirement."

Now, if she could just get Jasso and Garcia to buy a couple of extra nights of hotel stay to sweeten the deal...

Stuff I've Been Enjoying - 7/19/2020

Prehistoric Road Trip by Emily Graslie

Oh wow is this series (really just 3 episodes) fun. For all those of us who ever poured through the foldouts in National Geographic, the ones with the big diagrams showing each of the epochs, and which fossil beds were associated with them...

I felt like I was eight again. Or, no, like that eight year old and I were sitting there watching, connected, as Graslie actually goes to the digs. Meets the park rangers, the ones that are tangled up in the theories and the digs and the tensions between tribe and government and researchers and all the parts of paleontology that never showed up at the museum displays or the photo essays.

Just an absolute joy. Though I do wonder how many miles Graslie put on the odometers; my back and butt ache just thinking about the hours on the road this one had to take. Very much thank you, Emily Graslie, this was a wonderful presentation.

On The Passing Of C. T. Vivian and John Lewis

Rhiannon Giddens and Yo-Yo Ma: Build A House; Rhiannon Giddens, songwriter

It Grows Underfoot... A Serendipity Oh story by M. K. Dreysen

Last week, dear reader, we introduced ourselves to Serendipity Oh. For this week's free story, let's dig into Serendipity's past a little. Find out a bit, perhaps, of how she left the friendly confines of Luna, and the academic world, for other horizons and different dreams. This week, let's find out just how

It Grows Underfoot... A Serendipity Oh story by M. K. Dreysen

The night Serendipity Oh finished the damned thing off, graduated, got the signatures on the first page before the bastards all walked out of the conference room, defended her thesis, did the fandango and danced the light electric... the night Serendipity Oh became Doctor Oh to you, ya schmuck...

Serendipity Oh lost her best friend. And she didn't even know it. Not until a month or so later. A month and a lifetime too late to do anything about it.

Jameil Ali was the golden child. The one for whom all paths are open, all routes available. Did he want to be a medical doctor, like his mom? Aid the sick, give comfort to the dying? He could have done that, if he wanted. Jameil had the memory, and the compassion, and a good understanding of the foundations of the discipline.

Did he want to run a company, like his dear old father? Dig into the financials and tease out the losses the managers hadn't found? Catch wind of a piece of equipment, something they were using in Australia in a different industry, but with a little imagination and a little work, hey man this thing just might save our butts... Yeah, Jameil had the curiosity, and the ethic. He could have done that, listened, learned, picked up the grab bag of skills and ideas and experiences.

Musician? Jameil played bass, and he played it well. He marched trumpet, because that's what he'd started out playing and he had a blast, but at home, on the weekends, when the urge hit him and the need for sound and joy came, the bass found its way to his hands. Both parents thought this was fantastic, Dad was a devoted worshipper of all things George Clinton; bass, well.

Dad Ali had dreams of his kid, up there on Luna putting down the line and grooving on six worlds' worth of live feed, bring the Solar System the funk, the life, the universe of love and spirit.

Mom loved Funkadelic, but what she dreamt of, laying there in bed after the last paper had been read, the last note to self for tomorrow's rounds put in the memory banks, was Yo-Yo Ma. She'd caught his last concert, she'd been six and her mom had taken her to the standing room only performance. Ma retired to an orbital life, free from gravity's poor sportsmanship and a century's worth of air flights and taxis, giving one last night to the budding space societies.

Mom heard the echoes of the cello, still. Haunting tones resonated down between the adults, pulled from the air by a white-haired, frail figure glimpsed past the hips of the crowd. And she dreamt of her son, a double bass in front of him, generating those ghosts for a new audience to be haunted by a century hence.

Whatever, however Jameil Ali wanted to create himself, these tools and more were available to him. He had the desire to go along with it. So he put in the work. Homework, practice, marching band and swim team, the hours of the day were full and long, but the kid had the smile and the power.

And the addiction. The one that crept into his head somewhere in eighth grade, about the time he noticed that the girls were starting to notice him right back. The cigarettes, they weren't the addiction, not all of it. The booze, the first few sips from someone bringing their dad's flask to school, that wasn't the whole of it, either.

The night his freshman year, Mom and Dad out of town and the cabinet sitting right there, Jameil sampling it, and then sampling way too much of it, yeah that was the beginning of the addiction. The beginning, but not the whole of it.

He knew better. So the booze and the cigarettes were easy. But his classmates, the other private school kids, all of them had the money.

