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  “It’s an instrument of climate warfare,” the President had said, “in the hands of a known drug user.”

  So yes, Paramaribo was a busy place, and yes, that mattered.

  “We seem to have a visitor,” Jeanette said suddenly, looking up at something behind Alice’s head. Dona was looking that direction as well, so Alice turned her head just in time to see a buzzing microdrone the size of a hockey puck come whizzing to a stop a few meters from their table.

  In a tinny yet creepily natural robotic voice, it said, “Dona Obata. Jeanette Schmidt. Alice Kyeong. Please acknowledge your identity.”

  “Acknowledged,” Jeanette said.

  More cautiously, Dona asked, “Are you from Renz Ventures?”

  “Yes,” the drone replied. “However, I’m not authorized to give any additional information without confirmed identities.”

  Sighing, Dona said, “All right. Acknowledged.”

  Annoyed, Alice said, “You know damn well who we are.” By now, this little puck could have matched their faces against any number of global biometric databases. That was probably how it knew to approach them in the first place. But it was no more intelligent than a doorbell, and there was no point arguing with it, so she said, “Acknowledged.”

  The drone chimed. “Thank you. Passengers Dona Obata, Jeanette Schmidt, and Alice Kyeong are requested to move to their assigned launch site within three hours.”

  Jeanette did try to argue with it, then, by asking, “Right now? Three hours? Why?”

  It replied, “Launch schedules have been adjusted, spaceport wide. Passengers Dona Obata, Jeanette Schmidt, and Alice Kyeong are given three hours to collect belongings, perform personal hygiene, and travel to their assigned launch site. Pre-boarding procedures commence at 1:50 p.m. local time and will not be suspended or delayed.”

  “That’s more than a full day early,” Jeanette protested.

  “Please acknowledge receipt of this message,” the drone said.

  “Acknowledged,” all three of them said, in annoyed near-unison.

  The drone chimed again, then retreated into the flow of traffic on the street.

  “They could have just called,” Jeanette said.

  “Someone’s checking up on us,” Dona said, looking genuinely worried. “Something’s not right. They want us in orbit early, too, which means the crew ferry’s leaving Transit Point Station ahead of schedule.”

  “Which means what?” Alice asked, not following her reasoning.

  “Could be embargo stuff,” Dona speculated. “Renz Ventures is afraid of outside forces interfering with Suriname’s internal affairs.”

  If that was true, Alice thought wryly, they were right to be afraid. However, the administration of ITAR sanctions sat largely with the United Nations, and there was no guarantee they didn’t have some ham-handed, ground-level operations of their own in the works. Or, hell, even the mammoth U.S. government—five million bureaucrats, and growing!—with its overlapping jurisdictions and spirit of empowerment, might have dozens of operations going on that the President didn’t specifically authorize or know about. Banking investigators, tax investigators, the customs service . . . the list was endless.

  “That could fuck us hard,” Alice said.

  “Indeed,” Dona agreed.

  “Well, let’s get going!” Jeanette piped up.

  So they took a final sip from their drinks, and slapped way too many paper currency bills down on the table, because who was going to need them after this? Then they rushed out into the street, waving for a taxi.

  And now that the launch was only a few hours away, and controlled by these yahoos rather than the U.S. Space Force, and Alice was headed not for a secret training base in low Earth orbit, but for a dangerous mission in the blackness of outer space, far from everything she’d ever known or loved, she did have to acknowledge that yeah, she actually was a little bit afraid. Well, damn.

  2.1

  21 March

  ✧

  ESL1 Shade Station

  Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1

  Extracislunar Space

  Igbal Eilan Renz—Iggy to his closer associates—eyeballed the vapor pen in his hands and breathed deeply, oxygenating his blood for the ordeal ahead.

  “You’re back to the beta-three mixture,” Pamela warned.

  “Noted.”

  “It’s going to last about twenty minutes, and you’re going to feel—how did you put it?—‘paralytically jammed in a soft, cold blankness.’”

