Yondering. Jack Dann

room of the new surveillance system.

      A grid of screens hooked to the drywall flickers through images of the activities of all 41,000 computers on campus. Another strip in the grid displays live feeds from the cameras placed in every interior cavity of the institute. Not a single section of the monitoring room’s surface is left uncovered.

      This new visual reminder being broadcast causes a renewal in the slacking tension of the room. Of the few students remaining, some start laughing louder, forcing smiles while trying to casually turn so their backs face the camera, still peering over their shoulders or out of their peripheral vision. Others mutter something about having to meet someone and step outside. The trick, of course, is to not show any emotion until safely out of range of the cameras.

      “There’s no way this is legal.” Zack shakes his head.

      I bring the brim of my ceramic mug to my lips, letting the scalding liquid slip down my throat and trying to ignore the lens I can now tangibly feel boring into my back.

      * * * *

      Henry put in the last algorithm, paused, and called up the original—not just the quills’ cell, but the base file of the original 78. He listened to it one last time through—the chunky high twang of the guitar strings, Henry Thomas 1928’s clotted voice, the trilling of the longer notes on the quills—and decided, yes, except for that bothersome exuberance, it was quite a perfect little cell. Henry keyed in the commands to send the file off to the DNA of this distant Brandon-something for computation.

      * * * *

      “I heard a rumor,” Zack lifts his own cup, “that the guy didn’t even do it himself. He got the codes for the virus and the information to hack into the security system from some student in the computer science department who always does all his work for him. He’s only a front; nobody home. This other student, whoever it is, is the real brain. What do you think?”

      “I didn’t think anyone believes that Brandon was tech-savvy enough to break through one of the country’s most complex computerized barriers anyway,” I say, unable to look at him. The camera seems to be zooming in on me now.

      * * * *

      The file was coming back…but slowly. Why would that be? Henry wondered. The file would have to be enormous, or the modem somehow compromised. But he had sent specs for a modest 990-note file, and algorithms for rendering a simple two-part fugue with harmonies in perfect fifths; the modem claimed it was working at normal speed. When the file had finished downloading, Henry read the K’s and whistled. It was roughly four times the size he had expected. Puzzled, he opened it and keyed it to play.

      What was this? The first minute was familiar enough, a statement of the quills’ cell: the thirty-three note theme, at Henry Thomas 1928’s tempo three repetitions a minute, ninety-nine notes. Then it began to expand, to flower—but too soon for a ten-minute, two-part fugue. It refolded itself, became a three-part fugue, went through its variations as smoothly as a finger running along a Möbius strip, but then folded itself again and became a four-part fugue. Four parts were a singularity, almost an impossibility for a fugue, and Henry sat listening, fascinated and delighted, wondering almost subconsciously how his algorithms had created this beautiful lotus of sound. What was it Saint-Saëns had said about a fugue? “A piece in which the voices come in—and the listeners go out—one by one.” But Henry couldn’t go out, couldn’t turn it off, or even turn his head. After four minutes had passed there came another fold—a harmonic impossibility, he would have thought, but there it was, dazzling, capturing his thoughts completely—forcing out even the curiosity about how it had come about, forcing out even the wonder at its existence.

      The distant DNA hadn’t scrubbed the emotion from the quills’ cell—it had raised it, made it an exponential complex of exuberance, one that filled every part of Henry that had ever experienced music: his ears, his mind, and heart, his skin, and then the music went deeper, and even deeper, until it felt like it was a needle piercing his own.… But that was impossible; didn’t the agency guarantee single-vector access? He felt as if he were somehow being lifted up out of himself, and didn’t know the way back, but the music made him happy to be traveling freely, as free as a breath blowing over a cane quill. He felt his every Uncle Fester spine, every self-isolating quill, becoming instead an antenna, picking up every nuance of the music, picking up the happiness Henry Thomas 1928 so brightly broadcast over the ninety-year arc, picking up even the intellectual satisfaction and pride of whoever had compromised and re-marked his simple algorithms, taken them far beyond his understanding, and those emotions filled every part of Henry Thomas 2018 and carried him out of himself.…

      * * * *

      “Well, whoever is smart enough deserves to graduate…with honors.”

      “Yeah, and go on to a fabulous career in the state penitentiary.” I chuckle, attempting to mask the irrepressible sense of pride swelling up in my chest and the intermingling jolt of terror-induced adrenaline hijacking my pulse. “Listen, I’m going to step outside for a second, okay?”

      THE GIZZARD WIZARD, by Rory Barnes

      Being a short sequel to that admirable novel, Space Junk, in which we learn the fate of Ned Malley and his friend Emceesquared Gonzalles della Harpenden following their abrupt ejection from the planet Earth.

      Ned Talking

      A guy in uniform appeared out of the darkness and pointed a light through the open window of the car.

      “Evening, Ms. Harrison,” he said.

      “Evening, Stan,” Sue-Ellen said and waved her hand at me and Em in the back seat. “These two are the Special Ambassadors of Youth.”

      “Are they drunk?” the guy said.

      “I don’t think so,” Sue-Ellen said.

      “Other substances?”

      “Not to my knowledge.”

      “Look this way, please,” the guy said.

      We looked at him. We were already looking at him. He shone the light straight into our eyes. First me, then Em.

      “Normal pupil contraction,” the guy said. “I haven’t seen that for a while. OK, on your way. Have a nice trip.”

      He pulled his head out of the car’s window and lifted the barrier. The Gamma surged smoothly through the gap in the security fence and picked up speed on the approach road. At first the headlights showed nothing but more bitumen and desert. Then, in the distance, we could see a cluster of bright lights, some of them flashing, a few low buildings, and the dark bulk of a spacecraft. It didn’t look very big. In fact, it looked pathetically small.

      “What the…?” I said. “Are we really meant to go all the way to Newharp in that?”

      “That’s just the runabout, you fool,” Sue-Ellen said. “The Delegate is in orbit. They couldn’t land it if they wanted to. Which they don’t. It’s spinning.”

      “Now they tell me,” I said. “And anyway, what’s all this about Ambassadors of Youth?”

      “That’s what you are,” Sue-Ellen said. “It’s the pitch I had to make to Ulrike Lewis to get you on board. You are carrying youthful messages of peace and goodwill to the distant corners of the universe.”

      “What messages?” I said. “We’ve got no messages. We haven’t even got any luggage.”

      “Make them up, for godsake,” Sue-Ellen said. “Brothers and sisters of the cosmos, we extend to you the hand of friendship in which we hold the sweet dove of eternal peace in the sure and certain knowledge that our two planets are bound together in a common destiny and a common ancestry, blah blah blah.… Just stress the fact that everybody’s ancestors came from Earth—everybody’s human, they love that. That and the dove of peace.”

      “Grab hold of a dove,” I said, “and the thing will crap on your hand. Or it’ll peck your eyes out.”

      “Words, Neddy-boy,”