And a few of them had connections. Grass was trivial, X, custom designed and created pills in designer neon, hey those were there, too, you just had to give the guy a little lead time, that's all. Up, down, sideways, whatever you wanted, it was all there, and the kids in plaid skirts or blue button-ups and slacks had money, they had power, they weren't going to jail for this shit now were they?

Jameil kept it together; he felt the tremors under his feet, the night he took a black mollie, the night he dropped acid, the line of cocaine. Each of those nights were magic.

But he backed away from them, freshman then sophomore then junior year. Put that urge back of the line, sir, there were other things that came first, thank you very much. Rice, or maybe USC. They'd come calling, and Jameil listened.

It got harder, fighting that addiction to the back of his mind. By the time Jameil graduated with his bachelor's, well, two of them because he'd done music and pre-med, by the time he put his blue and silver on and walked across that stage, ignoring the hoops and hollers and looking for Mom and Dad's tears and gentle smiles and Mom's hands up to the sides of her face like when he'd rolled down the driveway on his bike on his own the first time... by that time he'd traded cigarettes for a caffeine addiction, and hard Fridays and Saturdays for an occasional good scotch.

But he hadn't traded the addiction away. He believed he'd tamed it. Medical school was calling, and Jameil Ali was listening, and he'd built, he felt, ambition from that addiction. To help, to heal, to conquer death in little tiny ways, every day. That's what Jameil Ali told himself, each time the thing reared its head and nibbled at the back of his neck.

If the road to recovery begins with knowing you've shit the bed, the roads to hell begin with wide promenades, and entrances by the thousand.

At least one of them comes with music, a cheap drink, Serendipity Oh dropping in for a weekend visit for the first time in an absolutely ridiculously long time, and the beguiling young man weaving his way through the dancers. If you're Jameil Ali celebrating the beginning of your residency, that is.

The guy had ear buds in and glasses on, like the rest of the dancers he'd tuned into his own frequency, Kenneth, his own mood.

Jameil didn't know from love, but lust he could handle. Especially when the guy returned glances. Just so often, enough for Jameil to not quite give up and move on to someone else. He was tall, lithe and lean, maybe a swimmer, or a runner; maybe he'd had that natural born gift.

Basketball. As it turned out, the guy was a D-league guard, too short for the big league, too good of a handle for the team to let him go. "I get paid just enough to not go find something else to do," the guy told Jameil.

"And not enough to make any real money?" Jameil replied.

"That's why I'm turning on to something new." And he told Jameil about it, at the five in the morning pause before sweet sleep.

That something was the next step. From designer drugs, to designer bugs. Gut flora, the ever-present company. Jameil had hated those semesters of medical school, the ones that dealt with the things that live in all of us. For the simple reason that memorizing what felt like forty million different protozoa, bacteria, and others, good, bad, and occasionally indifferent fellow travelers of the human experience, was not his favorite way to spend his time.

Processes, yes. Mechanisms, of course. Surgery, administration, for God's sake put Jameil Ali to work doing anything in a hospital or doctor's office, from straightening the magazines to suturing gun shot wounds to handing out needles to addicts. Hell, Jameil would rather swamp out the restrooms than sit... and read lists... of the myriad... endless... bugs that people have found living in bowels.

If the guy hadn't been so very warm, and the bed so cozy... Jameil listened to his pitch. How his backers had re-engineered their gut bacteria for one simple purpose. "To give you whatever high you want, on schedule, and in just the right amounts."

Up, down, sideways, tune in or turn out, what you need is limited only by your imagination. "Take one, and what? Wait three days and get loaded?" Serendipity wasn't impressed, when Jameil filled her in.

They'd gone to dinner; Jameil had scheduled a followup date with Wayne Martene, the guy. Which might be a business date if this worked out, for Sunday brunch. Saturday evening, he and Serendipity sat in Lunatic's Pizza and Pasta, splitting a Chicago-style pie, her side the works, his side pepperoni only.

"They're engineered to produce the precursors only when you drink, or eat, certain things," Jameil supplied. "Drink a beer, and they load you up on THC, or LSD pick your poison. When the alcohol drops below a certain level, they turn off. A cup of tea, and you get opiates, or X, or psilocybin."

"And then you go safely on your way?"

Jameil shrugged. "Is anything safe? Sere, I just found out about this this morning. I'm not any farther along with it than you are." Except that Jameil had spent the morning logged on, chasing down every hint, every snippet of information. The rumors of self-engineering, biohackers, the world of self-experimentation.

