Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Thank you for coming in at such short notice, Mr Grant — may I call you Steven?  Steven.” The young man sitting on the other side of the desk smiles a perfect, white smile in response to Steven’s polite nod.  “My name is Nathan Vaughan.  I lead ViaStellar’s recruitment and onboarding team here on Ganymede.  I’ll get straight to the point — I have some very good news.  We’ve found a composite partner for you.  You’ve got a match.”

Steven blinks. “I – okay.”  Nathan continues to fix that blazing smile on him, and he feels a better response is expected.  “That’s – brilliant.  Fantastic.”

And it is brilliant and fantastic, of course it is.  This is what he’s been working towards for most of the last ten years.  Five years of studying every night after work for the sub-light pilot’s qualification which was a prerequisite for ViaStellar’s screening program.  Two years of psych tests and brain scans and the agonizing wait for the results of each stage, every time convinced that this was the hurdle at which he would fall.  And then, the hardest wait of all, for ViaStellar’s matching algorithms to spit out the name of someone who had done all of that as well, someone whose brain was the perfect mirror of his own.  

And knowing throughout all of it that his time was running out.  

He tightens his grip on the handle of his walking stick; he doesn’t like using it, but his balance has noticeably deteriorated in the last six months.  Ganymede’s gravity is slightly less than that of Earth’s Moon, but the colony’s grav generators keep the public areas of the settlement at a consistent three-quarters G, which Steven finds just about manageable, although lately even walking short distances has started to tire him out.  Nathan’s office, however,feels like it’s set to something closer to full Earth gravity, and Steven feels like there are weights pressing down on his shoulders and legs, forcing him down into his chair.  He can just about handle sitting down in this gravity.  An hour or two in full Earth gravity would probably leave him incapacitated for days.  It’s just as well he’s not ever going to Earth.    

Well.  If this works, he might get to Earth some day.  Just not in this body.  And while the news he’s just been given is brilliant, fantastic, it also means —

It means he’s going to die.

He grips the walking stick handle harder and pushes the thought away.  He knows this; he’s known it from the beginning.  

Nathan is still talking to him.  “I’m sorry,” Steven says, “I didn’t catch that.  Could you – would you mind turning the gravity down a bit?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, of course.  I transferred here from Earth last month and I haven’t quite acclimatized yet.”  Nathan gets up easily and adjusts the room’s environmental controls.  The gravity decreases and Steven breathes out in relief.  Nathan sits down again, and when he next speaks, his voice has dropped slightly into a lower, kindlier tone.  “I know this must be a lot to take in.” He leans forward a little, clasping his hands together on the desk in front of him.  “Steven, my job today is to make sure you understand exactly what you’re agreeing to do and that all your questions have been answered.  The most important thing for you to know is that you can choose to stop this at any time, right up to the very last second.  There are no penalties, no fees.  We understand this is literally the biggest decision of your life, and we know you need to be certain.”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” Steven says.  “Well – I am going to change my mind, aren’t I?  That’s sort of the point.”

Nathan laughs, probably a bit more than the joke actually warrants.  He sits back in his chair.  “Is there anything you’d like to ask?”

“Who is he?” Steven asks, then adds, “Or she?”  The huge majority of composites are same sex pairings; male-female matches are rare but not impossible.  

“I can tell you that your match is male, and his name is –” Nathan looks down at the infopad in front of him, “Marc Spector.  He’s a couple of years older than you, and, uh –”  He stops and frowns very slightly for an instant before his face smooths back into what is apparently his default expression of bland affability.  “That’s all I’ve got here, I’m afraid.  Name and a date of birth.  Normally I’d have a lot more biographical information to share with you, but the file I’ve been sent is light on details.  Sometimes that happens when someone has only very recently been identified as a match.”  

Marc Spector, Steven thinks.  He tries repeating the name in his head a couple of times, but it remains just a name, a collection of sounds which designate a stranger’s identity.  He can’t wring any deeper meaning from it.  

“Usually, at this point, I would inform you which physical body our testing processes have determined is more suitable to host the composite’s dual consciousness.  I’m sure you can appreciate what a difficult conversation that can be when dealing with two healthy adults.”

Steven forces himself to smile.  “Probably not so hard in my case.”

Nathan nods.  “I’m glad you understand. Obviously, due to your condition, the only viable option for you is hosting by your composite partner.”  He hesitates, and Steven can guess what’s coming next.  He’s mildly curious as to how Nathan is going to phrase the next part.  It can’t be easy to settle on a form of words which boils down to, we’re going to have to kill you.  “Now.  I know you already know this, but I’m required by Earth and Colonial law to tell you again.  It is illegal under the Anti-Cloning Act of 2195 for any single human consciousness to exist simultaneously in multiple biological environments.  For that reason, once your consciousness and memories have been imported successfully to the brain of your composite partner, that expression of your consciousness will be deemed to be you and all legal rights and responsibilities will transfer across immediately and irrevocably.”  Nathan stops and hesitates again.  Then he looks Steven in the eye.  “Again, I am required by law to ask you: do you understand what that means?”

“It means this body doesn’t get to wake up after the procedure.”  Steven uses his free hand to gesture at the walking stick he’s holding.  “Honestly, that’s no big loss.  My body hasn’t done me a lot of favors.”

Nathan’s smile returns.  “I have to emphasize, from your point of view, you’ll go to sleep in one body and wake up in another.  It won’t feel like –”  He breaks off, clearly reluctant to use the word dying.

Steven saves him from his discomfort.  Living most of his life with an incurable illness has made him good at managing other people’s awkwardness around him.  “It’s fine.  I’ve had a long time to think about this.”

“Of course,” Nathan says, eyes crinkling at the edges with compassion.  Steven knows that look and quietly loathes it.  Then Nathan continues, “And now for the even more exciting news!  Your match is on the way here already.  They managed to find a stasis pod for him on a ship that left Mars yesterday.  He’ll be here in four weeks.”  

“Four weeks,” Steven repeats.  He’d been expecting – he’s not sure what he’d been expecting, but it was something longer than four weeks.  “I’ll have to hand in my notice at work.”

Nathan waves a hand dismissively.  “You work for the Ganymede Port Authority, don’t you?  That’s fine, we’ll take care of all of that.”  He gives Steven another wide and dazzling smile.  “You’re part of the ViaStellar team now, Steven.  We’ll look after you.”

***

“Oh my God!” Donna shrieks when he tells her.  “Oh my God! I can’t believe it!”

She pulls Steven into a hug which is well-intentioned but crushing in a very literal sense.  “Donna – I can’t – breathe –”

Donna releases him and steps back so she’s only holding on to his shoulders.  Her head bobs somewhere around the level of his chest; Donna was born on Earth while Steven, like almost everyone born in a lower gravity environment, is tall.  “I knew you could do it!”

In fact, Donna has spent a lot of the last ten years telling Steven he should give up on the Z-space pilot idea and find a nice girl or boy and settle down.   Steven thinks that on some level, she genuinely doesn’t understand that is not and never has been an option for him.  Maybe that’s understandable, since for most of the time he’s known Donna – they have been working at adjoining stations in the Port Authority control center for a decade – Steven’s illness hasn’t been that obvious.  DeWitt’s Syndrome is stealthy, and the medication he’s been taking since early adolescence slowed down its advance to a glacial crawl for a long time.  But DeWitt’s isn’t curable, and even Donna must have noticed how it’s started to gain the upper hand over his body in the last couple of years.  The person he sees in the mirror these days looks frail and unwell, and it must be obvious to the world at large.  

Donna shakes her head.  “I can’t believe my Stevie is going to be a Z-space pilot.” 

Steven has been asking her not to call him Stevie since the day he started working at the Port Authority.  It is a request that Donna has never once acknowledged and he thinks it’s possible she’s never even registered him making it.  Sometimes he’s not sure that he even likes Donna very much, but since his life has consisted of very little other than working and sitting in his quarters studying for a long time, she is the only person he has actual conversations with and the closest thing he has to a friend.  

Also, she is sufficiently absorbed in her own problems that she has never looked at him in a way that suggests she feels sorry for him, and for that alone Steven has always been grateful.  

“What’s the pay scale?”  Her eyes go wide.  “I bet it’s amazing."

Steven sits down at his terminal and leans forward to log in by facial scan.  “The money isn’t really the point, Donna.”

“Well, I bet it pays better than Z-space route mapping,” Donna says.  “I’d go for it myself, but knowing my luck I’d probably end up sharing my body with some weirdo and then what do you do?  You’re stuck with them for life.”

“Yeah, thanks for that,” Steven mutters, and is grateful when he is saved from the rest of the conversation by the sound of his terminal chiming an alert to let him know he’s just been assigned his first route of the shift.  

The problem is, Steven knows that Donna isn’t wrong.  The algorithms which sift through screened candidates to match composite pairings get better all the time, and these days it is vanishingly unlikely that a pairing will break down after merging.  But the process which creates composite pairings is irreversible, a fact which has been highlighted over and over to Steven during the long selection and screening process.  Steven can’t help wondering what happens if the algorithm does its job perfectly, and he ends up sharing a body with someone whose mental structures are an ideal match for his own, but who he simply doesn’t like very much?  He’s heard people compare existence as a composite to being married, but he’s never been convinced by the metaphor.  Married people can at least go and sit in different rooms if they’ve had a fight.  

Married people can also get divorced if they can’t stand each other.  Composites can’t.  

That’s an unwelcome thought, and he pushes it to one side by focusing instead on his work.  The first item in his queue is a request for a Z-space flight plan from Ganymede to the colony on Cygnus.  A dozen ships a week make the journey to Cygnus, and Steven has filed flight plans for this particular route so often that he’s memorized the node sequence.  

There are currently over fifteen hundred known nodes, those locations where the fabric of space is sufficiently porous to allow a ship to pass into or out of the pocket dimension known as synoptic space or – more commonly – zip space, a term which Steven’s been told came originally from a very old method of compressing datafiles to the smallest possible size they could be.  In zip space, all the information which comprises the universe has been crushed into a volume only a tiny fraction of the size of the real thing, and as a result a point to point journey which would take decades or centuries at sub-light speeds in realspace can be completed in minutes.  

The tricky part is that not every entry/exit node connects to every other one.  The node which is twenty thousand kilometers beyond Jupiter’s orbit – the first one ever discovered by humanity and the reason the Ganymede colony exists – links directly to just over two hundred of the other known nodes.  The rest of the nodes on the network which cannot be reached directly from Ganymede are accessible by making several Z-space hops with weeks of sub-light travel in between.  

There are, of course, sophisticated software programs which can identify the most efficient sequence of node jumps needed to make a particular journey.  But they aren’t perfect, and after nearly a century of expansion beyond the solar system, no one has yet managed to eliminate the need for the involvement of real human beings in the planning of interstellar journeys. 

Steven is so familiar with the Ganymede to Cygnus route that he doesn’t even need to check the node map to plot it out.  The first jump is from Ganymede to Gideon’s World, followed immediately by a jump from Gideon’s world to Yasina, then two weeks of sub-light travel to the node at Yasina for the jump to Allieve, then a long three week sub-light crawl to the node in deep space from which the Cygnus node can be reached.  The entire passage will take four separate jumps over five weeks.  He submits the plan for approval and upload.

“Stevie, can you take an urgent one?” Donna calls over.

“Yes.”

“Thanks, babe,” she says, which is something else he wishes she wouldn’t call him. He turns his attention to the emergency redirection request in front of him.  A passenger ship carrying two thousand people in stasis is experiencing problems with its sub-light drive.  The ship – the New Horizon – is currently adrift close to the last node it exited.  Without a functioning sub-light drive, the ship is marooned in realspace, but since it’s still close to the node, it can jump back into Z-space and go directly to somewhere else in the network.

Steven checks the node map: the New Horizon can get to Allieve in a single jump.  The Z-space node at Allieve is just outside the orbit of an uninhabitable gas giant, but the node itself is a hub which connects to over a thousand others, and is therefore so easy to reach from so many places that ViaStellar maintains a space station in orbit around the planet with extensive repair facilities.  If the New Horizon jumps directly to Allieve, the station can send out a tug to tow it in for repairs.   

Steven plots the New Horizon’s jump to Allieve and uploads the new flight plan, and by the time he’s done that, there are another five route requests queued and waiting for his attention.  It’s shaping up to be a busy shift. 

Most people do this kind of work for a year or two before they start to find it stultifyingly boring and move on, but Steven has been here for nearly ten years and he likes it.  So many ships, going to so many planets – Cygnus, Ariel, Dartenden, Caliburn, Meili-Difang, and all the others.  When Steven first started this job, he would spend hours after each shift searching Ganymede’s intranet for information on the destinations to which he had dispatched ships that day.  He had even printed out some of his favorite images of the distant worlds he read about and stuck them up on the wall in his quarters, so that he could look at them while he studied for the pilot’s exams.  All the places he would go some day.   

He’d stopped eventually, because as the years wore on and his health started to deteriorate with no word of a match through ViaStellar’s composite program, he had started to think that his dream was only ever going to be just that – a dream – and nothing more. 

But it isn’t.  He only has five more shifts left to work at the Port Authority.  In just a few short weeks, if everything goes according to plan, he won’t be looking at a Z-space route on a screen; he will be guiding a ship along its weaving path through real and synoptic space, responsible for the lives and safety of everyone on board.

It’s a fairly terrifying thought.  Then again, he won’t be doing it alone.

If this works, he won’t ever be alone again. 

***

Ganymede’s main medical facility is a sprawling tangle of interconnected tunnels located on the uppermost level of the colony, close to the moon’s surface.  Steven has spent far too much time in it over the years, waiting for appointments with specialists, waiting for treatment, waiting to be certified fit and discharged, waiting, waiting, waiting.   

Until today, however, he had never been inside the other medical center.  

Hidden away at the back of the general medical facility, there is a reception area and a set of doors bearing ViaStellar’s corporate logo – a stylised letter V designed to look like a swooshing arrow, highlighted against a starfield.  A young woman sits at the reception desk, which is bare apart from an infopad suspended in a zero-G field in front of her and a bowl of real fruit.  There’s actual carpet on the floor; it’s so soft underfoot that Steven feels like he’s sinking down into it.    

He barely has a chance to clear his throat to speak when the young woman at the desk looks up and gives him a warm smile of welcome.  “Good morning, Mr Grant.  If you’d like to come with me, the team is getting ready for you.”  She notices his stick.  “Would you like a wheelchair?  I can arrange –”

“No,” he says. “Thank you.”

He regrets it almost at once, though, when she sets off through the doors at a pace he can’t match.  Fortunately she notices quickly and slows her steps to let him catch up.  For once, he doesn’t mind walking slowly: the hallways in ViaStellar’s section of the colony’s medical center are decorated with framed posters from the worlds the company’s ships serve.  It reminds Steven of the printouts he used to stick to the walls of his quarters, except these pictures are huge and sharp with details.  He walks past pictures of mile-high waterfalls tumbling from cliffs into jungles far below, ice caverns with vaulted cathedral roofs, twin moons rising over deserts where the dunes are made from glittering jewels.  Every world is a marvel.

They arrive at last at a door bearing the innocuous-looking label Merge Clinic.   “Here we are,” the young woman says.  She swipes her hand across the door’s sensor and it slides open.  “Good luck.”

He goes in.

The room is smaller than he imagined it would be.  Or maybe it just looks small because most of the available floor space is taken up by two reclining couches, each one surrounded by a plethora of complicated-looking medical equipment.  One of the couches is empty.  And on the second one –

The man lying on the second couch has curly dark hair cut severely short and a visibly strong physique that comes from possessing the kind of bone density and muscle mass that humans only get by growing up in full Earth gravity.   Steven, who is slight even by Ganymede standards, feels like a twig in comparison.  He would feel embarrassed if the other man could see him, which he can’t, because he is already sedated.  His eyes are closed and his chest rises and falls in a slow and even pattern while the selection of monitors surrounding him beep and hum reassuringly. 

So that’s Marc Spector.  Now Steven has a face and a body to go with the name, but he doesn’t know much more than he did.  Marc Spector is from Earth.  He is currently unconscious.  And very soon, he and Steven will be sharing a brain.

Suddenly it all feels very real.

“May I take that for you, Mr Grant?” 

He looks around; a short woman with very straight hair tied up in a bun is gesturing at his stick.  “Steven,” he says automatically, handing it to her.  

He feels a little bereft as she takes his walking stick away and sets it somewhere out of sight behind one of the many pieces of equipment.  He worries suddenly that he won’t be able to find it when it’s time to leave before suddenly remembering – no.  He won’t need it.  

He won’t need it because he won’t be walking out of here in this body because this body will be dead.

“Steven, let me help you on to the couch.”

He accepts her help, and a few seconds later he is sitting up on the other couch and she is bustling around him, switching on and lining up various pieces of equipment.  She talks as she works.  “I’m Dr. Rivetti.  I’m going to be carrying out your merge today.  This is Nurse Technician Reynolds,” she adds, nodding in the direction of a man standing behind one of the banks of equipment who Steven had not noticed until Rivetti pointed him out. 

“I thought I’d… get to talk to him,” Steven says.  “I mean – before it happened.”

Rivetti glances over at the other couch.  “He was brought in early so we decided to go ahead and prep him.  I asked him if he wanted to stay awake until you arrived, but he preferred to be put under.”

Steven doesn’t feel particularly reassured that his composite partner apparently didn’t want to meet him before the procedure.  Maybe Marc Spector just feels supremely relaxed and confident about the whole thing.

It would be nice if one of them did. 

“You know,” Rivetti says conversationally, “you two are the best match I’ve ever seen.  You’re 99th percentile.”

“That’s good, right?” Steven asks.  It sounds good.

“It’s brilliant.   Here, let me show you something.”  Rivetti lifts a holoprojector disc and holds it up in front of him.  She taps at its controls and a three dimensional image pops into existence above the disc.  For a moment, Steven thinks she’s showing him a model of the galaxy, because that’s what it looks like: a convex disc with thick spiral arms trailing from its circumference as it slowly spins.  The shape is made up of a vast number of tiny pixels of light moving from one location to another, appearing and disappearing, so that it is not really a static image at all.  The overall form has a constancy, but every element that makes it up is recreated anew a thousand times each second.  It is gloriously complex.