  “I remember, yeah. It was a rough trip. The Beings barely spoke to me at all.”

  “Uh-huh. You can stop that deep breathing, you know. Your pulse ox is ninety-eight.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he assured her. He was cramming every oxygen molecule into his bloodstream that he possibly could, because he knew from experience that it would hold that suffocating feeling at bay, keeping him calmer for a longer period of time, allowing him to retain some control over his faculties. He’d also loaded up with furanocoumarins at breakfast, courtesy of a dense grapefruit paste imported from Earth, and that was going to increase the potency and half-life of the DMT he was about to inhale.

  Over the past several years, he’d tried blending straight DMT with 5-MeO-DMT, and everything else from bufotenin to LSD to psilocin and psilocybin, but found over time that all that stuff just got in the way of the Contact he craved. Now he was back to a formula that was almost pure N,N-DMT, solvated in almost pure ethanol, with just a hint of zaleplon to keep his heart rate down and goose up the visualizations a bit. This mix hadn’t worked that well for him in the past, but now that he was closing in on why, he felt it was important to circle back and retry some of his early experiments.

  The two of them were in his office, by a set of enormous windows looking out at the tiny Earth. He sometimes took his drug trips sitting down, strapped into his chair, behind his desk, both bolted firmly to that surface of the room he’d arbitrarily designated as “floor.” Today, though, he was floating free, with the air temperature set to a nearly blood-warm twenty-nine degrees, because he figured minimizing bodily sensations was the ticket to better reception.

  “Last time I used this was on Earth,” he reminded her. “Surrounded by jibber-jabbering radio fields and quantum decoherence. Now even the Sun is quiet. With the Shade-absorbed photons kicking electrons into the conduction band, the entangled states here in the station are minimized, which means less noise.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay, Ig. I’m sure that’s correct.”

  “Oh, don’t patronize me. Quantum physics is used to justify all kinds of nonsense, but that doesn’t mean quantum physics is nonsense.” He waved the vape pen at her. “This stuff, this brain chemical, activates neuro-quantum computing pathways that can be measured with a goddamn MRI scanner. It’s a real brain circuit, that connects you to something outside of the brain. That’s profound, Pam, and if you’re not willing to experience it firsthand, you don’t get to judge.”

  “I most certainly do,” she said, fussing with his blood pressure cuff, “and not just because I’m your doctor. Everybody gets to. Everybody is.”

  “Not breakin’ any laws,” he reminded her.

  “I could murder you right now and not break any laws. That doesn’t make it smart.”

  “Well then, we’ll let history be the judge,” he said, in a voice that sounded pompous even to him. Then, backpedaling a bit, he added, “It’s not like I’m the world’s first innovator to have eccentric hobbies. Isaac Newton was a closet alchemist. All his life, trying to make gold out of thin air. Isaac Newton! Feynman played drums. Howard Hughes? Morphine. I’m not even the only person doing exactly this. The Beings are a hot topic on the biohack roundtables.”

  “Great. That’s great. Very respectable.”

  “I’m just saying. Let people judge me when they’re generating as much electrical power as the entire United States.” Then, sensing that wasn’t getting him anywhere, he changed course again and said,
“How’s the baby doing?”

  Pam touched her abdomen. “Not kicking yet, but otherwise good.”

  “And you’re feeling okay?”

  “The morning sickness appears to be subsiding, yes.”

  “All right, well, I know what that means.”

  “Mmm?”

  “The thing you’re working on? Your actual job? You’re going into stasis soon.”

  She sighed uncomfortably. “Yeah. I mean . . . Yeah. Are you worried? I mean, it’s your baby, too.”

  He shrugged. “I know it’s the whole reason you came to Esley. I’m not going to stand in your way, but yeah, sure, I’m worried. Shouldn’t you be reassuring me?”