Serendipity Oh had heard at least a few of these rumors herself. "Someone's getting out of their box. Go from self-experimentation to mass production in just a few easy steps. When do I start seeing the commercials?"

Jameil hid the frown that jumped to his face behind a bit of pizza. "I'm not married to the idea, Sere. I just want to know what it's all about, that's all."

And so it was Sere's turn to hide a frown. She used a beer instead of a pizza slice. And she didn't try and answer Jameil's reply. She'd known him too long not to spot the signs that Jameil had the bit in his mouth and he was going to tear this thing down to its parts.

Tear it down, feast on the pieces, and then build it up again as his own. Like when he'd jumped in the pool and made himself into, ok maybe not the state champion or anything but the best damned long-distance swimmer Saint Mary's school for wayward lunatics and groundhogs had ever seen. Or when he'd decided that he'd rather lose the first-chair bass at the Lunar high-school symphony through auditioning with Mingus' Sinner Lady than win with yet another rendition of Beethoven's recitative.

When he made up his mind, Serendipity Oh knew well that Jameil Ali would dig and work and kick until he'd reached his end point with this thing, no matter what anyone else thought of it. And no matter what anyone else might consider to be a useful endpoint. So Sere finished her beer, and her pizza. Then she gave her friend Jameil Ali a kiss, on his already balding head, and she left him to his new hobby. She had a class to teach, undergraduates desperate for nothing more than a passing grade in their very first instrumental lab, so it was back on the sublunar train and back across to the other pole. "Arrivederci, mi amor. Just don't do anything stupid."

Jameil gave her then the smile, his personal smile for friends and family alone. "Trust me, Sere. I've got a world awaitin'." Then he laughed, almost a roar. "Besides, if all I get out of this was last night with Wayne, then anything else is pure gravy."

Sere smiled and shook her head. "Work, sir, work."

He flipped her the finger. "Work's for Monday when I report for the first day of residency, and when you get up on front of a class full of clueless freshmen. Get thee gone, wicked woman, and leave me to my last few joys before the grind."

Serendipity Oh returned the rude gesture and left the pizza joint for a long train ride back to her world.

It wasn't the last time she saw him. But the next time she did see Jameil Ali, the only part of her oldest and dearest friend that she recognized as hers was, as best she could tell, the bald spot. Everything else, down to the private grin for the fortunate few, had been re-forged into something, someone, entirely new.

Jameil started with a survey of his fellow residents. Molly wanted "Adderall and THC, clarity and a good mellow feeling."

Adderall was almost universal. The other sides, the flip sides... Jameil put opioids into his list, even though he didn't want to, because there were so many who wanted it. "Blew out my knee snowboarding," Roger said.

"Too many nights on my feet," Jeanine told him. "Just enough for pain management, it would go a long way."

They all of them were as intrigued as he was. In their own problems, and little joys where they could get them, sure. But the second hook, among the doctors and the nurses, was the idea of what they could do for their patients. "Can you engineer Prozac? What about ketamine?"

Cancer drugs. Because the oncology unit could never quite get the cost down, not on the wrong side of too many patents and too many gravity fields.

When he started getting emails from residents in the Martian rotations, and even a little note from the chief of staff for the Io mission, Jameil knew he'd found something that just might matter.

Wayne didn't know whether Jameil had lost his mind, or not. Wayne braced his lover over breakfast. "What happened to easy, simple money? Get them high, three days later they're clean and maybe ready to try something new? And oh by the way, safe." Because the bugs had their failsafe, they did: die off and leave no traces, no permanent place for stragglers in the system.

The two men had moved in together just about six weeks after that first night. They'd put together a comfortable partnership over six months. Wayne with two cats and a ferret and weeks on the road, Jameil for the first time in his life dealing with things like litter boxes and impatient desk cats. He'd more than once called Wayne up to complain about Rotter the ferret stealing random surgical tools. Or Maynard Tuxedo sleeping on his computers. But these things were, Jameil was learning, just a way to make sure he had Wayne on the phone.

"They'll be just like the drug delivery flora," Jameil said. "Three day turnover, and then take another pill."

"Until the FDA catches up to you. They won't view the things you give a patient quite the same way as they do club-drugs."

Jameil didn't notice that he no longer gave Wayne, or anyone, his private smile. Wayne didn't notice, but then he'd only been around, at that point, a short time. Jameil beamed a sales grin, wide and easy and made to put his audience at ease. "But they're natural materials, aren't they? Macrovitamins, or yogurt, turned up and tuned up just a little. And we'll be curing people, Wayne. It'll be fantastic, once people understand how we're helping them."