“This is your neural map,” Rivetti says.  “Essentially, it’s a visual representation of the activity which constitutes your mind.  It’s what makes you, you.   And this is his neural map,” she adds, nodding in the direction of the man on the other couch and then tapping the disc’s controls again.

A second swirling galaxy appears above the first.  To Steven, it looks almost identical to the lower image, although it seems a little less bright and the pixel-lights which move around inside it appear slightly sluggish.  

“He’s sedated, so there’s a bit less activity,” Rivetti says, “but if I overlay the images…”

She taps again, and the two holographic models slide over each other.  A small display pops up showing a percentage which ticks up and up as they align, but Steven doesn’t need it to understand what he’s seeing. They are a near perfect match.  

“Look at that,” Rivetti says with admiration.  “Anything over 95th percentile should be pretty solid, but at 99th percentile, there’s virtually no chance of the host brain rejecting the additional neural pattern.  In terms of brain physiology, you’re basically the same person already.”  She switches off the holoprojection and puts the disc away.  Then her expression grows more serious.  “This is the part where I’m legally obliged to remind you that you can still stop this now if you want.”

Steven hesitates.  He swallows.  It had been very easy to be certain about his choice when he had first filled in the application forms, all those years ago.  It was even easy when he was sitting in Nathan Vaughan’s office being told that the possibility of matching with another candidate had just become a reality.  But now, sitting on a couch and knowing that if he says yes now, the body which he has thought of as being him for his whole life will not leave this room breathing – it is a different proposition entirely.  

Rivetti is looking at him sympathetically.  “Yes, I know.  I’d feel like that, too.”  She tilts her head slightly.  “At this point in the procedure, the question I hear most from people is, Why can’t you just put my body in stasis and put me back into it if I don’t like being a composite?”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because it doesn’t work like that,” Rivetti says.  “Once we’ve made a perfect duplicate of your mind and imprinted it on to another brain, that mind and your original mind become two distinct entities.  If we tried to make a copy of the imprinted mind and transfer it back to the original brain, it wouldn’t re-integrate.  You’d have two overlapping and very slightly different consciousnesses in your head, and they’d both be convinced they were the ‘real’ you.  And, believe me, that way madness really does lie, and there are a bunch of case studies from the early days of neural transfer science that read like psychological horror stories to prove it.”

“What if you didn’t try to copy my consciousness back again – what if you just, you know, woke up the me in stasis?”

She shakes her head.  “The version of your mind copied into the composite brain would still exist, and he’d be as real as you.  There’d be two Steven Grants walking around – although one of them would be in someone else’s body – and both of them would have an equally valid claim on your life and your identity.”  She gives a rueful shrug.  “And that’s why we have the Anti-Cloning Laws.”  Rivetti hesitates.  “You’ve got DeWitt’s, don’t you?”

He nods.

“I’m not here to influence you, but DeWitt’s only ends one way.  That guy over there –” Rivetti nods at Marc Spector’s unconscious form on the other couch, “He’s as healthy as a human being can be.  Barring something unforeseen, you’re going to get to enjoy being alive for another forty or more years as a composite compared to – well, a lot less as you are.  For what it’s worth, I think you’re doing the right thing.”

“That helps, actually,” Steven says.  “Thanks.  Okay.”  He takes another breath.  “I’m ready.”

Rivetti hands him a device which looks like a simple remote control with one button on it.  “Lie back and try to relax.  When you’re ready, press this and you’ll get a shot of sedative which will put you to sleep.  When you wake up, it’ll all be over.”  She smiles.  “Or, you know, just beginning.”

The controller nestles comfortably into the palm of Steven’s hand.  He follows Rivetti’s instructions and lies back on the couch.  Before he closes his eyes, he turns his head to look again at the man sleeping on the other couch, who apparently had no hesitation and no doubts at all about what’s coming next.

Forty years, he thinks.  And the only thing he has to do to earn all that extra time is share it.  

He closes his eyes and presses the button.

***

Steven wakes up slowly.  He feels comfortable, relaxed.  A little fuzzy round the edges, maybe.  For a while he does nothing except hover contentedly in the liminal zone between wakefulness and sleep. He can’t remember much and nothing seems terribly important.

He can hear voices talking somewhere far away.

“How are the body’s vitals?” asks a woman.

A man’s voice replies, “All solid. Blood pressure and heart rate are steady.”

“And their neural maps?”

“Both clear and distinct.  No overlap. Spector’s coming round faster than Grant.”

“The host mind usually does.  Okay, let’s see who’s awake.”  When the woman speaks again, she sounds louder and closer.  “If you can hear me, I’m going to raise the couch so you’re sitting up.  Don’t try to open your eyes or speak yet.”

That’s good, Steven thinks vaguely.  He wasn’t planning to do either of those things.

He feels his upper body tilting upward.  Strange, he thinks, the bed in his quarters doesn’t do that.

Then it all comes back in a rush.  He’s not in the bed in his quarters, he’s at the ViaStellar medical facility, and he’s here because —

“Okay, Grant’s neural map just got a lot more active. He’s fully conscious now.”

“Steven,” the woman says – Dr. Rivetti, he suddenly remembers.  “Steven, it’s okay.  The merge was a success and you’re fine.  Right now I just need you to stay still.  Don’t try to do anything.”  

It’s an easy instruction to follow, because Steven abruptly realizes he doesn’t know how to do anything.  He wants to open his eyes but they stay stubbornly shut.  He tries to speak but can’t make his mouth or tongue work.  Some vital link that he never knew existed – the connection between wanting to do a thing and actually doing it – is missing.  

He experiences of moment of pure, distilled terror.  Rivetti is wrong — the procedure hasn’t worked, and he is trapped inside someone else’s body, locked in and imprisoned, with no way of communicating with the outside world.

“Marc,” Rivetti says, “can you open your eyes for me, now, please.”

Unbidden by Steven, his eyes open.  He can see Dr. Rivetti standing beside him; she is giving him a reassuring smile.  There’s an empty space behind her, which throws Steven for a second, because he’s still expecting to see a second couch there, with Marc Spector lying on it.  But that’s not right; the second couch hasn’t moved, Steven has.  He’s now lying on it, in Marc’s body, and the first couch is gone.  

His own body is gone.

“Welcome back.  How do you feel?” Rivetti asks.

“I feel fine,” Steven hears himself say.  It isn’t his voice.

“Can you tell me your name and your date and place of birth?”

“Spector, Marc.  August fifteen, 2240, Chicago, North American Federation.”

Steven doesn’t just hear Marc’s voice, he can feel it, too, rising in his chest and echoing inside his skull.  Suddenly he has a visceral understanding that there is a whole other person in here, in this body, with him — someone whose consciousness is intimately entwined with his, existing on the same set of brain cells and neurons, someone who has been living inside this skin since birth and whose claim on it is far stronger than his own. 

He’s not sure he’s going to be able to cope with this.

“Doctor, Grant’s neural activity profile is getting choppy.  He may be in distress.”

“I don’t feel anything from him,” Steven hears himself – no, hears Marc – say.  He sounds uncertain.  

“No, you won’t be able to,” Rivetti says.  “Emotions don’t cross over, except insofar as they trigger a physiological response in the body, and Steven isn’t close enough to the surface right now for that.  All right, Marc, since you’re from Earth, I want you to close your eyes again and think about a blue sky.  A beautiful clear blue sky.  Try to clear your thoughts as much as you can.”

The world disappears again as Marc follows her instructions and closes his eyes.  

“Steven,” Rivetti continues.  “I want you to think about breathing.  Just imagine yourself breathing in and out.  In and out.  Nice and slow.  Don’t think about anything else.”

It’s hard to think about anything past his mounting panic, but Steven tries.  In and out.  In and out.

“You can open your eyes now, Steven.”

He opens his eyes.  Breathes in.  Breathes out.  

Rivetti beams at him.  “There we go.  That’s your first transition.  Well done, both of you.  How are you, Steven?”

“Um,” he says uncertainly.  “Okay, I think.”  His voice sounds strange – he doesn’t sound like himself, but equally he can hear that he sounds very different to Marc.  “I sound weird.”

“That’s normal,” Rivetti reassures him.  “Your mind is trying to make this body’s vocal apparatus work the same way it’s used to.  Most composites sound different to each other when they talk.”

Most composites.  He is a composite now.  They are a composite.

“Same question for you,” Rivetti says: “Name, date and place of birth, please.”

“Steven Grant, ninth of March 2242 Earth-adjusted, Ganymede Colony.”

“Great.  Now try moving the body’s arm.”

Steven looks down at his – Marc’s – no, his – forearm where it is resting at his side.  The arm is a little darker and a lot hairier than his own. He thinks about moving it, and this time it works and he lifts the arm – his arm, his arm – smoothly.  He gives his fingers an experimental wiggle.  

“Okay,” Rivetti says.  “Next I’m going to ask you to get up off the couch and walk around.  Marc, you’re going to want to take over – try not to.  You’re familiar with this body, Steven isn’t.  Give him a chance to get used to it.”

Carefully and slowly, Steven pivots around until he is sitting on the edge of the couch.  He pushes himself forward, feeling like a circus acrobat about to perform some daring and impressive feat.  He is pleasantly surprised when he somehow manages not to fall over and faceplant on the floor.  Instead he simply – stands up.  

Rivetti says, “Remember, you’ve got muscle memory on your side.  Don’t try to overrule the body.  It knows what it’s doing.”

But Steven doesn’t really hear her.  He is too busy marveling at the sensation of standing up in a body which is strong enough to bear him.  He breathes in again – much, much more deeply than he is used to doing – and realizes just how much better his lung capacity is now.  Ganymede’s gravity feels so weak as to be inconsequential, and he can’t quite believe that he used to struggle against it.  

This is what it feels like to be well.

Rivetti encourages him to walk up and down the length of the room and he does so, cautiously at first, and then with increasing confidence.  Marc’s body is shorter and more solidly built than the one Steven is used to walking around in, and it feels strange at first, but Rivetti’s right about trusting this body’s muscle memory— walking becomes easier the less he thinks about it.  Then Rivetti makes him and Marc practice swapping control of their body until they can do it quickly and smoothly.  She seems pleased: “Seriously, I’ve seen people take a whole day to get to this point.  You’re naturals.”  Already Steven finds himself thinking of the process of changing over as a kind of internal movement forward or back.

At last Rivetti nods, satisfied.  “Well, you’re both awake, you know who you are and you can walk around without falling over,” she says, “so that’s my part finished for today.  Reynolds here will take you down to one of the conference suites on the next level so you can meet your trainer.”

“Thank you,” Steven says.  Thank you doesn’t feel like an adequate response to what’s just happened to him, but it’s the best he can come up with right now.   

Rivetti smiles at him.  “Told you it was the right decision, didn’t I?”  Then, just as Steven is following Nurse Technician Reynolds out the door, he hears her voice calling him back.  “Wait.  Steven, this is yours.  Do you want it?”

She’s holding his walking stick.

“No,” he says in his new voice.  “You can throw that away.”

***

Their trainer is a woman called Shelly and also a woman called Meera, both inhabiting a body whose very long hair is mostly black but liberally streaked with bolts of bright primary colors.  “We started going gray, so we decided to have fun with it,” Shelly says.  She speaks with a Scottish accent while Meera’s accent sits somewhere between India and Mars.  “Take a seat.  Let me get you a glass of water.”

Steven thanks her and sits down.  He’s not sure if he should be operating some kind of half-and-half body sharing schedule with Marc, but Marc didn’t try to take over at any point on the walk down here, so Steven can only assume he’s still following Rivetti’s advice to let Steven get used to being in charge of his body.

The conference suite is, like the rest of the ViaStellar complex, luxurious, bordering on opulent.  The chair Steven is sitting in feels incredibly soft, and he thinks it might be upholstered in actual leather, and the table he’s sitting at is made of real wood.  Steven’s mother had owned a single wooden bowl that her own parents had brought with them from Earth; it had been used only on very special occasions.  He can’t begin to guess how much it would cost to ship this table all the way from Earth – on the other hand, ViaStellar literally owns the ships.  

“Here you go,” Shelly says as she sets a tumbler of chilled water in front of him.  She sits down in the chair opposite.  “You’re Marc Spector and Steven Grant, right?”  Steven nods, and then Shelly’s demeanor shifts subtly into something more formal and precise.  Shelly’s composite partner, Meera, looks down at the infopad she’s holding.  She swipes at the screen a few times, looking increasingly irritated.  “Usually we would have had a chance to review your files before meeting you, but it appears you were moved up in the schedule and the system has not caught up yet.”  

“Och, it doesn’t matter,” Shelly says.  “We’ll all be spending enough time together that we’ll soon get to know each other.”  Addressing herself to Steven, she adds, “Don’t mind Meera.  She doesn’t like it when things aren’t done properly.  First things first – how are you both feeling right now?”

“We’re fine,” Marc says, breaking through for the first time since they were with Dr. Rivetti.  Steven’s not sure he likes Marc answering for both of them; Marc, after all, has no idea if Steven’s fine or not.  

“Now, who was that?” Shelly asks pleasantly.

“Me.  I mean, uh – Spector.”  

Most of the people Steven knows who go by their surnames are military or ex-military.  He wonders if Marc Spector is, and remembers again that he really doesn’t know the first thing about the other man.  

“And would you prefer me to call you by your first or last name?”

Steven can feel Marc start to speak, then stop and hesitate.  “I – Marc.  Marc is fine.”

Ex-military, then, Steven thinks.  But recently enough that he hasn’t dropped some of the habits yet.

“Okay, Marc it is. And how are you, Steven?”

“This is strange,” he says honestly.  “I keep expecting to wake up and be me again.”

Shelly nods understandingly.  “I remember that feeling from when I merged with Meera.  The first 24 hours are a real trip.”  Her posture shifts and becomes ever so slightly more reserved – that’s Meera again, Steven thinks.  It’s surprisingly easy to tell the two women apart.  

Meera says, “We are going to teach you how to be a Z-space pilot, but we are not starting today.  This session has just one purpose: to tell you what you need to know to get through the rest of today and tomorrow.  I promise, it does get easier.”

Steven starts to relax a little.  Shelly and Meera are a composite, and they’re clearly fine.  Other people do this.  He and Marc can do this.

“Some of what I am going to tell you will be familiar to you from the joint counseling sessions you did before your merge,” Meera continues, “but now you know what it feels like from the inside, it will be easier to put the techniques you learned into practice.”

Steven stares at her.  “The – excuse me, what sessions?”

“The counseling sessions,” Meera repeats, and then Shelly breaks in and says, sounding genuinely shocked, “They didn’t bring you in for pre-merge counseling?”

“I only arrived on Ganymede last night,” Marc says.

Steven adds, “We had the procedure this morning.”

Now it’s Shelly’s turn to stare.  “Then when did you first meet?”

“When we woke up,” Steven says.  “About an hour ago.”

There’s a short silence.  Then Meera says under her breath, “Well, that is a fuck up,” and Shelly immediately says, too brightly, “It’s fine, we’ll work with it.”

Steven’s nascent sense of feeling relaxed and reassured vanishes.

“First of all,” Meera says, “after we finish here, you will go to the pharmacy on the way out and pick up your meds.  You need to take them to make sure your brain chemistry stays stable during the first six weeks.  Do not start thinking the pills are optional; psychosis is not pleasant.”

That’s fine, Steven thinks.  Only needing to take one tablet a day will feel like a vacation.

“Each of you will need to learn to stop thinking of your physical body as your body and start thinking of it as the body.  It is your joint responsibility.  The first time you take a shower or go to the bathroom or get aroused is going to be awkward and embarrassing.  The fiftieth time, you’re not even going to think about it.”

Steven shifts a little in the seat, suddenly aware of this body’s bladder in a way he wasn’t just a moment ago.  He is starting to realize just how little thought he gave to the practicalities of his new existence before he went ahead and pressed the button to launch himself into it. 

“Sometimes composites expect to wake up from the procedure able to sense each other’s thoughts or emotions,” Meera continues, “but it does not work like that.  You have not suddenly become telepathic, which believe me is a good thing because you do not want to be walking around all the time constantly aware of how the other person is feeling.”

Which makes sense, but right now Steven wouldn’t mind some insight into how Marc is feeling.  From the few things that he’s said so far, Marc seems completely unfazed by all of this.  Then again, maybe the experience is a lot easier for the person who hasn’t just woken up in a different body.  

“So if you want to know what the other person is thinking,” Shelly says, “you’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way and actually talk to each other.  Use a mirror, especially at the start – it’ll feel more natural.  But however you do it, you must communicate with each other.  Everything you do is a joint decision from now on.”

And that would be reassuring, Steven thinks – the knowledge that he will never have to face anything completely on his own ever again.  But any comfort he might take from the idea is tempered by an awareness of just how little he knows about the person whose brain and body he is now inhabiting. 

Meera says, “The only time anything might cross over between you is when you are both asleep.  The barriers around your minds will be a lot more porous when you are unconscious, and you may experience some overlap in your dreams.  That is normal and nothing to worry about.”

Shelly picks up the thread.  “And speaking of sleep, you’re going to need a lot more of it from now on.”

“I’m generally fine on about six hours,” Marc says.

“You mean the body is fine on six hours,” Shelly corrects him gently.  “You and Steven are going to need somewhere between nine and twelve hours each.”

"Twelve hours?” Marc repeats, and Steven is almost relieved to note that he sounds, for the first time, disconcerted. 

Shelly’s expression is sympathetic.  “I’m sorry.  You’re not supposed to only be finding this out now.  This is all covered in the pre-merge counseling.  The sleep requirement is a side effect of being a composite – the human brain has an immense capacity for storing and processing information, but hosting two completely separate minds simultaneously is still a lot of work.  You’re both going to need more mental rest than physical rest, and there’s no way around that.” 

“How is that even going to work?” Steven asks.  

“Well, when the body is asleep, you will both be asleep,” Meera says.  “You will each need to get your additional hours while your composite partner is awake.  When you start feeling mentally tired or unfocused, do not fight it.  After a while, it will be easy to be asleep while the body is not.”