  “Mmm.” Her look was more thoughtful than a glower, less certain than a glare. She looked, for lack of a better word, compromised. “It’s possible to want something with all your heart, and also fear it. We really don’t know the risks.”

  “But it’ll be okay?” he tried. She knew more about that than he did, so he didn’t try to elaborate. But it was true, he also felt uneasy now that the moment was actually upon them. There was a doctor en route to ESL1 who would put Pam in stasis and then take over her job. And there would be no more Pam, not for a long time.

  He sighed. In addition to being one of the most beautiful women Igbal had ever seen (with genes from all over the world—red-brown hair, coppery skin and, somehow, blue epicanthic eyes), Pamela Rosenau was a medical doctor, and an expert in hibernation technology. Blowing sunshine up her pant leg was unlikely to work, and might backfire, and she knew damn well he was going to miss her, and worry about her. And the baby. His first and only child!

  He grimaced and shrugged instead. “You want to make someone else do it? I’ve got a whole list of candidates.”

  She didn’t appear to have a ready answer for that.

  “Seriously,” he said, “You don’t have to do this at all. You certainly don’t have to be the first.”

  “If I’m not first then it’s never going to happen for me,” she answered. “And that’s not acceptable, either.”

  Unsure what to say to that, he simply patted her on the back of the leg and called it good.

  Pam and Iggy’s relationship was eccentric at the best of times, and uneasy at the worst, and there was no way in hell a guy like him could have put a baby in her if he hadn’t been a trillionaire with literally worlds to offer. Even so, it almost hadn’t happened, and even now she seemed ambivalent about it. Ambivalent about him, and about the possible futures that might keep them together or apart. So okay, time to change the subject again.

  At the left and right edges of the bank of windows, he could see the ESL1 shade sprawling like a blank canvas, almost as big as Germany and with more energy at its disposal than any country on Earth. His most prized possession. He stared at it for a long moment, and then at the round, perfectly lit sphere of Earth. And, far behind it and to the left, the gray-white pinkie nail that was Luna. Some offices had views of mountains or forests or cities or parks; his had a view of everything there ever was.

  “I’ll support whatever you decide,” he said, meaning it, although his heart and mind ached with the possible outcomes. Then, with nothing more to say, he put the vape pen in his mouth and inhaled sharply.

  “Bye,” she said, now even more clearly annoyed.

  Which was dumb, because even as inhaled vapor, DMT didn’t take effect that quickly. He held the breath for as long as he could, and then exhaled.

  “It tastes like mint,” he said.

  “I don’t know why,” she answered.

  “There’s no mint in it?”

  “You know exactly what’s in it.”

  “Maybe the zaleplon? Could there be menthyl acetate in it as a filler?”

  Pam glared. “I don’t know what the fuck any of those things taste like, Ig, and you’re the one that programmed the synthesizer. Okay?”

  But then, before Igbal could think of a witty rejoinder, the chamber walls were kaleidoscoping around him, slowly lengthening and unpacking and telescoping and folding out into the much bigger (and yet somehow much flatter) space he called the Atrium. It resembled his office in the same way a baroque, stained-glass cathedral resembles a little white church.

  “Atrium,” he reported, not for Pam’s sake, but because he was being recorded.

  His voice echoed: trium . . . um . . . ummm . . .

  “Standard atrial echoes, normal color palette. The space appears at least four times larger than normal in every dimension, and growing.”

  He felt the words coming out of him, but he couldn’t hear them; each syllable rebounded from every surface in an otherworldly cacophony. And what he was saying wasn’t precisely correct, either; his office didn’t appear larger, so much as it appeared to be broken up into facets like folded maps that never stopped unfolding.

  “Not standard echoes,” he reported. “Very strong.” strong . . . strong . . .

  Vibrations rang everywhere; even the slightest sounds ringing the office like a church bell. He hit the pen again, drawing deeply from it twice more while he still had the presence of mind, then felt it spinning out of his grasp. The Atrium was collapsing—fast, this time—into the dimensionless tube or point or singularity he called the Junction. The Junction had no size, and yet it was made of colored shapes, like a black hole swallowing cartoons onto its infinitesimal holographic surface.