Of course, it wasn't the FDA that made their life miserable, that first go-round. Nope, it was the drug companies. Because when you get down to it, the worst thing in the world, from their point of view, was an escaping subject.

Jameil met with the Pfizer reps on board the L5 station. "The chemicals have been out of patent for more than a hundred years. And they've never been successfully patented outside of Earth orbit. Just what in the solar system do you think makes me care about your opinions?"

He'd practiced the frown that went along with this statement. The sales grin came easy; he reserved that for the end of the conversation, the one that Jameil knew was predestined. But first...

"We'll have you tied up in courts for decades, Doctor Ali. You and anyone else involved in this. We don't have to win to make damned sure you never see a penny from these drug-release systems."

The suits were, to a woman, indistinguishable to Jameil. Power, all of them, tuned to their environment. Up and down orbit ten or fifteen times a year, out to the belts and back, maybe Luna, maybe Earth, didn't matter really. They went where the conglomerate sent them.

Jameil had three other meetings scheduled, with the other three major medical conglomerates. Practice, maybe.

Or maybe they were coordinating. That was easier these days, with no firm over-arching system-wide agreements to hinder the important people.

Jameil kept his frown in place, and hands laced behind his head, while he listened to his thought. 'What did they say?' this thought whispered to him. 'They gave something away, what was it?'

If it wasn't the chemicals, which were being manufactured on Luna, and Mars, right now, with no royalties or kickbacks... the suit had mentioned drug-release systems... 'Ah,' the thought whispered. 'That's what they've done. They're all working on long-release systems, time-controlled and easily digestible in the right combination.'

That long-standing goal, to get things past the gut and into the blood, and avoid the needles and the i.v.'s and the titrations in the clinic. Give a pill once a week and all your worries are gone. For a fee, of course.

And Jameil charged a lot less than they did. Why shouldn't he?

"I'll give you one percent," the newly minted CEO of Ali-Martene told them. "Four percent across the whole of your partners."

The suits attempted to separate and negotiate separately, but he squashed that any time it came up. "Look, you can pretend to the press that you're competitors, but we've all signed the NDA's, here. Let's put it together and be done with it. Four percent is a good round number, split it between you and get out of my hair. If you want more, you have to put up real money."

Which was entirely out of the question, the suits argued. They'd been sent to bite and fight, not do anything significant like spend real money. Nope.

They took the four percent. And Jameil gifted them with the smile. "You are all going to be heroes, you know why? Because you'll be able to sell your methods as 'real' and 'sophisticated', not the meatball methods those loonies and dirtpushers use."

And the suits walked out of the conference with their agreement, a little cash to come in the corporate accounts. And yes. A stack of pre-made advertising material to sell to the Earthbound billions, about how lucky they all were not to have to take so many medicines the way the "Poor microgravity and radiation-damaged explorers have to take, isn't it a shame?"

****

Rumor was, and Jae-lyn followed it. For something new, it's not like she had a hard time getting what she needed. A little here, a little there, a Saturday night that didn't involve sitting in her apartment listening to her roommate complain about her professors.

Lights and cameras and music. And if she was lucky, maybe a little space that didn't involve someone else creeping into it. "Why don't you just surf into the Libelous Lounge, if you don't want people touching you?" That's what Ys would ask, if Jae-lyn brought it up. So she didn't bring it up. She'd quit bringing things like that up a long time ago, because Ys was a wonderful little sister: a pain in the ass with a heart of gold and far too much interest in her roommate's love life. Or lack thereof.

Jae-lyn went out because it wasn't being in. And online was always inside. She'd never yet seen a room there that didn't blow her straight out of the mood, between buffering and time lags. Nope, she wanted the real thing. And she was happy to return to worrying about how many extra hours she could cadge in the library if she needed to, to cover the book and tuition money she was getting ready to spend.

She'd come for the pills already. But they'd gone the way of the dodo, and she had new adventures in her head. Story now was, there was a new type on the market. One-time purchase. Take it once, and all would be at your command.

And she'd not have to revisit it again next time she just wanted a blessed few hours in a nothing skirt and glitter-weight heels.

"Big money" it was, compared to what she was used to. But Dad had sent the semester check just yesterday, she'd enough saved over and the break coming up to work for the rest. She bought the new pill, sent it down in the Starlighter on warmup time, a little tonic and gin to chase it down with and wait for the mood to come to her.