Meera disappears and Shelly takes over.  “The first couple of days are always rough, but you’ll adapt faster than you think.  At first, you’ll think you need to manage every transition consciously.  You don’t.  The human mind is a wonderfully flexible thing; it won’t be long before switching over will be like breathing – you’ll be able to control it deliberately if you want, but otherwise it’ll just happen when it needs to. And now I’ll prove it to you.”  She points at the glass sitting on the table.  “Can either of you tell me who drank the water?”

Steven looks at the glass, noticing for the first time that it’s nearly empty.  Now that he thinks about it, he can remember drinking from it while Meera and Shelly were talking.  What he can’t recall is whether the person doing that had been him or Marc.  

“I don’t know,” he says.  “We just… did it.”

“Right.  The water got drunk, and that’s all that matters.”  Shelly stands up, and by the time she’s on her feet, she is Meera.  “Welcome to composite club,” Meera says, and Shelly adds, “You’re going to love it.”

***

“This is it,” Steven says as the door slides open: “Home sweet home.”

Steven’s quarters are located on one of Ganymede Colony’s lower residential levels, so far away from the nearest transport hub that it usually takes Steven most of thirty minutes to walk home from the station.  Tonight, in Marc’s body, he barely exerted himself and did it in half that time.  

He steps inside and the light flicks on automatically.  Steven winces internally, wishing he’d spent at least some time yesterday cleaning the place.  When he left first thing this morning to go to his appointment at ViaStellar’s medical center, he hadn’t really grasped the reality that by tonight he’d have a roommate, in more senses than one.  “It’s, um, not very tidy.”

Steven’s quarters are a basic two-room setup consisting of a small living/sleeping area and an even smaller bathroom.  On Ganymede, only accommodation units large enough for four or more people have cooking facilities, and so Steven always eats at one of the colony’s public cafeterias.  The living area is mostly taken up by a chair, a small desk and a set of bunk beds.  Steven sleeps in the lower bunk, and the top bunk is piled high with books – as, in fact, is every other available surface and parts of the floor.   

“That’s a lot of books,” Marc observes.  There’s something in his tone that might be a kind of faint amusement, but Steven can’t tell.  It doesn’t help that he can’t see Marc’s facial expression when he’s speaking, and he begins to see why Meera suggested using a mirror when they’re talking to each other.  

“I like books,” Steven says.  “I mean, I mostly read on an infopad, but I just – I like real books.  Always have done.”

“Aren’t they expensive?”

“No, the books are cheap.  No one wants them anymore. The shipping cost, now – that’s a different story.”

Marc actually laughs at that.  

“Do you read a lot?” Steven asks.  

“Not really, no.”  

Marc steps over the pile of clothes in the middle of the floor.  He sets down his duffel bag on a chair and opens it.  Steven is relieved that Marc has a couple of changes of clothes, as he’s pretty certain none of his own clothes would fit the shorter, stronger body he now inhabits.  The only other thing Marc takes out of the bag is a small pouch of toiletries.  There’s nothing else in it.  

“Where’s the rest of your stuff?” Steven asks him.

“This is it.”  

Marc sits down on the bottom bunk, which is directly opposite the door to the bathroom.  For a minute or more, neither of them say anything.

“I suppose we have to do this sooner or later,” Steven says at last, feeling apprehensive. 

“Yeah,” Marc agrees.  He stands up.  “Okay.  No point putting it off.”

Marc goes into the bathroom and does what needs to be done while Steven tries hard not to be obviously present.  Afterwards, washing his hands in the small sink, Marc says, “Only forty-nine more times until that feels normal,” and now it’s Steven’s turn to laugh.

The mirror above the sink is the same one Steven has stared into while brushing his teeth or shaving for the five years that he’s had these quarters, but the person reflected in it isn’t him anymore.  He remembers looking down at Marc’s unconscious features back in Rivetti’s lab, back when they were two different people.  He’s never going to have an outsider’s perspective on this face again – it’s his face now, he inhabits it.  

He looks at Marc – at himself – for a second or two in the mirror, then raises his hand and touches his face.  He traces his fingers – Marc’s fingers – down his forehead to his nose, mouth and chin, then sweeps them up the line of his jaw to his temple.  

In the mirror, his mouth opens and Marc’s voice says, “I guess this is weird for you.”

A tiny pause before Steven takes over and speaks in a voice which no longer sounds like himself but doesn’t sound like Marc either: “I’ll get used to it.”  

He will get used to it.  He has to. 

The shelf beneath the mirror is piled with packets of pills and medicine bottles.  There are so many of them that in places they are stacked in layers two or three deep.  Steven is aware of Marc’s gaze dwelling on the extensive collection of medication.

“I had DeWitt’s Syndrome,” he volunteers.  “My mum was an excavation specialist; she was working on a dig while she was pregnant with me when the shielding failed and she got a dose of radiation exposure.  She was okay, but I ended up with genetic damage they couldn’t fix. I was diagnosed with DeWitt’s when I was twelve.  I always knew it would kill me eventually.”

“So you signed up to be a composite.”

“Seemed like a fair deal,” Steven says.  “What about you?  Why did you agree to do it?”

Marc is silent for a second.  Then he says, “This was my best option.”

That’s… really not an answer.  But it’s their first day, and Steven is tired, and he doesn’t know what he should say or what question he could ask to get Marc to explain what that means, so he doesn’t pursue it.

Back in the other room, Steven lies down on the bottom bunk.  He always sleeps on his back, but somehow it just doesn’t feel right anymore.  Then Marc turns over on to his side, and suddenly he is comfortable. 

“Hey,” Steven says, “I meant to ask, did anyone ever say anything to you about having counseling sessions before the procedure?”

But Marc doesn’t answer, and Steven figures he must have fallen asleep already.

Less than a minute later, Steven is asleep too.

***

When Steven wakes up, he is running.  

His first instinct is to stop, and as a result he trips over his feet, which in turn leads to an awkward couple of seconds where both he and Marc are mentally tussling for control of the body in an attempt to avoid falling over.  Then Steven remembers to pull back, which allows Marc to grab the bar of the treadmill he’s on with his hands and jump his feet on to either side of the moving belt.

“Sorry,” Steven gasps.  It’s hard to speak – Marc is breathing hard and Steven can feel the body’s heart pounding in his chest.    

“S’okay,” Marc replies between breaths.  For a few moments they stand and get their breath back while the treadmill belt whirrs.  Marc has come to one of Ganymede’s public leisure and gym facilities, Steven realizes.  He knew they existed but he’s never visited any of them before; until yesterday, just walking from place to place was enough to exhaust him.

There’s no one else there, and Steven understands why when he notices the large sign on the wall: CAUTION! 1G ZONE!  

“This is full Earth gravity,” he says when he can speak without panting.  He feels like he’s got lead weights attached to his limbs.  “How do you even stand up in this?”

“Usually, with no problem,” Marc says ruefully.  “But I was on Mars and then I was in stasis and now I’m out of shape.”

“Being able to run in one G is not out of shape,” Steven tells him.  

After running, Marc lifts weights.  Steven hangs back at first and watches, then cautiously takes over for a few sets.  It’s hard, but not as hard as he’s expecting, with Marc talking him through it and the body’s muscle memory making the movements feel familiar and right.  

Then there are sit-ups – because apparently that’s something you can do when you have abdominal muscles – and finally Marc heads for the shower.  It’s still weird, but by now Steven feels they’ve got an unspoken agreement going that Marc will attend to the body’s needs while Steven tries to keep out of the way.  At some point, Steven knows, he’ll have to look after their body by himself while Marc is asleep, but he’ll just have to deal with that when it happens.

They get lunch at one of the colony’s public cafeterias, charging the meal to their newly created ViaStellar employee account.  Marc selects what seems to Steven like far too much food, until he starts to eat and realizes he is ravenously hungry.  He clears his plate and is mildly shocked at himself.

Everything about this body – this Earth-born, healthy, fit body – is more than he is used to.  He feels as if he has lived his whole life up to now wearing one of those ancient deep-sea diving suits, the ones made out of thick rubber with goldfish-bowl metal helmets, honestly believing that he was experiencing the world around him to its fullest.  He wasn’t, he now realizes – nowhere near it.

“Hey, Spector!  Marc Spector!”

A man is walking across the cafeteria towards their table.  He’s not wearing a uniform, but everything else about him screams Earth military, from his height and bulk to his bearing, which is not exactly aggressive, but is definitely at the very upper end of the assertiveness scale.

Steven might not have any direct ability to sense Marc’s thoughts, but the body’s reaction is immediate and obvious: he can feel his heart start to beat faster and his breathing quicken.  

“Is something wrong?” he asks.

“No,” Marc answers, which unnerves Steven, because he is absolutely certain that’s a lie.

“Spector!” the man says as he reaches their table and holds out his hand.  “Don’t pretend you don’t recognise me!  Christ, what’s it been, eight years?”

“Must be,” Marc says.  He takes the proffered hand and reluctantly – or so it seems to Steven – shakes it; Steven is unsurprised when the man’s grip turns out to be crushing.  “Good to see you, Larsson,” Marc says in a tone of voice which suggests it is anything but.

“What are you doing on this shithole?” 

Steven bridles at that, and, forgetting himself, breaks in to say, “Actually, Ganymede is the third largest human population center in the solar system after Earth and Mars.”

The man – Larsson – just stares at Steven for a second.  Then he throws his head back and roars with laughter.  “Christ on a pogo stick, Spector, you’re a comp now?”

Marc says nothing for a long moment.  Then, reluctantly, like the admission is being dragged out of him by torture, he answers, “Yes.  Nils, that was Steven Grant, my composite partner.  Steven, this is Nils Larsson.  We shipped out together a few times when I was in TerraCorps.”  

“Pleased to meet you,” Steven says, icily polite.  Well, he thinks, at least now he knows he was right about Marc being ex-military.  

Larsson just keeps laughing.  “I sat in a bar with you on Luna and you told me you’d rather put a bullet in your brain than let someone else wander around inside it.  How the fuck did you let yourself be talked into this?”

Flatly, Marc says, “I had reasons.”

Larsson’s laughter fades into a cynical grin.  “Right, and every reason had a dollar sign in front of it.  You should’ve talked to me first.  There’s work out there for people like us, you know.  You could’ve made good money without getting brainfucked.”  He glances down at the table, where Steven and Marc’s brand new ViaStellar ID card is sitting beside their tray, then leans forward conspiratorially:  “You don’t have to stay corporate.  I could still put you in touch with people.  You’d make even more as a comp.  Freelance Z-space pilots can name their price.”

“No,” Marc says quickly.  “Thanks, but no.”  

“Maybe,” Larsson says, “I’ll put your name out there anyway.”  

There’s something in the way he says it that Steven doesn’t like at all.

Marc says, “I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Your loss,” Larsson says easily.  “See you round, Spector.”  Then he turns and ambles away.

Once he’s out of sight, Steven says coolly, “Well, thank you for not shooting yourself in the head.”

“For chrissakes, it was one drunk conversation a decade ago, it doesn’t matter now,” Marc snaps back, voice tight with anger.  Or, at least, it sounds like anger, and if Steven were listening from outside their shared body, that’s how he would interpret his tone.  But Steven has an insider’s perspective, and although he cannot sense Marc’s emotions, he can feel the impact they are having on the body.  Right now, their heart is racing and their breathing is shallow and Steven can feel every muscle tensing with the barely suppressed instinct to run.  Marc is scared.

Steven wonders if that means he should be, too.

***

The next night, Steven gets an insight into just how thoroughly his and Marc’s privacy has been compromised when he finds himself inside one of Marc’s dreams.  

In the dream, he is walking along a path under an open sky on Earth.  Steven’s only knowledge of Earth comes second-hand from books and holoshows, but the dream is rich with sensation.  He can feel sunlight warming his skin, then the coolness of a rising breeze and the first heavy raindrops of a summer storm splashing down onto his bare arms.  He realizes he isn’t alone; there is someone else walking next to him.

Then the mood of the dream abruptly changes.  He isn’t just getting wet in the rain, he is up to his neck in water, trapped in a dark and claustrophobically small space, struggling to breathe in a shrinking pocket of air.  The other person is there as well, and he is trying desperately to hold on to them, to stop them slipping away from him, but the rising water is a torrent now, rushing around and past him, pushing them apart, and then he is alone, his empty hands clutching uselessly as the water covers his nose and mouth and his lungs fill with its cold, leaden weight.  

He wakes up in a surge of fear and adrenaline and sits bolt upright, gasping for breath.  After a couple of seconds he can feel his breathing start to slow with deliberate effort.  He isn’t doing it, which means it must be – “Marc?”

“It’s okay, go back to sleep.  Sorry I woke you.”

“I thought I was drowning,” Steven says, suppressing a shudder at the memory of cold water enveloping him, dragging him down.  It had felt very real, more like a memory than a dream  – but there isn’t even a swimming pool on Ganymede, and Steven has never been up to his neck in water in his life.

There’s a lengthy silence.  At last Marc says, “It’s just a dream I have sometimes.  Forget about it.”

Marc lies down again and Steven tries to settle back to sleep, but without success.  He can tell Marc isn’t sleeping either from how restlessly he keeps tossing and turning in the bed.  

Eventually, Marc gets up and goes into the small bathroom to splash water on his face.  Marc looks into the mirror above the sink – now clear of all Steven’s old medications, which he took great pleasure in consigning to the incinerators – and for an instant Steven finds himself looking straight into Marc’s haunted gaze from a vantage point just behind his eyes.  

Steven almost speaks but then thinks better of it.  He feels he is intruding on something he shouldn’t be seeing and he doesn’t want to make it worse by announcing his presence.    

Marc pulls on a T-shirt and sweatpants and goes out.  He takes a transport pod up to colony’s main concourse and makes straight for Ganymede’s only liquor store, where he buys a bottle of cheap whiskey – Steven doesn’t recognise the brand, but it’s not one of the expensive ones distilled on Earth.  

Steven has a bad feeling about this.

Then Marc leaves the concourse and heads for one of the public observation lounges up at the surface. At this time of night, almost no one else is there – a couple of teenagers are giggling and vaping together over on the far side, and there’s a woman sitting alone working intently on some kind of handcraft that might be knitting or crochet.  

Marc sits down next to one of the observation portals.  On the other side of the transparent reinforced glass is the surface of Ganymede, rocky and inhospitable.  Jupiter is a massive and looming presence above the horizon.  

Marc opens the bottle and takes a swig from it.  It tastes nasty, but it burns on the way down their throat in a way which feels familiar and weirdly pleasant.  Steven doesn’t drink; in his old body, he had been taking various types of medication since early adolescence and he’d never acquired a taste for it.  But this body is apparently far more used to drinking alcohol than Steven’s was, and although Steven doesn’t want to down most of a bottle of cheap liquor, he is unsettled to realize that he could.

When the top quarter of the bottle is gone, Steven decides he has no option but to step in.

“I think that’s enough for now, don’t you?” he says, putting the lid back on the whiskey.  He feels a little unfocused, and talking is more of an effort than it should be.  They’re already more than slightly drunk.

“Shit,” Marc says, startled.  “How long have you been there?”

Steven avoids the question.  Instead he says, “We’ve got a session with Meera and Shelly in the morning and I don’t want to be hungover for it, so I think you should stop now.  Also I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to drink while we’re still taking the meds.”

“You’re a real killjoy, you know that?” Marc says.  But he sets the bottle down next to the seat.  

Steven can see the reflection of his and Marc’s shared body on the inside of the observation lounge window.  Their seat is right next to it, and if Steven concentrates he can almost convince himself that he and Marc are two people, twins sitting side by side.  

As they sit, a ship takes off from Ganymede Port, rising smoothly and silently into the sky before accelerating out into the night and towards the local Z-space node.  

They are both silent for a while and then Steven says, “When I was little, my mum used to bring me up here when I couldn’t sleep.  We’d watch the ships take off and she’d make up stories about them to entertain me – silly things. That one’s taking a shipment of teeth to the tooth fairy, she’d say.  Or: That one’s going to stick Saturn’s rings back in place because they’ve come loose again. ”

“She sounds like fun.  Do I get to meet her?”

“I wish you could,” Steven says.  “She’s been gone five years.  Mining accident.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.  I mean, it’s not okay, but I have a lot of good memories of her. I was a donor kid, so it was always just mum and me, the two of us versus the universe.  Team Us, she used to say.”  He hesitates.  “Do you have any family?”

“My father’s alive.  We don’t really talk.”

So Marc’s lost his mother, too, Steven thinks.  “What was your mum like?”

Marc is silent for so long that Steven is beginning to think he’s not going to answer when he finally speaks.  “I had the mother I deserved.”

Steven doesn’t know what that means, but he’s confident it’s nothing good.  

There is another lengthy silence, broken again by Steven.  “I haven’t thanked you yet.”

“For what?”

“For this,” Steven says.  “I was on the composite waiting list for years without a match.  I was starting to think it wasn’t going to happen and I was running out of time. I’m alive because of you.  So – thank you.”

Steven doesn’t know what response he was expecting to that, but the harshness of Marc’s tone takes him aback.  “I didn’t do it for you.  I didn’t know anything about you.  Look, Steven –” Marc turns around slightly so he is looking directly at the body’s reflection in the window: “I am not in any sense a good person so don’t make the mistake of thinking I am.  I’m not a composite because I wanted to be one.  I made some bad decisions and then I made some worse decisions and eventually this was the only thing left for me.”  

“That makes it sound like a punishment,” Steven says.

“Come on, Steven, who would choose this?”

That stings, because Marc so obviously means it.  

“I chose it.”

“You were going to die,” Marc says.  “You didn’t make a choice, you made a deal.  You gave something up to get something in return.”

“Maybe I did,” Steven says, “but it was a fair deal and I knew what I was doing.  What deal did you make?  Because you don’t seem very happy about it.” 

Marc is silent.

“I’m not going anywhere, you know,” Steven tells him.  “This is the rest of our life.  You’re going to have to tell me these things eventually.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Marc says evenly, “because it is none of your fucking business.”  

“I live in your head.  I’d say that makes it my business.”

“Let me explain something to you.  This is not a relationship, it’s an arrangement.   We’ll look after the body and we’ll fly ships for ViaStellar, and the rest of the time I’ll stay out of your way if you stay out of mine.”

“If that’s what you want,” Steven says tightly.  “I’ll start right now, then, shall I?”