  “Junction,” he might have said, although the parts of his brain that could speak were lagging farther and farther behind him. He felt himself breathing hard and deeply, drawing more and more and more oxygen into his lungs, because he knew damn well that where he was going—the sacred, sordid, incomprehensible place he called the Tumbles—he would barely be able to breathe at all.

  He felt a moment of terror, just like he always did, because THIS WAS A HELL OF A THING HE WAS DOING, RIGHT? RIGHT? RIGHT? Oh godly godly here we godly go.

  Imagine a man’s voice saying “Murblemiiih! Mih! Mibblemurblemibblemih!” right into both your ears, and conducting right down into your bones and jumbling them into bright soft fragments, except that the man’s voice is your own, and you’re not there at all, except that the Beings are with you, and they are glad, so glad, so very glad you could make it back to see them.

  They have some

  They have something

  They have something really important and wonderful to tell you

  because you’re

  getting

  closer

  to

  the moment of

  contact

  hello hello hello hello HELLO!

  why hello

  the message is

  yes

  the message is a transmission

  yes hello

  the message is a transmission from a

  yes

  hello

  so glad so glad so GLAD you could make it

  here is the message:

  here

  here

  here is the message:

  Except you’re not there at all, and you’re tumbling dimensionlessly in the everything, and you still can’t still can’t still can’t really quite make out what they’re saying and

  try again

  try again

  not quite

  hello!

  not quite integrated

  here is the message:

  here is

  here

  hello?

  no

  damn

  “Still too much decoherence noise,” a clear voice says, and that’s

  Hello?

  That’s all

  Hello?

  That’s all

  The message is a

  Hello?

  That’s all

  That’s all you get this time.

  Ah, damn. Ah, well. DMT hits like a tidal wave and evaporates like a dream, just a few minutes later. Melting, forgotten, and yet somehow intensely meaningful.

  “You back?” Pam asked, shining a pen
light in his eyes. Still annoyed. Still not into this particular aspect of her job.

  “Ow. Yes. I’m back.”

  “And?”

  “We’re getting closer.”

  “Joy,” she said acerbically. She handed him a bulb of orange-flavored electrolyte drink and said, “I realize the ethanol in the vape mix is only there as a solvent, but it’s still ethanol, and your blood levels haven’t peaked yet. Don’t go back to work for at least an hour. And Ig?”

  “Yes, Pam?”

  “Even if I stay, you need to find someone else to help you with this. I’m not doing it anymore.”

  1.3

  21 March

  ✧

  Paramaribo, Suriname

  Earth Surface

  The RzVz launch vehicle, Exultation, was a good old-fashioned vertical rocket ship with a little shuttle perched on top, with seating for a pilot and copilot who apparently were not actually needed, or at least not going to show up for this particular trip. The empty seats were far more unnerving than if the ship were simply automated and pilotless. Their vacancy contributed to the rushed, half-baked vibe of this whole endeavor.

  Separated from the cockpit by a little doorway was the passenger compartment, with two rows of three seats. It looked like maybe two additional rows could be bolted in, but those spaces were vacant as well. The seats had probably been removed to save weight. The seats that remained were pleather in RzVz blue, bright against the cabin bulkhead of gray composite material, much like that of the Space Force’s own shuttles. There were video monitors built into nearly every surface, serving as virtual windows looking up at the sky, down at the ground, across at the launch tower and the complex of roads and fuel tanks and support buildings that surrounded it, and out over the sea and the swamp and the rocky beaches and the bricky, tin-roofed sprawl of Paramaribo off in the distance. A ladder led down the left-hand side of the cabin, but it seemed weirdly out of place, because the overall effect in here was like someone had taken a section from the right half of an airliner, and tipped it on its back.