****

Dawn in a college town, even with the advancements and the Luna gravity and there's only so much difference from Abelard and the gang. The ER wasn't packed, normally.

But the nurse and the AI on duty both recognized that three kids, three nights in a row, in for what the MRI identified as massive colorectal tumors... "How many twenty-year olds have you ever seen like this?" the nurse asked the computer.

"Once, twice a year at most," the computer replied, after dutifully checking its numbers. "Our statistics fit well across the solar system."

"What are the odds on three in a row, advanced to that degree?" Each of the kids had described three days of hell, stomach or back cramps, fever, abdominal bruising, the works. And then they'd found a way to the ER, their roommates dragging them in.

And then they'd died, because no one checks a young adult for colon cancer until it's far too late to do anything about it. The last one was bleeding out on her table and there was goddamned nothing the nurse could do about it.

"Somewhere around one in a million," the AI answered.

"And the odds that they're all in the same class?"

"Incalculable."

****

Serendipity Oh had lost students, because when you've taught for more than a minute, you've lost students. Random accidents, bad news from the family genetics.

Drugs and alcohol the most common cause, because they always had to test. And Sere had tested the boundaries herself, so there was only so much she felt she could shake her head over. "There but for the grace of God" and all that.

Three kids in the same class, within three days of each other? And all from the same thing, sudden rapid massive colorectal tumors?

Yeah, she didn't take it as an accident.

She tore down the lab first. Set the chemistry department's AI system going on any hints of random chemicals they'd missed. "Has there ever been anything in our storeroom history that would be likely to cause this? And I mean anything, including our research stores. Take it to the Dean if you need permissions higher than mine to get the answer."

Which the AI didn't need; Sere hadn't asked for direct personal information, the general question gave the AI the wiggle room to investigate and summarize. "As you'd expect, we have had research chemicals, most often in the biochemistry division, that could be expected to cause this, or at least similar symptoms. However, Professor Gollada retired some five years ago, and none of our current faculty have interest in such areas."

"How were Gollada's leftovers accounted for?"

"Offsite storage, her funding sources provided for long-term repositories in vacuo. Inventory and bonding listings are for the trans-Jupiter asteroid cluster labeled Ux101-Sipp."

Sere didn't like that. Rather: she didn't want to miss anything. "Is there a story there?" Meaning, she told herself, is there any particular reason Gollada would have chosen storage on the other side of the solar system?

"Costs. Bonding was ten times cheaper, and long term storage five times cheaper. New systems at rollout and complete automation, so no human interferences for the underwriters to worry about."

The lab testing was fairly easy, as well. It was a chemistry department, after all, so the AI had its own snooper bots to do the grunt work. As opposed to turning a bunch of underclass kids loose on day money and a prayer.

Sere didn't wait on the lab results. Oh, sure, there would be trace levels of something.

A mutagen that powerful, and three random kids from a junior-level instruments lab wouldn't have been the first ones to show it. Serendipity Oh prescribed powerful work to her kids, but she didn't put them into that kind of deep water. No mileage in it and there were a million times more of chemical spaces to work in than that branch. They'd get there soon enough, the hazmat suits and containments that lay in the future if they pushed farther. No need for that today.

Which left recreational chemistry, and tracking that down took her less time than it did for the AI to finish its analysis of the sampling.

They'd gone to ground, vamoosed, headed for the hills, the dealers had. If Sere knew within a week, the dealers heard it in hours. "You're killing your customers" has its way of sharpening the mind and the attention.

But they couldn't clean up their trails. All Sere had to do was ask the roommates. "Renata said she'd heard there was a new flavor in town," and "Jae-lyn told me she'd decided she was tired of spending good money just because she wanted a good night out every six weeks," and "Christy had never tried anything like that before. But when Renata mentioned it..."

The other thing the dealers couldn't hide was their connection. Club kids had many things in life, Sere believed, but they weren't normally focused on the kind of planning it took to engineer a drug delivery system. Not one that was intended to permanently hijack the bodily function the earlier generations had simply piggy-backed on.

Sere sat in her office, waiting on the AI's results before she did anything more.

But when she'd dotted her t's and crossed her i's, when she had the backup data she needed, Serendipity Oh turned herself to the task of getting into Ali-Martene's office spaces.

Unobserved, of course. Because she wasn't about to confront Jameil on hearsay. She wanted real data, if there was any.

They always air-gapped their important stuff, in Sere's experience. Still the only way to keep unwanted eyes away. If the computer was connected, it was compromised, that's the secret that everyone believed in.