The rest of his life suddenly feels like a very, very long time.  

***

The days begin to fall into a routine.

Steven usually wakes up mid-morning, by which time Marc has been up for hours and has exercised, showered, had breakfast and done whatever else it is he does when Steven’s not around. 

Once Steven is awake, they meet Meera and Shelly for a training session.  They spend a lot of time in one of ViaStellar’s simulators, learning the endless sets of flight protocols.  There are protocols for taking off, for landing on planet-based ports, for docking with space stations and other ships, for dealing with equipment failures, for a million other scenarios, and they have to be familiar with every one of them. 

By early afternoon, Marc will start getting tired, although he never wants to admit it. Shelly’s dire warnings about each needing twelve hours of sleep haven’t quite come to pass — Steven thinks he’s settled somewhere around eleven hours, and Marc seems to need slightly less.  But by now Steven has learned that the kind of mental exhaustion that comes with being a composite cannot be fought off or pushed through by sheer effort of will, whereas Marc still seems to think he can decide whether or not he’s tired.   Steven spent most of his life living within the limitations imposed by his old body and could tell him that it doesn’t work like that, if he thought Marc would listen.  Steven thinks that Marc chafes more against the constraints of their new life because before this he always had the luxury of being able to choose to ignore his needs.  

All of which means that it’s quite usual for Marc to disappear without warning shortly after lunch.  Occasionally he’ll even fall asleep mid-sentence, which Steven thinks is quite the achievement.  The third or fourth time it happens, Meera says sternly, “Marc, if you will not pay attention to what your mind is telling you, then I do not know how you expect to learn to synchronize with Steven.”

Not that they’ve synced yet, or even tried to.  Syncing can only happen in Z-space, which means they can’t learn it in a simulator, and Meera and Shelly won’t clear them for an actual training flight until they’ve got every last protocol memorized.

Eventually Marc reluctantly accepts that he needs a nap around the middle of the day, which means Steven often eats lunch by himself.  Once Marc’s back, they’ll do another session – usually with Shelly alone, if Meera’s asleep.  

Steven normally begins to feel himself getting mentally fuzzy by late afternoon, so he’ll nap then.  He can hardly believe that he asked Meera back on their first day how he was going to be able to sleep if the body was awake, because now it feels as natural to him as breathing – when he starts to get tired, he simply pulls back into himself and lets his mind drift until the external world feels remote and distant, like a holovid playing in the next room.

Back in their quarters after dinner, Marc will watch some old and – in Steven’s view – pretty terrible holovid, usually something with lots of chases and explosions.  He always falls asleep less than half-way through it, though; Steven watched far too many dreadful movies all the way to the end before he realized that Marc hadn’t been quiet because he was engrossed in them, but because he’d been fast asleep after the first twenty minutes.

After Marc’s gone to sleep for the night, Steven reads.  Sometimes he goes out for a late night walk around the public concourses on the colony’s upper levels.  He always liked walking, and he likes it even more now that his legs and lungs and heart can keep going and going. He sees Donna once, coming out of a bar with a group of her friends.  She doesn’t recognise him, of course.  He thinks about going up to her and telling her who he is, and then decides against it.  

All in all, Steven’s new life is not so different from his old one.  He sleeps and works and studies, and if he and Marc don’t talk to each other very much outside of the training sessions and the communication necessary for running their body – well, that’s not so different from how his life was before, Steven tells himself, except now he’s fit and healthy and he’s learning to do a job he actually wants to do, so overall he’s better off.

He doesn’t know how Marc feels about how things are, but he assumes Marc is happy with their arrangement, since this is what he said he wanted.  Steven doesn’t ask him, and when he wakes up in the night gasping for breath after another one of Marc’s dreams of drowning, he doesn’t say anything.  Nothing at all.

***

Four weeks later, they are back with Dr. Rivetti, who checks their brain activity using a variety of different instruments and scanners and seems pleased with what she observes.  “You’re adjusting extremely well.  No signs of rejection, and your activity levels are pretty well matched.  That’s very good.”

She swipes the controls of the medtable she’s working at and calls up a neural map projection.  It’s very similar to the one she showed Steven on the day of their merge, except that now the two slowly spinning spiral galaxy shapes appear together as soon as the projection begins, layered on top of each other with a finger’s width of a gap between them.

“That top image is yours, Steven, and the lower one is Marc’s,” Rivetti says  “See that gap between them?  That’s good, it means you’re nice and separate when you’re awake.  If we did the same thing while you were both asleep, the gap would be a lot smaller.  And if we mapped you during synchronization, there’d be somewhere between forty and fifty percent of an overlap.” 

“We haven’t done that yet,” Steven says.

“Synced, you mean?” Rivetti turns off the holo image. “You’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice once you’re in a real ship.  And Meera and Shelly must be planning to get you out there soon, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent you back to me to get your receptors grafted on.”  She reaches into a tray of instruments and lifts something which looks unnervingly like a small drill.  “Hold your head still for me.”

She puts on a medvisor and activates it; Steven can see the faint glow of the display as it starts scrolling on the inside of the headset.  Then she comes around to stand at his side and starts to work.  He feels something hot press against the body’s left temple, and the sensation swiftly builds until it feels as if something is penetrating the side of his head.  There is a brief, bright flash at the back of his retinas and then it’s over.  Rivetti makes a small, satisfied-sounding Hmmm noise and moves to his other side to repeat the process.  

She finishes and holds up a mirror so he can see the results, much like a barber allowing a customer to inspect a new hairstyle.  On either side of his head, at the same level as his eyes, he now has twin metallic discs set flush into his skin, each one about the size of a large thumbprint.  They are barely visible when he’s looking at himself straight on; it’s only when he turns his head either way that he can see them catching the light. 

“They might itch a little for a day or two until they bed in,” Rivetti says. “Try not to scratch,” she adds, as Steven lifts his hand to do exactly that.  Marc swiftly makes him lower it.  

“Do you ever get composites who just… can’t sync?” Steven asks.

Rivetti hesitates.  Then she flips up her medvisor so she’s looking directly at them.  “It can happen,” she says reluctantly. “But it’s rare and usually there are other underlying issues with the stability of the composite pairing.  I don’t think you guys need to worry.”

“We’re not worried,” Marc says, and Steven feels a flash of irritation, because there he goes answering for both of them again.  Steven wonders if ‘we don’t really like each other very much’ counts as an underlying issue with the stability of the composite pairing.

“But, just say you had a composite pair who couldn’t sync,” Steven presses, “there must be ways to make it happen.”

“Oh, there are ways,” Rivetti says, “but they would kill one of you and mess the other guy up for life, which is why they’re completely illegal.  So, trust me, you don’t want to know.”

But Steven does want to know, and so he asks Marc about it later that evening.  Their post-merge course of medication is long finished, and they’re officially allowed to drink alcohol, although in practice that just means that once or twice a week Marc will have a couple of beers in their quarters after dinner; he hasn’t made any attempt to get seriously drunk since the first night his dreams woke Steven up.  And although Marc still doesn’t seem to want to talk to Steven much unless he has to, sometimes he loosens up a little once they’ve got a certain amount of alcohol in their bloodstream.  

And since Marc having a couple of beers inevitably means that Steven has drunk the same amount, Steven feels emboldened enough to ask the question.  “What was Dr. Rivetti talking about?  I thought only the military and big corporations like ViaStellar made composites.”

“Officially, yeah.”

“And unofficially?”

“What she was talking about is called neural butchery.  There’s a black market in illegal composites.”  Marc finishes the beer and reaches for another.  “There aren’t enough composites to meet the demand for Z-space travel.  Not enough people are suitable and are willing to do it.  You and I passed the screening that made sure we’d be stable as a composite, but we also had to match with each other. The gangs skip the second part.  They lure people in by telling them how much money a freelance composite can earn, then the neural butchers just mash together any two people who pass the initial screening.  The result is never stable – one mind always ends up wiping out the other sooner or later.  But they can sync and they can navigate Z-space, and if they burn out after a couple of trips, no one cares, there are always more.”

“That’s barbaric,” Steven says, quietly horrified. “How do you know this?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Where?” 

Marc takes another drink and is silent for a few seconds.  “It doesn’t matter,” he says, with a finality that Steven has by now learned means there’s no point pushing him.

Still, it’s actually quite nice to be having a conversation instead of watching the minutes tick by in silence, which is how they normally spend their non-working conscious time together.  Rather than let the silence drag on, Steven decides to try to keep the momentum going.

“What do you think syncing is like?”

“I don’t know.  Ask Meera and Shelly.”

“I did, while you were napping at lunch yesterday.  Shelly said it’s not the kind of thing she could describe, and we’d understand once we did it.”  Then Steven has a thought: “You must’ve known composites when you were in TerraCorps.  Did any of them ever talk about it?”

“Not really.  The comps I met were all — not unfriendly, exactly, but they didn’t need much company beyond each other.  And I wasn’t going out of my way to hang out with them.  Comps make people uneasy.”  He finishes the beer and crumples the tin in his hand.  “We make people uneasy.”

The conversation peters out after that.  Long after Marc has gone to sleep for the night, Steven is still thinking about all those other composites, the ones who find sufficient companionship in each other and have little need of anything outside of that.  He wishes that could be him and Marc, and he feels a kind of subdued grief at the knowledge that while their neural maps might be a perfect match, nothing else about the two of them is at all.

***

ViaStellar’s pilot training ship is essentially a large metal box with a Z-space drive, a sub-light drive and a life support system bolted on to it.  It is possibly the ugliest spaceship Steven has ever seen, and the ships which arrive and depart at Ganymede on a daily basis are generally freighters and colonist transports, neither of which are the kinds of vessels which are likely to win prizes for their design.

From where he is standing on the embarkation gantry, he can look up and see the external parts of the ship’s zip drive directly above him.  It doesn’t look like much – just two huge rings projecting out from the ship’s hull – but he knows what those rings can do.  Once the drive is powered up, the twin rings generate a field which allows the ship to pierce the fabric of space like a needle passing through cloth, but only at one of the nodes where the structure of reality is softer and more porous than elsewhere.  

Entering zip space is relatively easy – navigating through it is another challenge again.  In Z-space, information is so compressed as to be far beyond the processing ability of the most advanced computer.  Even now, the human brain is still more agile, more flexible than the best software.  But even the mind has its limits, and a single mind will inevitably buckle under the tsunami of information which comes with even the briefest passage through Z-space.  

In the early days of interstellar travel, Z-space pilots could make at most two or three journeys before burning out.  The lucky ones retired after extremely short careers with excellent pensions and a variety of psychiatric disorders.  The unlucky ones didn’t.

Then came the first mind-sharing experiments.  Two pilots, side by side, minds linked by a physical connection to a neural net.  But no matter how sophisticated the hardware and software, the sharing of information always suffered a degree of delay.  Burn out could be postponed but not prevented.  

The solution, in the end, was obvious.  The answer had to involve two minds sharing information at the speed of thought; two minds perfectly synchronized.  And the only place that could happen was inside a single human brain.  

For years, Steven has been plotting paths between Z-space entry/exit nodes and passing the results on to the composite pilots who are uniquely able to guide ships along them.  Today, for the first time, he is one of them.

He is almost bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet with excitement.  Marc makes him stop.   

“Could you please try to relax?  I’m thirty-eight years old and I’ve got butterflies in my stomach.  That’s just embarrassing.”

“Sorry,” Steven says, not sorry at all.  He’s grinning like an idiot, and it probably looks all the stranger given that the smile is getting wiped off his face every time Marc takes charge.  He doesn’t really care.  “They’re going to let us fly that.” 

“They won’t if you send our blood pressure through the roof.  Come on, deep breaths.”  Marc takes over and breathes in and out several times, slowly.  When the body’s heart rate has come down to something more normal, Marc says, “Anyone would think you’d never been in a spaceship before.”

“I haven’t.”

There’s a second of what Steven guesses is shocked silence.  “You’re kidding.”

“No.  I’ve never been off Ganymede.  I wanted to go to college on Earth but I was medically barred from stasis and the tickets were ten times more expensive if you had to be awake the whole way, so we couldn’t afford it.”

“But you’ve got a sub-light pilot’s qualification,” Marc says.  “You couldn’t have got on to the composite screening programme without one.”

“I did all the flight hours in a simulator,” Steven tells him. “With my medical history, they wouldn’t let me pilot a real ship.”

There’s another pause.  Then Marc says, “You really were determined to do this, weren’t you.”

“I signed a contract which gave ViaStellar permission to kill me,” Steven points out.  He can’t help adding tetchily,  “That should’ve been your first clue.” 

Before Marc can reply, Shelly and Meera arrive.  Shelly’s up front.  “Big day today, lads,” she announces in a cheerful Scottish burr, clapping her hands together.  “Are you excited?”

“Don’t encourage him,” Marc gripes as they start to head up to the airlocks.

By the time they’re in the training ship’s small control deck, Meera has taken over from Shelly and is all business.  “Marc, I still have not received your records from Central and no one on their end seems very interested in chasing it up for me.  You have your sub-light qualification, I assume?”

“When I was in TerraCorps, yeah.”

“Technically, I should not let you fly without seeing your license…”  Meera says.  

Shelly breaks in: “Och, Meer, if it bothers you, the log can say Steven did all the sub-light piloting.  It’s not as if there’s any way to check.”

Meera sighs.  “Very well.”  Then she touches a control to open the ship’s comms link.  “Port Authority, this is ViaStellar Training Vessel VS-TRN-4623B requesting permission to depart Ganymede.”

“Acknowledged, ViaStellar Training Vessel 4623B.  Uploading your Z-space flight plan now.  Request pilot verbal ID confirmation.”

“We are Lead Pilot Composite McDonagh-Vijayendra,” Meera says, then nods across at Steven and Marc.  

“We are Pilot Composite Grant-Spector,” Steven says.  It’s the first time either of them has said it out loud.  It still sounds strange.

“Thank you, ViaStellar Training Vessel.  You are cleared for departure.”

“Do you want to do this or will I?” Marc asks.

Now that the moment has come, Steven feels more nervous than he thought he would.  “You can do it.”

In the end, it’s no different from any one of the hundreds of simulator flights which Steven had to log to get his sub-light license.  Marc’s hands move confidently over the ship’s controls, and within minutes the ship has broken free of Ganymede’s weak gravity and is moving at a steady pace out into open space, along the busy shipping corridor that ends with Ganymede’s Z-space entry/exit node.  There are only two nodes in the solar system; the other one is out past Neptune and lacks the handy staging post of a nearby human settlement like the one on Ganymede.

Once they’re on their way, Shelly unclips her harness and floats up from her seat; the training vessel is too small to have a grav generator.  Steven’s never experienced zero G before, but fortunately Marc must have, because he moves around in it comfortably and easily.  

“All right,” Shelly says.  “All we’re going to do today is jump from the Ganymede node out to node X-6728 and back again.  I’m going to do the jump out and with a wee bit of luck you’re going to jump the ship back again – there’s a good reason for that, and you’ll understand better after we’ve done it.”

They strap in again as the ship approaches the node.  Meera takes the pilot’s seat, delicately clipping the twin cables which emerge from either side of the headrest onto the receptor points on her temples.  Steven puts a finger to the side of his head, where the recently installed implants are still a little raw around the edges.  

Meera says, “You are about to go through Z-space fully conscious.  It will not be pleasant, but as a composite, you will be able to tolerate it in a way that a single mind cannot.”  Then Shelly breaks in and grins at them: “It’s still a hell of a ride, though.  Buckle up.”

Steven notices his hands are clipping the straps on the copilot’s chair back into place across his chest and thighs; he’s not doing it, so it must be Marc.  He tries to prepare himself, although he’s not sure what he should be preparing himself for.  “Do you know what this is going to be like?” he asks Marc quietly.

“No. I’ve only been through Z-space the normal way, in stasis.”

“We’re about five seconds out from the node,” Shelly says.  “Meera and I are going to sync now.”

With that, Meera and Shelly’s body gives a small shudder and then stills into something which looks, to Steven, disturbingly like an absence seizure.  

“Are they all right?” he asks Marc.  “Is that what syncing is supposed to look like?”

“How should I know–” 

And then Marc’s reply is cut off, because they are in Z-space.

In one sense, nothing changes.  They are still strapped into the copilot’s seat with Meera and Shelly next to them. 

And yet – everything is different.  The ship’s control deck looks somehow denser.   Every edge is more sharply delineated, every texture more concentrated, every color richer.  Steven finds himself staring at a single small light on the control panel, unable to look away, his gaze sucked deeper and deeper into it, because the more he looks the more he can see, patterns within patterns, and there is too much information yet at the same time he cannot help but keep trying to make sense of it because it demands his attention and his focus.

It is too much; it is overwhelming.  He does the only thing he can, which is to retreat into himself.  And there, when he turns his attention inward, he becomes aware of another mind, a solid and real presence which he can use to anchor his own sense of self against the chaotic torrent of information.  

And then he feels the other presence anchoring itself in the same way to him.

The cabin snaps back to normality.  The control deck is just the control deck again.  

“Bloody hell," Steven says, and Marc immediately follows with a heartfelt, "Fuck."

“I did say it was a ride,” Shelly says.  She is blinking rapidly but otherwise she seems fine.  

“That was horrible," Steven says sincerely.  "That’s Z-space?  No wonder people go mad.”

“If you weren’t a composite, you’d be having a seizure or catatonic now,” Shelly says.  “You can talk about the information density of zip space all you like, but no one really gets it until they’ve been there.  Now, this is the important part – did you reach for each other?”

Five minutes ago Steven wouldn’t have understood what she meant by that.  Now he knows exactly what she’s talking about.  “Yes.”  Then, in a sudden rush of understanding, he gets it.  “Oh.  That was syncing, wasn’t it?”

“That was the route into synchronization,” Meera says.  She looks pleased – or as pleased as Meera, who is so much less demonstrative than Shelly – ever looks.  

“You could’ve just told us that beforehand,” Marc says, pinching the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb.   

Shelly reappears, looking apologetic.  “No one can tell you how to sync.  You have to find your way into it yourselves, and the most effective way to help you do that is to throw you into Z-space and let your instincts do the work.”

To Steven, that sounds a lot like saying the best way to teach someone to swim is to drop them into a deep body of water and hope they figure it out, but he can’t argue with the results.