Except that someone had to be able to shift information across the gap. And if anyone between the galaxy and the deep blue sea kept an army of data-entry clerks busy, Serendipity Oh had never heard of it.

She used her own machine to find the A-M repository. The Luna data sets were open, and blessedly well-maintained.

Jameil hadn't wandered far from home, Sere found. He'd taken over a datacenter from the old days, one of his father's. The older Ali's company sold off so the old man could safely retire, and the data center now rebuilt and repurposed.

And with a steady supply of data couriers on two-hour intervals. The traffic pattern stood out, the Luna government had noted it already; Sere found it with an email and a phone call.

A-M had not shifted certain kinds of operations yet. The courier services company was licensed and bonded across the solar system; Zhe Yuan had built herself a reputation. "We know you need data updated securely. We're the best at the job."

You could see them regularly, if you knew what to look for. Small fast rockets, small fast cars or flyers or boats.

Always discrete, though. Never a placard out of place. The only advertisement just a sign in the window, to let you know who'd been hired to do the job right. Always on time.

Sere had hired Yuan's Traders a couple of times, to deal with a recalcitrant co-author on L4 Station. Bloody bastard Barney refused to part with his data over electronic lines, he'd collected it and by-God he was going to be the first one to publish it. Twenty-thousand dollars per trip, L4 to Luna, and thank any god who bothered to listen that Sere'd only had to come up with the money once a year. Y-T's operation had asked only the what, the where, and the when, given her a quote. Waited for half as deposit, and half on acceptance when the kid in the zip suit, looking like he was barely old enough to shave, came in with the perfectly sealed and protected flat pack containing her data.

The traffic pattern suggested that the Y-T team had a retainer. Serendipity's contact had sent a link; average time for the courier was just less than ten minutes. Enough to get in, hand over for a signature, and then head back out the door. Electronic transfers were never that quick.

And Y-T never carried cash or equivalent. Data only, and it had to be no larger or heavier than a pack of three-by-five index cards.

Larger datasets meant more couriers, and more money. Simple as that. "How the fuck are you able to pay for a quarter-million in courier shipments a day, Jameil?"

What gave Serendipity Oh her hope was one more little aspect of those that paid Yuan Traders the best: you never knew who had the real data. The young man there at ten a.m., in his polo and slacks with the Y-T in carmine thread.

Or the granny in her shawl at three-forty-five in the morning on a random Thursday six weeks later. Neither of them knowing whether they had the real thing, or the dummy data that matched in every particular, date and time and size of file.

She might have taken a random-traveling salesman's solution path, or he might have been the fourteenth link in a chain of pass throughs; hell, Sere reminded herself, neither one of them might have held real data.

But they only showed up on average every two hours.

Not the same thing at all as showing up every two hours, guaranteed.

Sere went at five in the afternoon on a Friday. She'd taken the time to get a different haircut, she wore no makeup and she dressed like she would if a random big-money contributor showed up with deans in tow: a sport-coat she kept in her office, and the slacks and dress shirt she only put on when she'd heard rumors and gossip of the visitors and the begathon going down.

She carried her custom-made phone with her, and a handful of attachments that coupled to the extra ports. Nothing significant to random scanners, just a tool-kit in the pocket size, that's all.

Five o'clock on a random Friday at the A-M data center wasn't so different than it was at any other office space. Sere checked in through the first layer of office security, the generic one meant only to keep the lookie-loo's from wandering around the place.

The elevator, when she took the opportunity of an empty compartment, placed the leads from her remote across its ports, and asked the question, let her know that her presence hadn't been recorded as anything in particular.

Her handheld told her the elevator wasn't lying. So, instead of getting off at the first level, Sere got off at the level below.

The air gap meant she wouldn't be able to set a snooper. The odds that she'd pull this off twice weren't favorable enough to bet on. So, she had some few minutes to take a chance on, and then she'd have to haul buns for somewhere else.

The data transfer center would have been on the first level, the one the desk clerk, busy planning her night out, had directed Sere to. The second level, when she stepped out into it... was where the locals lived. The AI's present always, the humans who needed to talk to them came here for the remote stations scattered around the place.

And all of them with transfer ports, Sere noticed. She didn't stop for a sigh of relief. She went along the tastefully arranged temporary office desks, an open plan but not open enough so the guy at the next desk could see your monitor, until she'd reached about halfway from the elevator door.

She wasn't the only one working on a Friday evening. The lady in the back had her headphones on, the other lady at the front looked like she was getting ready to leave. Both of them dressed more or less the same way as Sere, business casual enough to handle a random boss cruising through, but nothing too annoying.