“Time to swap seats,” Shelly says.  They unclip their straps and after a few moments of awkward floating and maneuvering, Steven and Marc are at the pilot’s station.  Along with the usual profusion of instruments and displays, it has one very low-tech feature – a mirror fixed to the console on an adjustable arm.  It’s only when he sees himself reflected in it that Steven realizes it’s there for the benefit of the ship’s composite pilot.  

“All right,” Meera says, “now you’re going to take us back through the node.  You’ll need to reach out to each other again — it’ll be harder in real space, but at least now you’ll know what you’re aiming for.”

Shelly continues, “The hard part is timing it.  You won’t be able to maintain synchronization in realspace for more than a second or two – no one can – so you don’t want to sync too early, or you’ll drop out of it before we go into Z-space.”

“But,” Meera adds, “you must be in sync when we pass through the node, because the instant we go through, the zip drive navigation system will start feeding you data through your receptors.”

“And we’ll know what to do with it,” Marc says, in a tone which isn’t a question, but isn’t exactly a statement either.  He clips the data cables on to the receptor points on the sides of the body’s head; Steven can feel the magnetic seals locking securely into place.  

“You will know,” Meera says reassuringly.  “In sync, you will have two minds organizing and directing the brain’s processing capability, and you will not need to think consciously about distributing the workload in the same way you do not need to think about catching a ball when someone throws it to you.”

“Although when you’re piloting a ship through Z-space in sync, there are approximately ten quadrillion balls and just as many arms,” Shelly puts in.  

Steven wonders if this is a good moment to mention that he always had remarkably bad hand-eye coordination.  Then again, he’s not in that body anymore.

“So if you go into Z-space not in sync, you won’t be able to process all the data you’re getting and you’ll get hopelessly lost in there.”

“That sounds bad,” Steven hazards.

“That’s how we lose ships,” Shelly says bluntly.    

Marc says, “No pressure, then.“

“Don’t worry.  This is a training flight.  I’ll be watching your brain activity, so if you’re still not in sync point-one seconds before we go through I’ll be able to kill the drive and abort.”

That sounds like a very small margin of error to Steven, but Shelly and Meera have been doing this for a long time and presumably know what they’re doing.

He wishes he felt like he knew what he was doing.

“Here we go.  Ten. Nine. Eight.“

“So what do we do, here?” he asks Marc nervously. 

“What we did before, I guess,” Marc says, sounding less than confident.

“Talking is not going to help you sync,” Meera says sharply.  “Five. Four.”

Steven tries to recall how it felt to turn his focus inward and search for Marc’s consciousness.  It’s much harder without the external pressure of information-packed zip space pushing him in on himself, but at least he knows what he’s looking for.  

“Three,” Meera says. “Two. One.”

There it is: the shape of another mind, close but apart from him, bright with thought and awareness.  He sees – or rather feels – how the gap between himself and that other consciousness could be bridged.  All he has to do is stretch his awareness just a little further – 

– and connect.

Before today, Steven had always vaguely imagined that the experience of mind synchronization must involve temporarily losing touch with your own sense of self, because how else could it be possible for two distinct individuals to work as one?  In fact, it’s nothing like that – he is still absolutely self-aware, and he knows exactly where he stops and Marc begins.  But what’s different is how much more they are together.  It feels like suddenly having a whole other brain to call on – no, not another brain.  Another mind.  

The ship passes through the node into Z-space.  This time, Steven has no difficulty parsing the Z-space environment; it’s still just as information-dense, but no longer overwhelming. The ship’s Z-space navigation system kicks in and starts to send them a firehose of data.  Together they receive information, analyze it and make decisions at the speed of thought, all the time balancing the mental load between them without conscious direction.  

The path through Z-space is a thin, golden thread running ahead of the ship. They set a course to follow it, making minute adjustments in response to the shifting, changing nature of pocketspace.  

They follow the golden thread to the exit node. Another set of immaculately precise adjustments sends the ship through the narrowest of gaps back into realspace.  

The datastream from their link to the navigation system goes quiet.  They’re still synced, and for the briefest moment Steven wonders if they could just stay like this permanently and always be more than they are apart.  Emotions don’t seem to cross over in sync, so he can’t tell if Marc feels the same pull to remain, but Marc isn’t actively trying to break the sync either, so perhaps he does.  

In the end, it’s too difficult to maintain synchronization without the information density of Z-space pushing them closer.  The sync breaks, and Steven is once again aware of his surroundings – the training vessel’s control deck, the straps holding him in the pilot’s seat, Meera and Shelly sitting next to him.

“Look where we are,” Meera says.

Marc looks down to check the control deck’s displays, but Steven knows he doesn’t need to.  The ship is back at the Ganymede node; both he and Marc are both completely certain of their location.

“We did it,” Marc says, and then Steven repeats, “We did it.”  He’s smiling, and he doesn’t know which one of them is doing it.  It might be both of them.

Shelly is smiling broadly, too.  There’s something else in her expression that Steven can’t quite decode.  “You more than did it.  You synced on your first try and you navigated back through Z-space in under ten seconds.”

“That’s good?”

“It is… a lot better than good,” Meera says, and then Shelly breaks in and says, “What Meera is trying not to tell you that no one does that on their first attempt.  No one we’ve ever trained has done it.  We didn’t do it.  You two are going to be one hell of a pilot.”

“Hush, Shell.  I do not want them getting a big head,” Meera says, but even she’s smiling now.

“You hear that?” Marc says to Steven: “We aced it.”  He sounds, Steven thinks, really, genuinely happy, and the contrast to his usual demeanor is so pronounced that it makes Steven see clearly for the first time just how low Marc’s normal state of mind is.  He’s not just taciturn or grumpy most of the time – he’s miserable.

He’s still reeling slightly from the insight when Shelly says, “Okay, that’s more than enough for one day.  Let’s go home.”

***

Back on Ganymede, Shelly and Meera insist on accompanying Steven and Marc all the way from the port on the surface to Steven’s quarters in the lower residential area.   

“Once the adrenaline rush wears off, you’re going to crash hard," Shelly says, “so we’re just going to make sure you’re back in your own bed when it happens.”

Both Steven and Marc protest, but by the time they reach the transport hub on Steven’s level, they are both struggling to keep the body on its feet and moving.  Steven had thought he had left this kind of utter, bone-weary exhaustion behind with his old body.  He consoles himself that at least now it’s the kind of tiredness that comes from exertion rather than illness; still, he had almost convinced himself that Marc’s body was virtually superhuman, with inexhaustible resources of stamina and energy.

Then Marc falls asleep mid-step, and before Steven can completely take over, he half-stumbles into Shelly, who has to catch him and hold him up while he finds his balance.

“Sorry,” he says.  “Marc’s gone.”

“Nearly there,” Shelly says.  She lends him her support for the remainder of the walk to his front door, which is thankfully not much further.

When they finally reach his quarters, he has to lean against the doorframe so he doesn’t fall over before it opens.  He tries to suppress a yawn and fails.  “I feel I could sleep for a week.”

“Do not try to do anything tomorrow except rest,” Meera tells him.  “We will schedule another training flight for the day after that.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Steven says and, even through his exhaustion, means it sincerely.  As Meera and Shelly turn to go, he adds, “Thank you.”

Meera glances back at him over her shoulder, then stops and turns around again.  “This is our favorite part of the job,” she says. “I mean, being there when a new composite person realizes for the first time what they can do.  It is so hard to recruit composites, you know.  The idea of it scares people so much.  So many people are so terrified of sharing themselves with another person that they cannot see beyond their fear, so they lock themselves away into the little rooms in their heads and can’t let anyone else in.  They do not have what we have.  It must be so lonely for them.”  She smiles at him, and then Shelly says, “Get a good night’s rest.  The real work starts now.”

Once inside his quarters, Steven doesn’t even bother to undress, just collapses on to the lower bunk.  

“Shit,” Marc says, suddenly surfacing: “Did I check out?”

“It’s fine, I got us home,” Steven tells him.  “Go back to sleep.”

Marc doesn’t reply; he’s already gone again.  

Steven remembers how it felt to be in sync with Marc.  The knowledge is part of him now; he will never not know how to find his way back to it.  The certainty is comforting, as is the awareness that there is another consciousness somewhere inside him, sleeping right now but still there.  There will always be someone else there.  

“‘Night, Marc,” he says.  Not expecting an answer.  Not needing one.

***

There are, of course, no cemeteries on Ganymede.  The closest thing the colony has is the memorial garden on one of the middle levels.  It’s not much of a garden by Earth standards, and mostly consists of potted plants arranged around an area landscaped with raked sand and carefully placed decorative rocks.  At this time of night, there’s no one else here.  

One wall of the memorial garden is covered with engraved plaques, each one commemorating a person who lived and died on Ganymede.  The slightly larger ones have enough space for some additional writing, usually a verse from a religious text or a line of poetry.

Steven hadn’t been able to afford one of the bigger plaques, so his mother’s memorial only has room on it for her name, the dates on which she was born and died, and a small star of David.  But he did secure a good location — her plaque is at eye level on the wall, and close to a bench where he can come and sit.

“Hello, Mum,” he says, taking his usual seat.  “It’s me.  I know I look a bit different, but it’s still me.  You can probably guess what happened – I finally got a match and now I’m a composite.  It had to be his body, for obvious reasons.  His name’s Marc.  I’d introduce you to him, but he’s asleep at the minute. He’s an early-to-bed early-to-rise sort of person and this is a bit past his bedtime.”

He notices a smudge on the metal plate, so he gets up and polishes it with his sleeve.  “There we go, that’s better.  Can’t have your plaque getting all grubby.”  He admires his handiwork for a second and then goes and sits down on the bench again.  “Marc is… well, he’s hard work sometimes, to be perfectly honest.  He doesn’t read and he has terrible taste in movies and he’s always tidying things away while I’m asleep so I can never find anything.  He’s not very happy most of the time, and I thought it was because he didn’t like me, but I’m starting to think it’s because he doesn’t like himself.”

“Anyway,” he goes on, “I mostly came up here to let you know I’m not going to be around as much from now on.  We’ve nearly finished Z-space pilot training, and they’re going to assign us to a ship soon.  I’ll be back here when we’ve got leave to take, but I could be away for a long stretch.  So don’t worry if you don’t see me for a while.”

He stands up and starts to leave.  Just before he goes, he turns back in the direction of the memorial wall and says, “Mum, I wish I could tell you what it feels like to be synchronized with someone else.  I don’t even know how I’d explain it to someone who’s not a composite.  We’re – more, together.  I’m glad I did it, and I don’t regret it, even if it means I’m stuck with Mr Misery Guts for the rest of our life.  I’m going to be all right.  I just wanted you to know that.”

The fingers of his right hand twitch.  That happens sometimes when Marc’s asleep but Steven’s awake; Steven thinks it’s probably Marc dreaming.  

Steven hopes he’s having good dreams for once.  

Chapter Text

“That’s her,” Shelly says.  “ViaStellar vessel VS-TWRT-907, the Taweret.   What do you think?”

The ship is a passenger vessel.  It has a bulbous, solid shape — passenger ships need lots of shielding around the hull to protect their human cargo — with twin zip drive rings mounted at the back end and a lump at the front which houses the control deck.  Two landing struts stick out on each side like stubby legs.  

As of this morning, it’s their ship.  Steven is a little bit in love with it.  “She’s beautiful."

“It looks like a flying hippo,” Marc says.

“Well, that’s appropriate,” Steven tells him.  “Taweret was an ancient Egyptian hippo goddess.”

“How do you know these kinds of things?” Marc sounds almost amused.

“I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was growing up,” Steven tells him.  “I was going to go to Earth and dig things up at the pyramids.  Read everything I could get my hands on for a couple of years until I realized I had no chance of ever doing it.”

Shelly shrugs.  “The other ships in her class are the Horus, the Osiris and the Khonshu.   Someone at ViaStellar Central likes their mythology.”

“What’s our manifest?” Marc asks.

“You are taking 536 passengers to the new colony on Silvergate,” Meera says, and then Shelly adds, “Plus crew consisting of three engineer specialists, and Meer and I makes 540 bodies in total.”

“You’re coming with us?” Steven asks, pleased.  He likes Meera and Shelly, and the knowledge that his and Marc’s time being trained by them is shortly coming to an end has been making him feel ever so slightly melancholy. 

It’s Marc who answers.  “Z-space ships always carry a backup composite pilot in stasis. Just in case.”

“Not that you’re going to need us,” Shelly says.  “You’re more than ready for this.”

She’s right, Steven knows, but it’s still gratifying to hear her say it.  His and Marc’s first Z-space training flight had not been good luck or a fluke; they had synced just as easily on their second flight — and the third, and the fourth, and by the fifth time, Steven had stopped feeling anxious about whether they were going to be able to sync or not and had just started enjoying it.

Down below them on the floor of the hangar, the Taweret's hull doors slide open and port workers begin to move stasis pods up the ramp and into the ship.  From where they are standing up on a gantry, Steven can just make out the sleeping people inside them.  After the human cargo is safely stowed, the ship’s other hold will be filled with the passengers’ personal belongings as well as an assortment of other supplies on their way to the Silvergate colony.  

Meera says, “The journey time will be six weeks and covers nine nodes.”

“Can I see the flight plan?” Steven asks.  “I’d like to check it.”

“That is not your job anymore, Steven,” Meera admonishes him.  “You and Marc have one job, and that is to get that ship safely to Silvergate.”

“Piece of cake,” Marc says.

***

It is a piece of cake, at least at first.

For the vast majority of human beings, interstellar travel feels instantaneous, even if in reality it isn’t.  Most people experience the exceptionally long journeys between stars as blinks of time spent in stasis, with the entire duration of the passage feeling no different to a long night’s sleep.

For the composite pilots who guide the ships, Steven discovers, the journey has its own odd rhythm, made up of slow sub-light crawls to nodes followed by lightning fast Z-space jumps in which the ship covers vast distances in the space of minutes.  

The Taweret’s crew actually consists of seven people in five bodies, but only Steven and Marc are scheduled to be conscious for the duration of the journey.  Meera and Shelly are safely stowed in a stasis pod, next to the pods which contain two ViaStellar engineers and a Z-space drive specialist.  None of them will be woken up unless there’s an issue that Steven and Marc can’t deal with themselves.

It could be boring, but Steven has a high tolerance for routine and, it turns out, so does Marc.  In fact it seems to Steven that Marc is content in a way that feels new.  The change is so gradual that at first Steven thinks he’s imagining it, but eventually it’s obvious enough that he’s sure: the body he wakes up into is less tense these days, old knots of stress in Marc’s shoulders and back finally starting to loosen. Some burden Marc’s been carrying is slowly starting to dissolve, and Steven may not know what it is but he can feel the change in their body.

He knows that Marc enjoys piloting the ship through Z-space in sync as much as Steven; he hasn’t said so, but it’s obvious.  Here, out in the depths of space between the stars, life is very simple.  They run through each day’s checklist, make sure the stasis pods are all functioning properly, and keep the ship on course for the next node.   Steven hasn’t been woken by one of Marc’s dreams about drowning since they left Ganymede. 

“Don’t expect too much from Silvergate,” Marc says one evening, when they’re in their quarters relaxing after dinner.  The crew quarters on the Taweret are located down near the stasis hold in order to take advantage of the better shielding in the ship’s midsection.  “Most new colonies are just some prefab huts and a place to land a ship.  It’s not going to be that exciting.”

“Anywhere that’s not Ganymede is exciting, as far as I’m concerned,” Steven says.   “It’s got a breathable atmosphere, for a start.  We’re going to be able to walk around outside. There’ll be weather." He looks at the board in front of him and lifts a piece. “Knight takes bishop, check.”

Marc swivels the board around so he can examine it from black’s perspective.  “Remember our deal. If I’m learning chess, you have to learn to play poker.”

“You can teach me the rules, but I don’t know how we’re going to play it when there’s literally no way we can’t know each other’s cards.  And you’re good at chess.”

Marc is good at chess; he picked it up quickly and now he and Steven are evenly matched.  Steven is beginning to appreciate that even though they have very different personalities, they are a good fit in many ways.  He supposes that’s why ViaStellar’s algorithm matched them in the first place.

“Anyway,” Steven says while he’s waiting for Marc to make his next move, “Silvergate’s just the first place we’re going.  After that there’ll be the other colonies, maybe solar system routes, Mars, even Earth.” 

He catches it then – the way the body’s heart rate jumps for a second before Marc takes a breath and deliberately slows it down again.  They can’t read each other’s minds, but Steven has been getting adept at reading their shared body.  Marc doesn’t want to go anywhere near Earth; just the thought of it puts him on edge.  He’s been happier out here in deep space than he’s been at any time since they merged.

“Queen takes knight,” Marc says, lifting Steven’s white piece off the board.  “Your move.”

***

Steven is on the control deck by himself when the message comes in; Marc is asleep.

It’s a lot simpler to send information via Z-space than it is to send ships and people, and so it’s possible to send and receive communications from the farthest reaches of space with the lag measured in weeks rather than centuries.  

The comms app chimes an alert, and Steven opens it not really expecting anything except another ViaStellar corporate communication – they get a lot of those, mostly announcements about new nodes discovered and new ships commissioned, mixed in with the occasional circular about the employee benefits scheme. 

This message isn’t one of those.  It has a priority flag of Critical/Urgent and it’s for the attention of Meera Vijayendra.  But it’s the subject line which jumps out at Steven.

It reads Re: M Spector records.

There is, as it happens, a protocol which covers this exact situation, and Steven and Marc had to learn it as part of their training.  If a critical communication is received for a crewmember in stasis, the ranking crewmember not currently in stasis is supposed to review the message and determine whether waking the crewmember in stasis is justified. 

Steven could wait until Marc wakes up and show the message to him.  

He opens it.

It’s from someone called Anya Mitchell who works for ViaStellar Central.  He reads it quickly and guiltily. 