The port was standard, the operating system was standard, when she asked the node how much data was available to peruse, the number of bytes went somewhere north of "Way too damned big to even try and survey." Much less transfer in the twenty minutes Sere gave herself.

How do you hunt for a needle, not in a haystack, but in a thousand haystacks, in twenty minutes and with your bare hands?

Sere didn't. She sat down and started playing. Like she would with any computer. Go here, list the files, oh look they're interested in the Indian Threshold, hmm, and there's the Venus agency's call for proposals, a quote in-prep for the United Nations that would be turned down just like all the rest of them...

She didn't find a burning clue. She found a dumpster fire's worth of them. Not hidden at all, the notes were right there in the Research and Development directories. Under "Long-Term, Single-Dose Methods".

Sere didn't have time to worry that she'd been bird-dogged. Maybe she had, maybe she hadn't but her point wasn't to build a case, her point was to have enough information to get to Jameil in person with a fistful of outrage. She glommed the directory, which had a mountain of data, but all of it was there and transferred over, and she disconnected the port line while her handheld still had thirty-four seconds on the timer.

There and gone and waving at the new desk clerk, the other one must have headed out just as soon as her replacement had arrived.

"All finished up?" the kid said.

Sere nodded and waved. "You bet. Have a good weekend." She waited, just a beat, long enough to hear the kid whisper "At least it's a quiet weekend," and then Serendipity Oh hit the road.

The data wasn't enough to say anything about motives and reasons and what might have snuck out when the scientists doing the research weren't looking. This was bog standard stuff. Response curves, correlation functions, study reports and chemistry lessons and a very detailed look at a day in the life of a working research lab.

And when the bad news came, the reports all made note of it. "No long-term benefit" was the nice response. "Serious safety concerns" was the scientese speak-all for "Holy shit throw this combination in the dumpster and let us never speak of it again." All quite open and responsible and well-documented.

There was nothing to hide here, and if Sere was reading it right, they'd all stopped where they should, where the AI and the PI took a look at the dead mice and said "Nope."

"So who's the one who decided that the scientists weren't giving you the answer you wanted, Jameil?"

****

Sere did get the chance to ask Jameil Ali that question. Face to face, in a conference room with the best view of Earthrise money could by.

He greeted her from his seat at the middle of the conference room table. His secretary had led her to the room.

Jameil didn't get up from his seat, not really. He did the half-hearted, handshake and a shoulder bump in place of a hug and a kiss. She asked him the question, before the secretary had even left the room. He didn't deny it. "You're a scientist, Sere, you know how it goes. Some things work, some things don't. We shrugged it off and moved on to the next thing."

"Except for my students. And the others." Half a dozen more, before Sere had blown a gasket, and the A-M secret. Jameil hadn't emailed her directly, that had been his secretary.

"An overly ambitious new hire. She's been fired, and we were the first to file a lawsuit against her. She thought she would impress somebody. Or maybe find something good enough to sell off to Pfizer or the like."

He didn't look at her, the whole conversation. Oh, he gave her the occasional glance, it was impossible not to. Otherwise, he kept his eyes on the handheld in his lap, or the Earthrise behind her.

Sere noticed the smile and the frown. Both with the proper calibration, showing his anger that he'd been taken advantage of by someone he'd hoped would be the next generation of the company, and his cautious optimism that they'd rooted out the bad apples. "That's not us, Sere. Wayne, me, neither of us can bear the idea that our products would do someone harm."

The conversation was short, they hit all the beats. Jameil's story had all the elements. The basic science, and the caution of it that Sere knew so well. A hint that Jameil and Wayne had been taken advantage of by the Earthbound medical industry. The strong response, direct action to carve that tumor away from the body politic...

Sere walked out of her meeting with Jameil Ali sure of nothing but that she'd learned little more than she'd known when she went in. The only firm thing, the only bit and piece that had a concrete identity, was that she could no longer see Jameil as her friend.

Whatever and however life had moved for him, he'd put on the suit and armor of the CEO of his company, and all around was facade.

****

Two weeks later, and Serendipity Oh was also sure that she needed a damned job. The dean had hit her with it: "We don't run according to the traditional model of the terrestrial academy, Doctor Oh. We're much more responsive, progressive, than that."

No tenure, Sere translated. And, no contract...

"As such, I'm afraid that the college has decided that we need to go in a different direction. Please clear your office by the end of the week. The official reference letter from the department will be waiting in your inbox."