Hi Meera - Good to hear from you!  Regarding your mystery man, this isn’t really my area any more but I’ve still got some valid access codes and I was able to do some digging for you.  Not sure you’re going to want to see what I found but here it is.  Appreciate this puts you in an awkward position, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen Legal and Recruitment form an unholy alliance and pull this kind of stunt.  You know what they’re like – we’re so short of pilots that when a good match shows up they tend to overstep in order to make it happen. Does the other half of the comp pairing know?  Might be an issue there. Anyway, best to Shelly.  We should meet up next time you’re on Earth.  Anya.

There are a number of files attached to the message.  The first appears to be Marc’s military service records; Steven can see immediately from the dates that Marc left the service five years earlier.  That’s surprise number one, because Steven had assumed up to now that Marc had joined ViaStellar and become a composite straight after leaving the military.

But it’s the names of the other attached files which stop him in his tracks.  

Charges & trial transcript Spector M.  

Record of incarceration (Mars Tharsis) Spector M.  

Commutation of sentence Spector M.

With a terrible sense of foreboding, Steven opens the charges file.  He reads the first couple of lines, and starts to feel sick.

He closes the file and then sits without moving for a long time.  The pilot’s station on the Taweret's control deck has a mirror fixed to it, mounted on a flexible arm so that the pilot can adjust it to the most suitable angle.  Steven can see Marc’s face reflected in it.  It’s been a while since he’s thought of it as Marc’s face – it’s become easier over the last several months to start thinking of it as his face.  But it isn’t; it never was.  He’s never really known what was going on behind Marc’s eyes, in spite of spending all his waking moments looking out of them.  

“Hey,” Marc says when he wakes up, “I think we should take a look at the stasis pods in section four later.  Some of their diagnostic stats were a little off spec yesterday.”

Steven doesn’t answer.  He sees uncertainty flicker across Marc’s face as he catches up with the physiological impact on their body of Steven’s anger.  

“What’s wrong?” Marc asks.

Steven directs his gaze at the screen on the console in front of them, and brings up Anya Mitchell’s message to Meera and all its attachments.  “I was just reading your file,” he says in what he thinks is quite an even tone, considering.  “The file Meera kept complaining that Central hadn’t sent her.  I can see now why they didn’t.”

There is a very long silence, and then Marc says flatly, “It’s not how you think.”

“Isn’t it?” Steven asks.  “I mean, I really hope it’s not.  I hope you’re about to say those are someone else’s records, or that it was all a terrible mistake, or something like that.  Are you about to say something like that?” 

Marc doesn’t answer.

“Thought so.”  Steven gets up from the pilot’s seat and walks off the control deck.  He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he feels a strong need to get up and move.  He’s halfway down the corridor before he realizes that what he’s trying to do is get away from Marc, and he can’t.  Of course he can’t.  “You did tell me you weren’t a good person.  I should have taken you at your word.  Just out of interest, were you ever going to tell me?”

“No,” Marc says, his voice still almost toneless.  “I wasn’t planning to.”

Steven gives a hollow, angry laugh.  “Everyone I talked to before the procedure was so good about telling me I didn’t have to go through with it.  No one actually mentioned why I might not want to go through with it.”

It’s obvious, now Steven thinks about it.  He’d been working his way through the composite screening program for years and he hadn’t had that long left to live by the time he’d matched with Marc.  It would’ve been clear that he wasn’t going to drop out, and every time someone from ViaStellar had told him that he could, he had been more reassured.

“I’m pretty sure no one on Ganymede knew,” Marc says.  “After I came out of stasis, they removed the restraints before they took me to Rivetti.  And even if anyone there had known – what did you think they were going to say?”  A note of bitterness enters his voice.  “Do you really think they would’ve told you that the guy you’d matched with was serving a life sentence in a Martian jail for trafficking children?”

The words hang there, heavy and ugly.  Steven can feel the body’s heart beating hard in his chest but he can’t tell whether it’s being driven by his anger or Marc’s.  

“I would’ve walked away if I’d known,” Steven tells him. “I wouldn’t have done it.”

“You didn’t have the luxury of taking the moral high ground,” Marc says.  “How long had you waited for a match before I came along?  Would you really have gone back to waiting to die?”

“Yes!” Steven is close to shouting now.

“Fine.  Tell yourself that if it makes you feel better.  The real world has a nasty tendency to tear those kinds of sentiments to shreds.”

Steven yells, “Excuse me if I don’t take ethical advice from someone who went to jail for selling children and then made a deal to get out by becoming a composite!”

“You know nothing about it!” Marc is yelling now, too, and somewhere at the back of his mind Steven thinks that they’re both going to have a really sore throat after this.  “You spent your whole life in one place living the most fucking sheltered existence I have ever seen! You have no idea what is out there. You have no idea about the choices people have to make!”

“I know the choice you made,” Steven says.  “Do you know what Dr. Rivetti said to me? Right before I did it?  She said we were the best match she’d ever seen.  She said we were basically the same person.  What does that say about me?”

There is a long silence, and when Marc eventually answers, all the anger has drained away and he sounds defeated.  “Nothing.  It doesn’t say anything about you.  My mistakes are my mistakes, not yours. I thought it’d be better if you didn’t know.  I thought it’d be easier.”

“Better for who?” Steven asks him.  “Easier for who? Because we are stuck with each other, and I have to live the rest of my life looking at you in the mirror and you have to live the rest of your life with me in your head and right now I don’t know how we’re going to do that.”

“What happened – ” Marc starts.

“No,” Steven says, surprising himself with how savage he sounds.  "No.   We are past that now.  I do not want to hear one word from you outside of what you need to tell me to pilot this ship or run this body. Nothing, do you hear me?”

He can only assume that the answering silence signals Marc’s assent.

***

They work and sleep and eat and converse as little as possible.  Steven wakes up one morning to find that Marc has cleared away their last unfinished chess game and the board and pieces have been tidied away somewhere out of sight.

On the fourth day, they reach the next node on their planned route to Silvergate.  Steven half expects that he and Marc won’t be able to sync, just because it doesn’t feel right that they could sync when the silent gulf which now exists between them is so wide.  But they do, and it’s just as easy, just as right, as it’s ever been.  

They make the jump, and begin the next leg of the journey at sub-light.  It’s another three days to the next node.  

And then the ship is hijacked. 

***

When Steven wakes up, his first thought is that he is somehow back in the bottom bunk bed in his quarters on Ganymede, because he is lying underneath something.  

He reaches out a hand to one side and touches cold metal.  It’s the same on the other side.  He’s not back on Ganymede, but he’s not in his bed in the Taweret’s crew quarters either.

He’s – in one of the ship’s service shafts?  That can’t be right.  There’s no good reason Marc would need to start crawling about the ship’s innards.  But since he and Marc are barely speaking to one another, Steven doesn’t really know what’s going through Marc’s head lately.

Ironic, since it’s his head, too. 

“What –?” he starts.  He only gets one word out before his mouth clamps shut and his arms and legs freeze.

“Be quiet,” Marc says, so softly it’s barely more than a subvocalization.   “We’ve been boarded.”

“We’ve – what?" Steven starts, then feels his jaws start to close again.  

“Be,” Marc hisses through closed teeth, “quiet.”

“All right,” Steven says, lowering his voice so he’s subvocalizing too.  “Happy now? And can I please have the use of the arms and legs back?”

He feels the vise-like rigor which had been holding his limbs frozen in place ease. 

"Thank you. What do you mean, we’ve been boarded?  We’re in deep space.  That’s not possible.”

“Boarding a ship traveling at sub-light is difficult.  It’s not impossible.”

“And you would know this how, exactly?” Steven asks.  “Oh, wait, perhaps you did a little light piracy when you weren’t involved in human trafficking.”

“There are at least three armed intruders currently on this vessel,” Marc says tightly, “so if you want to snipe at me, maybe you could save it until after we’ve dealt with that?”

Steven has to concede that’s a fair point.  He exhales and tries to put his anger at Marc – and he is still very, very angry at Marc – to one side.  “What happened?”

Marc carefully wriggles around in the narrow tube, gradually turning so that they are lying on the body’s front rather than its back.  Then he starts to shuffle forward along the maintenance shaft, using his forearms to pull himself along and pushing with his feet, which feel cold – he’s barefoot, Steven realizes, and still wearing the T-shirt and shorts they normally sleep in. 

“Something hit us and it woke me up,” Marc tells him as they inch along the shaft.  “I thought maybe it was an asteroid.”

“That would’ve set off all the impact alarms,” Steven says. 

“Yeah, and that hadn’t happened.  I started checking the external hull cameras from the terminal in our quarters, and then I saw it – there’s another ship clamped on to the hull.  They must have exited the last node in our wake so we didn’t spot them, then come up alongside us so they could attach and use explosives to force the airlock.  That’s how we did it in TerraCorps.” 

“So why didn’t you get up to the control deck?  You could’ve sealed the doors up there – that’s a bulkhead, once it’s closed, nothing could get through it –”

“Couldn’t get there.  The main airlock access is between our quarters and the control deck, remember.  There was no way to get there without running straight into them.  So I hid to buy some time.”

Steven is silent for a second, thinking.  “Okay, but what do they want?   All we’re carrying is five hundred and forty people in stasis pods and some agricultural equipment.  There must be better targets out there.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Marc says, sounding grim.  “If you’re going to go to all this trouble to hijack a spaceship, you’re not going to hit some vessel at random.  Whoever these people are, they want this ship.”

“Right, then – why?” Steven asks.  

Marc doesn’t answer.

He has crawled far enough along the maintenance tube that they’ve reached another access panel.  Moving very carefully and very slowly, Marc slides his fingertips underneath its edge and lifts it until a sliver of light from the corridor below breaks through.  Then he lowers his head and squints through the gap.

There are three men standing in the corridor, having a conversation in low voices which Steven can’t quite make out.  One of them is tall and gangly – he has the classic physiology of someone born and raised in a low-G environment like Ganymede or Luna.  The second man is shorter and has a darker skin tone, against which the small, metallic gold circles on his temples stand out sharply – he’s a composite.

The final person making up the trio is stocky and much stronger looking than either of the other two, very obviously a native of Earth.  He has a shock of short white-blond hair, and when he turns around for a second, his face becomes visible.

It’s Nils Larsson.  

Larsson makes a sharp motion with one hand, which looks to Steven very much like a just-get-on-with-it kind of gesture, then turns and walks away.  After a second, the other two men head off in the other direction and the corridor below them is empty. 

Very gently, Marc lowers the access panel again.

“What’s he doing here?” Steven asks.

Marc breathes out.  He closes his eyes, and keeps them closed until Steven makes him open them. 

“He’s here for me,” Marc says at last.  “They’re not interested in the ship or the cargo.  They’re here to kill me."

“That man Larsson wants to kill you?  I thought you said you were in TerraCorps together?”

“We were.  The day we ran into him on Ganymede was the first time I’d seen him in years.”

Steven feels that there are huge chunks of important information simply missing from this conversation.  “Could you please just tell me what the bloody hell is going on?”

Marc gives a faint, humorless chuckle.  “I could, but it would involve me talking to you about things other than piloting the ship or running the body.  And I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me about anything else.”

Steven thinks that if they were in separate bodies, he would absolutely punch Marc right now.  “Well, now I’m listening.”

Marc is quiet for a while.  At last he says, “Okay.  After I left TerraCorps, I did some stupid things, and I ended up owing some people a lot of money.  And then I did something even more stupid — I took a private security job with an organisation I pretty much knew was just a front for something illegal.  But I needed the money, so I did it.”  He stops.  “They told me we were shipping valuable archaeological artifacts from a dig on Gallada. Smuggling, basically, but I decided I was okay with that.  It was just me and the composite pilot, and they wanted me awake during the sub-light parts of the trip in case we ran into trouble. The first two runs were easy; it was a lot of money for doing very little.  Then, the third time I took the contract, I started getting bored.  I started asking myself why a ship carrying nothing but old bits of pottery needed a second stasis bay and then I started wondering why it was locked.  So I broke into it to see what our cargo really was.”

Steven waits. 

“There were about thirty of them in the stasis pods,” Marc says.  “All kids.  None of them looked older than eleven or twelve. The people I was working for were trafficking children and I was helping them do it.”  He draws in a breath and again Steven’s view goes dark as he shuts his eyes for a second. “I was helping them,” he repeats.  Then he opens his eyes again. “So I went back to the control deck and I put a gun to the pilot’s head and then I sent a message to the closest colony world and I waited for them to come and arrest us.”

“What happened to the children?” Steven asks.  “Were they all right?”

“The ones on that ship were,” Marc answers.  “But how many kids were on those first two ships I helped get to their destinations? Fifty? Sixty?”

Steven says, “You didn’t know.”

“I should’ve known,” Marc says, his voice heavy with self-recrimination.  “The money was too good.  It was never fucking pottery.”  He pauses.  “Because I testified against the people who hired me, I got a more lenient sentence — thirty years in a Martian prison instead of the death penalty.  And I was going to rot there, except that I’d been assessed for composite suitability when I was in the military so I was still on a database somewhere. A ViaStellar lawyer showed up to tell me they had a near-perfect match for me, and I could stay in jail or I could be a composite and work for them. I said yes, because what else was I going to do? I was just swapping one sentence for another, and fuck knows I deserved it,” he finishes bitterly.  

Steven remembers their conversation in the observation gallery the very first night he’d been woken by one of Marc’s drowning dreams.  That makes it sound like a punishment. He had asked Marc what deal he had made, and when he’d read Marc’s files, he had assumed he had the answer – Marc had swapped prison for freedom and existence as a composite.  Now he realizes that he’d misread Marc’s internal logic – he hadn’t understood that as far as Marc was concerned, life as a composite was a worse punishment, and one he deserved. 

“And how does Nils Larsson fit into all of that?”

“At a guess – there must be a contract out on me,” Marc says.  “I caused too much trouble for too many people for there not to be.  I don’t know what Larsson’s been doing since he left the service, but I’m willing to bet a lot of it hasn’t been legal.  I did tell him I’d rather shoot myself than do this, so it probably seemed weird enough to him that I’d changed my mind to make him start digging around and asking questions.  And then he must’ve found out that it was worth his while to deliver my dead body to someone.”

It’s very cramped in the service tube, but somehow Steven manages to maneuver his arms to allow him to push the heels of his hands into his eye sockets for a second.  “Our dead body.”

“Our dead body,” Marc corrects himself.  Then: “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve got a lot to be sorry about.”

“Yeah,” Marc agrees.

“I might’ve lived a sheltered life, but at least I didn’t get mixed up in anything like that.”

After a few seconds, Marc says, “I shouldn’t have said that.  It wasn’t fair.”

“I wasn’t very fair either,” Steven concedes.  “I saw your records and I thought I knew what they meant.  I didn’t.”

“So,” Marc says, “now we’ve got the mutual apologies out of the way, can we deal with the people who want to kill us?”

“Yes, but what are we going to do?” Steven asks.  “We don’t even have a gun,” he adds, remembering that the only weapon on the ship was stowed securely in a locker on the control deck, and currently beyond their reach.   

“I’ve got a couple of ideas, but they all start with getting out of this service tube.”

“Okay.”

“Steven –” Marc begins, then stops, apparently thinking better of whatever he had been planning to say.  

“What?” Steven prompts him.

There is a pause.  Then: “These people are here to kill us.  Or, at least, kill me, and they won’t care if that means killing you, too.  They are not going to respond to harsh language, okay? I am going to do whatever I need to do to keep us alive, and you’re not going to have the option of looking away while I do it. Do you understand?”

Steven swallows.  “Yes.”

“All right.”  Marc lifts the access hatch again; this time, the corridor below is empty.  He starts to shuffle their body into a better position to climb down through the opening.  “Let’s do this.”

***

The Taweret’s cargo hold is the biggest single space inside the ship.  It is currently holding 540 individual stasis pods, stacked in three layers of 180 pods each.  Each stack of three stasis pods lying horizontally on top of one another is roughly three meters high, and so the bay is in effect a maze made up of walls of unconscious people in coffin-like boxes with narrow passages between them.

Marc carefully lifts the service hatch and looks down into the cargo hold.  There is a low electrical hum in the air which Steven can feel deep in their inner ear, but except for the 540 sleeping and oblivious passengers, he can’t hear anything else.

Marc drops down through the service hatch and on to the floor below.  

“We could wake someone up to help us,” Steven suggests.  A part of him feels that if Meera and Shelly were here, they’d know what to do.  

“Wouldn’t work.  The stasis management app would trigger an alert on the control deck.  You’ve never been in stasis – you don’t just wake up straight away, you know.  It takes about four to six hours for most people to come out of it, and we couldn’t hide them and us from Larsson and his crew for that long.”

“Why are we here, then?”

“For this,” Marc says.  They are now standing in front of the stasis bay’s terminal, the local control point.  A quick facial scan logs them in, and then Marc is swiping through menus and sub menus.  He calls up a keyboard on the screen and starts to type. “You know what would be really useful right now?  Two bodies, so one of us could do this while the other kept a lookout.”

“You work, I’ll listen,” Steven says.  

He sees Marc’s brief nod reflected in the screen they’re looking into.  Then Marc is quickly tapping commands into the app which manages the passenger list and stasis pod assignments.  

A small dialogue box appears with the message Are you sure you want to delete all passenger data?

“Yes, I am fucking sure,” Marc mutters under his breath, and taps the screen. 

Suddenly, Steven hears something – it’s hard to distinguish underneath the white noise hum of all the pods’ stasis fields, but it’s definitely there.  The click-click of boots on the metal cargo bay floor.

“Someone’s here,” he says.

Marc nods again.  He locks the terminal and moves quickly and very quietly into the maze of stasis pods.  

Then he starts to climb.

Steven’s not sure he would feel confident scaling the wall of stasis pods – they’re only stacked and are not secured in any way – but Marc pulls himself up without difficulty and within seconds they are crouching on top of one of the banks of pods.  All the pods have a clear section through which it’s possible to see the face and upper body of whoever’s inside, which means that if Steven glances down, he is looking straight at the sleeping face of a young woman with intricately braided hair and a nose piercing.  He has to suppress the urge to apologize for sitting on her. 

From up here, they have a good overview of the whole cargo hold.  Steven can still hear the noise of someone’s boots moving across the deck, louder now that whoever it is has come closer to their position.

When the click-click noise is right underneath them, Marc shifts forward a fraction.  

Standing right below them is Larsson’s composite pilot, the man with the shiny metal receptors grafted onto his temples, just like the ones on Steven and Marc’s body.  

He looks left and right.  If he looked up, Steven thinks, he would see them on top of the stasis pods, but he doesn’t.

Steven is suddenly aware of how calm the body is.  Marc is completely still, and his breathing is slow and even.  Their heart is beating a steady rhythm. 

What happens next, happens very, very fast.

Marc drops down behind the other composite, who starts to pivot around, but it’s too late – Marc has a crucial advantage.  He reaches out and places his hands very quickly and very deliberately around the composite’s neck and then he twists.

Steven feels it. 

Marc may be the one who consciously initiated the action, but Steven is equally present and feels the ghastly crack of bones breaking under his grip.  

The other composite slumps on to the ground, their head lying at a stomach-turning angle, eyes open. 

Steven feels sick.  His heart starts to race.  

“Steven,” Marc says: “Steven, no. You can’t panic – I need to be calm and I can’t be if the body isn’t.  Stay back and let me keep us calm, okay?”

“They’re dead,” Steven says.  He can’t stop looking at the body; he can feel Marc trying to shift their gaze, but Steven can’t help looking back at the corpse in front of them.  One body.  Two people.  “We killed them.”

“No, I killed them.  You didn’t do anything.”  Marc turns away from the body on the floor and looks instead at a reflective panel on the side of the nearest stacked stasis pod.   “Look at me.  Now breathe.  This is not for you to carry.  This is mine.”

Steven closes his eyes for a moment, but that just calls up the image of the other composite’s body crumpling onto the floor.  He clasps the body’s hands together tightly, trying to banish the memory of how it had felt to take a life – two lives, really – with them.  He doesn’t know how Marc lives with this.

“Listen,” Marc says, “Our chances of surviving this just went up, because that was Larsson’s composite pilot.  Without a composite, he has no way to fly this ship or his own through Z-space, and we’re a couple of centuries away from the closest inhabited world at sub-light.”

“We’re not the only composite pilot on board,” Steven begins, remembering Meera and Shelly.  Then he stops as he works it out.  “Oh – that’s why you wiped the passenger list.”

“Right.  He’ll know one of the people in these pods is the backup composite pilot, but now he has no way to find out which one. Which means you and I have something he needs and we’ve given him a reason to negotiate instead of shooting us on sight.”

Steven nods.  He no longer feels like he’ll throw up if he takes over the body completely.  He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget what breaking someone’s neck felt like, but for now he is able to push it somewhere off to one side.  “What now?”

“First we’ll…” Marc trails off.  The body sways on its feet and Steven quickly steps in to make sure they don’t lose their balance.  “Uh, first…”

A horrible suspicion begins to form in Steven’s mind.  “How long have you been awake?”

“Way, way too long,” Marc admits.  He slaps his hand against his cheek, as if that’s going to do the slightest bit of good.  Physical exhaustion is not the problem; Marc’s been conscious for too long and he can’t sustain it much longer.  “C’mon, no, not now, not now.   Okay, listen, get back up into the service tunnels, just hide until I wake up and then we’ll…”

The sentence trails off into unintelligible mumbling, and then he’s gone.  

Steven’s on his own now.

Hiding until Marc wakes up again sounds like a very good idea.

The service hatch they came down through to get into the stasis hold is up in the ceiling.  Steven briefly wonders if he could climb on top of the stacked pods to get back up to it before deciding that he probably couldn’t manage it without Marc.  But there’s another hatch located on the corridor outside the stasis hold, and so he heads for it.  

When the doors of the stasis hold open, he cautiously checks that the corridor beyond is clear in both directions before moving out into it.  He can’t help feeling very, very vulnerable without Marc’s steadying presence, and he’s painfully aware that the body he’s in might have Marc’s training and experience, but that it’s all useless to him without Marc there to deploy it.  

All his self-doubts are confirmed when he walks around a corner and finds himself face to face with Larsson. 

“Well, look what I found.”

Larsson is pointing a gun at him.  Projectile weapons are a bad idea on spaceships, for obvious reasons – the weapon Larsson is holding looks to Steven a bit like a hand-held version of the rock-cutting lasers used in mining on Ganymede.  He doesn’t like to imagine what it could do to a human body.

“Hello again, Marc,” Larsson says.  “I said I’d see you around.”

“Wrong person,” Steven says.

Larsson considers him for a few seconds.  “You’re the other one.  It was Grant, wasn’t it?”

Steven nods reluctantly.   

“So, Steven Grant.  Is Spector hiding behind you?  Make him come out.  I want to talk to him.”

“I can’t.  He’s asleep.”

Larsson lets out a huge guffaw of laughter.  “Oh, that’s marvelous.   He’s asleep.   He’s having a little nap."   He stops laughing.  “Where’s my comp?”

“They’re dead.”

Still holding the weapon on him, Larsson circles around and swipes open the stasis bay doors.  The composite’s corpse is visible where it lies on the deck, head bent at ninety degrees.  Larsson regards it with a mix of contempt and annoyance.  “I’m guessing Spector did that.”

“We did it,” Steven tells him, trying to project a level of bravura he absolutely does not feel.

“Course you did,” Larsson says.  “I’m sure you were a great help to the guy who was in Red Badge with me for four years.  While we’re waiting for your other half to finish getting his beauty sleep, I’m going to take you up to the control deck, and you and I are going to have a little talk while I’ve got you by yourself.  How does that sound?”

It sounds terrible, but it’s not as if Steven has a choice in the matter.  

He goes with Larsson. 

*** 

Larsson’s other associate – the tall, gangly man – is on the control deck when Larsson arrives there with Steven.  “Where’s JD?” he asks.

“Dead,” Larsson says shortly.  “Kneel there,” he orders Steven, pointing to the middle of the room.  “Vogt, start setting it up.”

The spindly man nods and gives Steven an unpleasant grin. He disappears and then quickly returns with a compact box which he begins connecting to various ports on the control deck.

Steven kneels; the metal deck is cold against his shins, and he feels weirdly exposed, because he’s barefoot and wearing shorts and a T-shirt while Larsson and Vogt are kitted out in something close to full body armor.  

Larsson sits down in the pilot’s seat and turns it around so he’s looking down at Steven.

“So,” he begins conversationally.  “There I was on Ganymede, and I saw my old friend Marc Spector for the first time in, oh, years.  Imagine my surprise when I find out he’s signed up to be a composite.  The very last person I would’ve expected to do that.  So I get in touch with some of my other friends, and I find out that Marc Spector has made a lot of trouble for a lot of people, and some of them are prepared to give a lot of money to whoever makes sure he doesn’t ever cause any more trouble ever again.”

Steven doesn’t say anything.

“But maybe I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know,” Larsson continues.  “Maybe my old friend Marc has become much more open and sharing since I knew him.  Do you know what he did?”

“I know he chose to go to prison rather than help exploit children,” Steven says.  “I know he made sure the people responsible had to face justice as well.”

“Such a saint,” Larsson says.  He leans forward a little in the chair.  “The first thing you need to understand is this: there is no outcome here in which Marc Spector does not die.  He’s worth too much dead.  There are, however, two possible scenarios, and you get to choose between them.”

Steven looks down at the metal deck in front of him and waits.

“In the first scenario,” Larsson says, “That body of Spector’s dies and you and he die along with it.  You may be thinking that gives me a problem – how am I going to get out of here without a composite to pilot the ship?  That is true.  But it is a problem that I will be very motivated to solve and you will both be dead so it won’t matter to you.  The second scenario, now. That is the outcome in which Spector dies and you don’t.”

Steven looks up.  “We’re a package.  That’s sort of the point of us.”

Larsson grins.  “You think?  Do you know what that is?”  

He points at the box which Vogt is working on.  It looks like it’s switched on and drawing power from the ship; Steven has no idea what it is or what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t see any advantage in lying about that.  “No.”

“You must have seen one before,” Larsson says, “although perhaps you don’t remember.  That’s a neural mapper – it’s what they used to make you.  But there’s more than one kind of composite. Did they tell you in your training that no one can sync outside of Z-space?  Because that is not, as it happens, true.  There are composites who exist in a state of permanent synchronization.  It’s much more efficient. But to make it work, only one mind can be conscious.  One mind rules the other, and the second mind loses its self-awareness.  It exists as a resource to be exploited, nothing more.”  

Steven feels cold.  “That’s murder.”

Larsson shrugs.  “So is breaking someone’s neck.”  He stands up.  “That’s the deal I’m offering you.  Marc Spector’s consciousness dies, and what’s left of him is just a power source for a composite engine.  I take you with me to prove that the body might be breathing but the man is gone.  A flat line on a neural scan will be enough proof for me to get my money, and I’ll also have a new pilot to replace the one Spector killed.  I think you’ll agree it’s a very fair deal.  I’ll even give you some time to think it over while Vogt gets everything set up.”

***

They put him in the storage locker next to the control deck and break the lock mechanism so it only opens from the outside.  Steven sits down on the floor, knees bent up to his chest because there’s not enough room to sit with his legs stretched out.

When Marc wakes up, he looks around and says, “They caught us, huh.”

“Yes,” Steven says.  “Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, I should’ve been there. Tell me what I missed.”

“Larsson offered me a deal,” Steven says.  “It’s not a good deal.”  Then he outlines everything Larsson said.  When he’s finished, he asks, “What he was describing – that’s what you told me about, isn’t it?  Neural butchery.”

Marc is silent for a few seconds.  “Yes.”

“You said you’d seen it.”

“Yeah,” Marc says after a pause.  “When I was in TerraCorps, I was Red Badge.  So was Larsson.”

Steven’s no expert on Earth’s military, but even he has heard of the Badges, the elite units of each of the services.  Red Badge is the space service’s special operations division.  

“We were sometimes deployed to support law enforcement.  We raided a butcher’s shop on Luna, and when we went in there were maybe ten newly made composites there.  Ten comps, twenty people.  People crying, people catatonic… there was one woman, and all she kept saying was, I’m hurting him, I can’t stop hurting him... The look on her face…”  He trails off.  “The next night I went to a bar with Larsson and I got very drunk and that’s when I told him I’d rather kill myself than be a composite.”

“What are we going to do?” Steven asks.

"We are not going to do anything,” Marc says.  “I am going to tell you what you are going to do, so listen really carefully.  After Larsson does this, I will be gone.  You need to survive long enough to get away from him, so don’t make trouble and do whatever he tells you.  Sooner or later he’ll get you to take him back to Earth – once you’re there, you need to find a woman called Layla El-Faouly.  Got that?  Layla El-Faouly.   The last time I heard from her, she was in Cairo in Egypt, so start there. When you find her, tell her everything.  You can trust her.  She can get you a fake ID and she’ll help you get away from Larsson.  Then make for one of the larger colonies – somewhere with a population big enough for you to disappear.  Gideon’s World or Meili-Difang, maybe.  You’ll be stuck with my face – that can’t be helped – but if you keep your head down and don’t do anything to attract any attention you might be okay.  Those people I saw on Luna weren’t matched to each other the way we are. You might be able to tolerate a permanent sync to whatever’s left of me without going insane.”

“If you don’t mind me saying so,” Steven says, “that is the worst plan ever."

“Steven,” Marc says: “I am not getting out of this.  But you might.”

“So the best outcome is one where I spend the rest of my life walking around with the shriveled up remains of your consciousness lodged in the back of my head?” Steven can feel himself getting angrier by the second.  “No.  I am not doing that.  I am not prepared to spend the rest of my life looking at a dead man’s face in the mirror.”

“You’ve seen exactly who I am,” Marc says.  He sounds tired.  “I am no great loss to the universe.  If the only chance you have of living is me dying – I am fine with that.”

“And I’m not," Steven says, surprising himself with his own vehemence.  “What is wrong with you?  Why do you want to be punished so much?   Because I had a disease that was killing me and my mother died in a stupid and avoidable accident and those things were awful but I always knew they weren’t my fault because they weren’t anyone’s fault because sometimes bad things just happen. Why do you feel so guilty all the time?”

Marc doesn’t answer.

And then, in a moment of sudden clarity, Steven understands.  “The drowning dream.  It’s not a dream at all, is it?  It’s a memory.  Who couldn’t you save?”

The silence stretches out for so long that he thinks Marc isn’t going to reply.  

At last he says, “My brother.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten.”

“Then it wasn’t your fault.  I don’t care what happened, if you were ten years old, it wasn’t your fault.”

“My mother thought it was,” Marc says. “She told me often enough.  I used to lie in bed at night and wish it had been me instead of him.  I still do.”

“She was wrong.   You dying so I live doesn’t balance out some great cosmic set of scales,” Steven tells him.  “I’m not your brother.”

“No,” Marc agrees.  And then, very quietly, he adds, “You’re more than that.”

“We’re a composite,” Steven tells him.  “You and me, together we make one composite.  If you die and I don’t, I won’t just go back to being one person again.  I’ll be half a composite, and half a composite is nothing.   I can’t live if half of me is missing and I have to stare at the empty space where you used to be all the time.  So we need a better plan."

Marc is silent. 

“Marc,” Steven says. 

“Shut up, I’m thinking.” 

Steven waits. 

“Where exactly were they setting up the neural mapper on the control deck?”

“They were fitting it to the main terminal.”

“What’s easily accessible from the main terminal? Let’s think. Sub-light drive, Z-space drive, life support systems…”

“Gravity controls,” Steven supplies. “Stasis pod regulation. But we’re not going to get the opportunity to do anything.  They’ll be watching us.”

Marc says, “No, they’ll be watching me."

“Same difference.”

“Not quite. Larsson doesn’t think you’re a threat.”  

“Larsson’s right.”

“No, he’s not.  He doesn’t know what a determined little shit you can be. I do.”  

“Less of the little, please. I used to be taller than you.”

Marc takes a breath. “Okay, I’ve got an idea, but it’s a long shot and might not work anyway.  And you’ll probably have to do it by yourself, because I might not be in any condition to help.”

“Tell me,” Steven says, and Marc does.

***

When Larsson comes back for them, they’re ready.

“Have you made up your minds?” he asks.

“Fuck you, Nils,” Marc tells him pleasantly. 

“Your other half is more polite,” Larsson says.  “Where is he?”

“Asleep,” Marc says.  

In fact, Steven is awake.  He is staying back, watching and listening through Marc’s eyes and ears, hiding.

Larsson gestures with the weapon he’s holding.  “Get up.  Hands on your head.”

Marc obeys and walks past Larsson back into the corridor and then through the doors to the control deck.  

“So,” Larsson says, his tone almost conversational: “Am I to kill your body or just your mind?”

“Grant doesn’t deserve to die for my fuck ups.  He’s just some guy who signed up to be a composite to get away from his crappy life on Ganymede.”

“Then that’s your answer,” Larsson says.  “Very good.  Get in the chair.”

Marc sits in the seat at the main control terminal.  The machine – the neural mapper, Steven reminds himself — sits on top of the console.  Two cables emerge from a port on one side, and both end with the same kind of magnetic seal which Steven has by now used on many occasions to attach to the receptor points on either side of his head.  

Vogt comes over and produces a roll of heavy duty tape which he uses to secure their wrists to the arms of the chair.  Then he clips the data cables onto the receptors on their temples.  

“I’d tell you this won’t hurt, but I think it probably will.”

Steven’s mouth feels dry and his heart is beating fast; he’s not sure if that’s him or Marc.  He hopes it’s him, because he knows he’s scared but he’d like to pretend to himself that Marc isn’t.

He moves his eyes – which is about the only thing he’s willing to risk doing – and looks at the control console.  The pilot’s seat is fixed to the floor, so the console is within easy reach, but now their wrists are tied to the chair’s arms and Larsson is standing next to them holding a weapon.  The plan had sounded almost workable when Marc had described it to him; now Steven’s not so sure.

Marc shifts their gaze back up, so they’re looking at a blank spot on the wall.  

Vogt turns the machine on. 

Nothing happens. 

Steven is just starting to wonder if maybe they’ve had a stroke of incredibly good luck, and the infernal thing is broken, when Marc balls the body’s hands into fists, locks his jaws together and lets out a hiss of pain. 

For a second, Steven can’t figure it out. The only physical discomfort he can feel is just the prick of his fingernails digging into the palms of his clenched fists. If the body’s in pain, they both feel it; he doesn’t understand what Marc could be experiencing that he’s not. 

Then he realizes — the causal link runs the other way. Marc isn’t reacting to the body’s pain, he’s projecting the mental pain he’s suffering on to the body. The machine must be tuned to Marc’s neural pattern; it’s attacking him while leaving the distinct pattern of brain activity which constitutes Steven untouched. 

In biological terms, Steven knows, the distance between himself and Marc is measured in neurons. The gap in what they’re experiencing right now is so vast it might as well be light years wide. 

Marc screws the body’s eyes shut. Steven tries to open them and can’t. He can’t get his hands unclenched either, and both those things are a problem because their plan requires Steven to get them free from their bonds and get them access to the ship’s controls. 

Marc screams; Steven can feel the noise being ripped out of their chest, scouring their throat on its way out of the body. 

“How long will this take?” Steven hears Larsson ask. 

“Depends.” That’s Vogt. “Could be a couple of minutes or a couple of hours. No way to tell.” 

Marc yells again, jerking around in the chair so hard that the only thing stopping him from falling out of it and onto the deck is the tape wrapped around his wrists. Steven’s never been locked out of the body like this — he knows Marc isn’t doing it deliberately, but that’s not much help to him. 

It goes on and on and on. The only pain Steven is experiencing directly is what Marc’s inflicting on their body – legs and arms bruised from thrashing around, throat raw, tongue bleeding from where Marc has bitten it and not noticed.  He can’t imagine what Marc is going through that he doesn’t even seem to know he’s doing any of this.  

The plan involved stopping this before Marc got permanently damaged, or worse.  

It’s already been going on far too long.

Then Marc passes out.

The body slumps and Steven feels his head loll to one side.  But it is his head again – he can move it if he chooses.  With Marc unconscious, Steven’s got the body.

“Thank fuck for that,” he hears Larsson say.  “That was starting to annoy me.”

Steven keeps very still for a few seconds.  He badly wants to open his eyes but he’s worried that if he does and Larsson happens to be looking straight at him, it’ll give away his presence.  He’s pretty sure that Larsson has forgotten about him.  