Don't even think of getting another academic job, Sere further translated. The dean was making sure she knew she'd been blackballed.

All the years of work and it all went away so quickly. Sere boxed up her shit; she didn't say a word, not even to ask her handheld to play music. Some of that was that she didn't want the random playlist to serve up an accidental dirge. A small part of it was a worry, a little tension in the back of her head, that if Jameil could reach so far as to push her out of her job, then he'd certainly go a little farther and place a listener around her. Just in case she said something actionable on her way out the door.

The biggest reason she didn't say anything, not as she packed up the piles and books and chalk dust, was that Serendipity Oh didn't trust herself not to cry, or scream. Or burn the fucking place to the ground on her way out. The roll of magnesium she'd had in the back of her drawer for God only knows how long called to her. Begged her to put it to its best use.

She didn't do it. She packed it up with the rest of the detritus and made her way home, autocart trundling along behind her.

The rest of the department had ignored her. She'd graduated from the school, undergraduate and doctorate. She'd taught homework sessions, labs, lectures, she'd brought in a bit of research money here and there. Sweet Jesus she'd fucked at least three or four of them and not a single one of the sonsabitches would even look her in the eye as she packed up and walked out.

"No tenure," she reminded herself, standing on the steps and getting one last look at the chemistry building before meandering down the corridor. Every single one of them, department chair to janitor, knew what could happen if they stepped wrong on their own little path.

If they didn't before, they did now. Sere's example, fresh in their minds.

Serendipity Oh walked away from the academic life, the dream she'd built for herself, certain only of two things.

First was that Jameil Ali had managed to make her into an enemy. Not the blood and dagger kind. She'd be doing no hunting, plotting no wars. But someday, somehow, the moment would come. And Jameil Ali would know regret. This she whispered in the caverns of the mind, where naught but her own memories could hear it.

The second thing Serendipity Oh was certain of was that she was glad she'd answered what felt like a random call to her handheld; it came in when she walked home from her meeting with Jameil, two weeks and a lifetime ago. "Doctor Oh, I understand that you're the system expert in mineralogical chemistry."

"Whoever told you that is being generous; who is this?"

"My name's Miller Wright, and I own a mining company. We operate a couple plants on each of the planets, but those are going all right. On the other hand, we've got a new one, out in the asteroid belt, that's giving us six kinds of hell, and I've been told that you're just the expert we need to get our problem fixed..."

Wright's retainer check, covering two years, travel time and expenses and worth about four years of her salary at the university even after the expenses, had cleared her account yesterday. Sere had signed the nondisclosure agreements, she'd booked her travel to the problem child of a plant.

Whatever life had ahead of her, and it was a hell of a wrench to her psyche to have to ditch a couple decades' work, she'd landed pretty well. Serendipity Oh picked two boxes of books and papers to go with her to the asteroid belt, along with a couple of new handhelds, and she got on the rocket to a new world.

Stuff I've been enjoying - 7/12/2020

Stuff I've been enjoying lately 7/12/2020

Hammers On Bone and A Song For Quiet, both by Cassandra Khaw.

Fair warning about these two: they are quite distinct in voice and character, though the setting remains the same. The central character of Hammers does indeed appear in A Song For Quiet, but not as the focus about which the story rotates.

In fact, when I come around again to A Song...; I'm not sure how I feel about this one.

Let me back up. Hammers On Bone, boil it down and we've got a Lovecraft world with a Chandler protagonist. Or maybe John D. Macdonald, Travis McGee in outlook and a Dashiell Hammett mouth. That kind of detective story.

Which, if you're like me, was more than enough to get started. And Khaw handles Hammers well enough to have me hanging on for the ride all the way through. I very much smiled throughout this one, I very much enjoyed Hammers On Bone.

A Song For Quiet, well. I knew going in that Khaw had given us a different character, story, in the same world. Still threatened by the worlds beyond our kenning, only from a very different point of view. And I'm an occasional musician, so the setup is definitely another one that had me bolting in and ready to hang on.

But I'm still deciding how I feel about A Song For Quiet. It made me think.

About the obvious, of course. The main character is black in a white world and time frame. This is the up front level where Khaw works; it's not, however, the only one.

I'm going to have to re-read this one. I suspect that this is one of those books that I'll scroll past for weeks, months, and then dive into again. A chapter or a few pages or a whole re-read at a time.

And that, I very much like. Maybe I won't ever decide how I feel about A Song For Quiet. And that is a very, very cool space to be.

Thank you, Cassandra Khaw.