He hears footsteps on the metal deck.  Was that Larsson or Vogt?  He has no way to be sure.  

He opens one eye in a narrow sliver.

Vogt is looking at the neural mapper and Larsson has moved over to the other side of the control deck.  Neither of them is looking in his direction.

Very, very carefully, Steven moves his right arm, testing how secure the tape binding his wrist to the chair is.  It’s much less tight than it was when Vogt put it on – Marc’s thrashing around has seen to that.  Steven tugs at it, and every time he pulls, he feels it loosen.

He opens his eyes fully, pulls one more time, and his right hand is free.  He goes to work on the left while examining the control console.

Marc’s first idea had been to try to put the ship into zip drive from the main control panel, since the jump into Z-space would instantly neutralize both Larsson and Vogt.  But there are simply too many steps required to make that happen – Steven would have to remove the neural mapper connectors, clip on the Z-drive connectors, plot an entry to the nearest node, activate the zip drive engines and then sync.  They’d agreed there was no way of doing all that before Larsson would stop them.

Realistically, Steven has the opportunity to do one thing before Larsson or Vogt notices.  The only advantage Steven has is that Larsson cares so little about him that he’s been forgotten, and the instant he does something to threaten Larsson, that advantage has been used and is spent.

He has to get this right.

The ship’s gravity controls are accessed from the first submenu in the main environmental settings app.  A swipe and two taps opens them.  Another tap changes them.

He works his left arm free.

He picks the best moment he can, when Larsson has momentarily turned away to look at something on the far wall.  As quickly as he can, Steven reaches out and swipe-tap-tap accesses the ship’s grav controls.

“Hey!” Vogt shouts.  He stands up.

Steven taps the grav controls – once to change them and again to dismiss the ubiquitous Are you sure? message which pops up.  

Larsson starts to turn around.

Vogt takes a step towards Steven at the exact moment the ship’s gravity jumps from around three-quarters of Earth-normal to something about six times as strong.

Even sitting down, Steven can feel the change – it’s as if someone just hung a weight from the wrist of his still-outstretched arm.  But Vogt is mid-step at the exact moment the ship’s artificial gravity field intensifies, and he loses his balance.  He goes down hard and hits his head on the side of one of the control panels on the way down, then lands on the floor, thin limbs spread eagled around him, out cold.  It’s about as good a result as Steven could have hoped for.

Steven pulls the neural mapper connectors away from the receptors on the sides of his head – rips them off, really.  It’s probably not the safest way to interrupt whatever the neural mapper is doing to Marc, but the priority is to stop it, and at least he knows he’s achieved that.

He stands up from the chair, trailing tape from both wrists.  It’s hard standing up in six G, and Steven is deeply, deeply grateful that Marc takes his full-Earth-gravity workout regime so seriously, because his joints protest but the body can do it.  

Moving in six G might be another matter.

But Larsson, like Marc, grew up in Earth’s gravity and, also like Marc, he looks like he works out.

"You," he spits, and Steven has no doubt that’s aimed at him rather than Marc.

“Forgot about me, didn’t you?” he says.  

Larsson is advancing on him, the look on his face murderous.  Steven might have Marc’s body, but he doesn’t have his military experience or training in unarmed combat, and he doesn’t think relying on muscle memory is going to get him very far in a fight with someone who is determined to kill him.

Which is why he’s not even going to try. He turns and runs out of the control deck.

Larsson gives a roar and follows him.

Running in six Gs of gravity, Steven swiftly discovers, isn’t really running at all – it’s more like wading.  He can’t move his limbs with any kind of speed and a small part of him thinks that he and Larsson must look faintly comic, staggering slowly after each other.  But Steven has at least one small advantage – Larsson’s body armor is weighing him down, while Steven is barefoot and only wearing the light t-shirt and shorts which he went to sleep in about a million years ago.

Trying to move his legs against six Gs reminds him of what it feels like to run through the sea at the beach, pushing through the surf as the waves tug at him with each step.  Except Steven’s never been on a beach or run through waves, which means that must be a memory of Marc’s.  

He’s certain that’s a very, very bad sign.

He risks a glance over his shoulder – Larsson’s behind him, but not far enough behind for comfort.  But it’s okay, because he doesn’t have far to go, now. He can see his objective just up ahead.

He’s making for the ship’s main airlock, where Larsson’s ship is clamped on to the Taweret.

He reaches the airlock ahead of Larsson and slaps his hand against the inner airlock door.  It’s barely any distance from the control deck but he’s out of breath and his heart is pounding.  

Larsson’s getting closer, brandishing the weapon he’s holding.  It’s a good thing it’s not a projectile weapon, Steven thinks, or he’d probably be dead already – if it’s an adapted version of something like a laser-cutter, which is what it looks like, it’s probably only effective at very close range.

He throws himself through the airlock and onto Larsson’s ship.  Then he turns and hits the airlock controls as fast as he can.

It slides shut just as Larsson reaches it.

Steven slides down to sit on the floor, his back against the inside of the airlock of Larsson’s ship.  Because Larsson’s ship is self-contained, the gravity here is the standard three-quarters G and it’s a huge relief.  He rips the trailing pieces of tape off his wrists and then just sits there and breathes.

Larsson’s ship is tiny compared with the Taweret.   The main airlock leads straight on to the control deck, which is a small cabin with the ship’s controls up front and two pairs of vertical-style stasis pods at the back for the non-composite crew to use during passages through Z-space.  Steven guesses the ship is designed to be fast and stealthy rather than comfortable.

He hears Larsson banging in frustration on the outside of the door a couple of times, but Steven knows there’s no way he’s getting through the airlock doors with any kind of speed.  He has time now.

Of course, none of his efforts will be worth anything if it’s too late and Marc is already gone.

“Marc,” he says when he’s breathing steadily again.  “Marc.  Are you there?”

He waits.

“Marc,” he says again. “Talk to me.”

Then he feels his mouth and tongue trying to work to produce speech.  What comes out, though, is just a mangled string of noises.

“I can’t understand you,” Steven says, trying to suppress his growing panic.  “Try again.”

Another string of random syllables.  Then, more clearly: “M’fuck’d.”

“What’s wrong?” 

“All’f’it,” Marc slurs.  “S’all wrong.”

“What can I do?  Can I help?”

There’s no answer.  

“Marc?”

Still nothing.

This was not the plan.

He gets up and goes to the main controls of this ship and finds, to his relief, that they’re laid out in a broadly similar way to those of the Taweret.   Here’s navigation, and here’s the Z-space drive.  The pilot’s chair even has the same kind of twin cables extending from the headrest as the one on the Taweret’s control deck.

He remembers that the last person who used those cables to connect to the Z-space drive was Larsson’s composite, who is now lying in a crumpled heap on the floor of the stasis bay with a broken neck.

Just then, the communications panel bleeps and lights up with a message from another ship.  For half a second, Steven wonders who’s trying to contact them, since there are no other ships within a hundred light years – and then remembers the obvious answer.

It’s Larsson, calling from the Taweret’s control deck.

“You must think you’re very clever,” Larsson says, his voice slightly tinny over the comm channel.

“Well, you know,” Steven says, “two heads are better than one and all of that.”

“I want to talk to Spector.”

“I don’t think he wants to talk to you.”

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” Larsson says.  “Or very close to it.  You have to think about what’s best for you, now.  Come out of there and let’s finish the job.  Do you know how much the bounty on him is?  I’ll split it with you.”

“No, thank you,” Steven says, distractedly swiping through the ship’s control menus.  

Larsson drops his wheedling tone; it’s almost a relief.  “If you won’t be reasonable, we’ll have to try something else.”

“There’s not a lot you can do while we’re in here and you’re out there.”

“Isn’t there?  How many passengers are in the stasis bay?”

Steven freezes.

“I’ve got a laser cutting tool and plenty of time,” Larsson says.  “I think I could force open, oh, let’s say one stasis pod every ten minutes.  That’s six people an hour –”

Steven slams his hand down on the comm channel control so hard that it hurts.  

He stands completely still for a few seconds.  

His right hand is resting on the control panel, fingers splayed.

As Steven watches, his index finger moves.  He’s not the one moving it. 

“Marc?”

His finger moves again.

The situation is still just about as bad as it could possibly be – maybe even worse, since Steven now has evidence of how gravely Marc’s been affected – yet he can’t help feeling some measure of relief.  He’s not alone; Marc is still there.  Barely, but he’s still there.  

Very slowly, his hand tracks across the control panel.  Steven tries to relax his arm to allow it to go where Marc wants to move it to.  His hand reaches the Z-space controls and stops.

“I know that was the plan, but it’s not going to work.  We can’t sync with you like this.  You won’t survive it.”

Using the index finger of their right hand, Marc taps the Z-space controls three times, slowly and deliberately. 

The problem is, Marc’s right.  Jumping the ship neutralizes Larsson, either by forcing him to get into a stasis pod or putting him through Z-space while conscious.  Marc had been the one who’d realized that while getting control of the Taweret wasn’t possible, they could use the engine of Larsson’s ship like a tug to push the combined mass of both vessels into the nearest node.   All they needed to do was get to Larsson’s ship and close the airlock door, and they’d have more than enough time to plan and execute a Z-space jump, and there would be nothing Larsson would be able to do to stop them.

But that plan had relied on Steven getting them free and away from Larsson before he inflicted too much damage on Marc’s mind.  And Steven now sees with horrible clarity that he had not done that anywhere near fast enough. 

The comm channel blinks again with another incoming communication from the Taweret.   Steven ignores it.  

“Larsson’s going to start killing the passengers,” he says.

Marc taps the right hand’s index finger impatiently against the Z-space controls.

“I know,” Steven says.  “I know.   There has to be a better option.”

His index finger waves slowly from side to side in a weird approximation of a head shake.  Marc’s meaning is very clear.  No, there is no better option.  This plan is the better option.

The comm channel alert stops, which probably means that Larsson has left the control deck and is heading down to the stasis bay.  Someone’s going to die in the next ten minutes unless they stop him.

They are out of other options.  

“All right,” Steven says, a heavy weight settling somewhere in the pit of his stomach.  “I need the hand back now, okay?”  He flexes his right hand and starts swiping through the ship’s navigation controls.  “If we’re jumping, I need to figure out where we’re going.”

He calls up the node network map which is saved in this ship’s navigation database and starts checking which nodes they can jump to from their current location.  Most of the available options are no good – there’s no point jumping the ship to another deep-space node with days or weeks of sub-light travel required to get to the nearest inhabited world.  A jump like that would solve half their problems by eliminating the threat from Larsson, but it’s obvious to Steven that if Marc survives the sync required to make one trip through Z-space – and Steven is grimly aware that is a very big if – then he is going to need urgent and highly specialized medical attention the instant they come out on the other side.

So: they can make one jump, and it has to take them somewhere where they can get help.

There’s only one destination that meets those criteria – the ViaStellar space station in orbit at Allieve.   

Steven looks up Allieve on the node map and feels a wash of relief when he sees it’s possible to reach it in a single jump from the node they’re currently drifting alongside.  He quickly enters it into the navigation system and lets the software estimate the jump’s duration.  

The number pops up on the display. 

He runs the calculation again, just in case the first result was wrong.  The second result is the same as the first.

Steven rests his right hand on the top of the console again.  “Marc, are you still there?”  

There’s a long pause before his right index finger very slowly lifts and then drops again. 

“Okay, listen.  We need to get to Allieve.  ViaStellar’s got its biggest base outside the solar system there.  They’ve got emergency response teams, repair docks, medical facilities, everything.  When I worked for the Port Authority, if ships got into trouble during a voyage, we would reroute them to Allieve.  The Allieve node is only a few thousand kilometers away from the ViaStellar station.  I can set the distress beacon to come on as soon as we come out of Z-space, and they’ll send help straight away.  We can get there from here in one jump.  But it’s going to be a long jump.”  He hesitates, unable to think of any way to soften the bad news.  “We’ll be in Z-space for eight, maybe nine minutes.”

The longest single Z-space jump they’ve ever done was seven minutes and fifty seconds in one of their last training flights, and afterwards Steven had slept for fourteen hours straight and Marc for twelve.

“Do you think you can do that?” 

The index finger of his right hand doesn’t move. 

“Marc,” Steven says.  “Are you still there?  Can you hear me?”

His hand remains completely still.

Steven closes his eyes for a moment.  Then he opens them again and sits down in the pilot’s seat and clips the data cables onto the receptor points on each side of his head.  

He says, “I don’t know if you can still hear me, but in case you can, I’m going to set up the jump to Allieve now.  I don’t know if this is going to work or what it’ll be like if it does.  I just know –” He stops.  “I just know I need you to still be there on the other side of this and I’m really scared that you won’t be.  You need to hold on, okay?  And if you can’t hold on for you, then hold on for me.  If you don’t think you deserve to live, if you don’t think you matter enough — well, you do to me. So forget about everything else and just hold on."

He taps the ship’s controls and sets the zip drive initiation routine to begin after a five second synchronization window.  

The control panel begins to display the countdown.  Five. Four. Three.

Steven turns his focus inward and searches for the familiar shape of Marc’s consciousness.  He’s done this so often by now that it should be easy, but this time it’s not.  The bright core of thought is dim and distant, hard to find and harder still to reach out to – and, unlike every other occasion that they’ve synced in the past, this time Marc’s not reaching back for him.   

Steven pushes to make the connection, stretching his awareness almost as far as he can without losing his own anchoring sense of self.  He is running out of time, he knows – they have to sync before the ship passes through the node into Z-space.  He pushes harder, stretches further, reaches and reaches –

– And syncs.

For the first few seconds, it feels almost normal.  Marc is still there – he may be disrupted and disconnected from their body, but the core part of him is present in the sync, the shape of his mind reassuringly familiar and undamaged.  Steven starts to hope that this might not be as difficult or risky as he feared.

He quickly discovers he is wrong.

The zip drive navigation systems start pumping data through the receptors in the same way they do during every sync.  Steven receives, analyses and sorts the information as it arrives, calling on the additional resources of Marc’s mind as he needs to, expecting to be called upon in the same way by Marc.

But it doesn’t happen like that.  Steven starts to realize that while he is making a steadily increasing claim on Marc’s mind, there is no corresponding pull on his own mental capacity.  Their synchronization is wildly out of balance – he is taking from Marc without giving anything in return.  What’s worse, he can’t fix the problem by himself; he needs Marc to make a correction on his side of the link, and Marc isn’t doing that.  With a growing sense of horror, he begins to understand that Marc can’t do that.

With every passing second, Steven can feel himself taking over more and more of Marc’s mind.  Faced with the onslaught of data coming at them through the datalink, Marc’s passivity leaves Steven with no choice other than to occupy an increasing volume of his mental space.  

He knows exactly what’s happening and he can’t stop himself doing it any more than he could choose to stop breathing.  He is very quickly and very effectively destroying the personhood of Marc Spector and turning what’s left into an unthinking computational tool.

Suddenly Steven has a visceral understanding of what the words neural butchery actually mean.

The seconds in Z-space tick by.  The golden thread which is their route out through the exit node appears in the chaos ahead and Steven pitches the ship towards it with the desperation of a drowning man clutching a rope.  He has to get them out of Z-space and break the sync before Marc is gone.

But everything has a cost, and trying to accelerate their passage through Z-space takes more effort, more calculation, more thought.  It takes more from Marc.

The nature of the synchronization starts to change, subtly at first and then more rapidly.  Emotions and memories shouldn’t cross over between them during a sync — they never have before — but now Steven catches glimpses of things he knows he shouldn’t be able to.  He is diving into the cool water of a lake on a hot day, plunging deep down into the green-blue darkness and then rocketing back up to the surface.  He is at his brother’s funeral and it’s raining and his mother will not look at him.  He is walking through a desert at night and the moon hanging above him in Earth’s sky is so bright and clear that he can see the glittering outlines of the biggest lunar cities.

The exit node is getting closer.  It won’t be much longer.  

He feels the synchronization hardening, the temporary link between them calcifying into something permanent and irreversible.  Once Marc’s consciousness is gone, what remains of him will be trapped in vacant servitude, existing only to be directed and controlled by Steven.  Now Steven understands what existing in a state of permanent synchronization means, and the knowledge is horrifying.  He won’t just kill Marc, he’ll cannibalize him, and he won’t be able to escape from the awareness of what he’s doing.  He’ll spend the rest of his life carrying an open grave around in his head.

If he doesn’t break the sync now, by the time they come out of Z-space, it’ll be too late.

He’s not even sure if he can break a sync in Z-space. 

Steven pulls his mind back from the sync as hard as he can.  The link stretches and thins but remains intact.  The sync between him and Marc exists in a bubble in Z-space, and the information-dense Z-space environment creates a kind of external pressure which maintains the bubble and forces their minds closer together.  Normally that’s a good thing, since it helps to maintain synchronization.  Now it’s strangling them.

He pulls back harder from the sync, stretching the bubble further and further.  

The sync breaks; the bubble bursts.  Z-space rushes in on him like a wave breaking over his head.    

The information load on him doubles, triples, then spikes up by a factor too large to guess.  It’s way, way more than Steven is able to handle by himself.  He can’t stop himself trying to call on Marc’s mental resources, but he feels relief when it doesn’t work because he can no longer reach Marc.  Marc – or whatever is left of Marc – is safe.  If he didn’t leave it too late.  

The exit node is ahead.  Without a pair of synchronized minds navigating through Z-space, the ship begins to drift off course.  The corrections required to bring it back are beyond Steven’s capacity alone.  He just has to hope that their last course adjustment will be enough to hit their target.  If not, the ship will miss the exit node completely and they will be adrift in Z-space and lost for good.

The navigation system is bombarding him with data and he can only process a fraction of it by himself.  Dimly, he’s aware that he’s going to be overwhelmed very soon.  This must be what drowning feels like, he thinks, and for an instant he is in the cave from Marc’s memory-dream, water rising to his shoulders, his chin, his nose, and he is reaching out to try to save someone who is close but too far away to reach.  

Hold on, he thinks.  Hold on.

It is the last clear thought he has for a long time.

***

“Steven?  Steven, can you hear me?”

Steven blinks.  The light is bright; it hurts his eyes.  He closes them again.

“It’s okay, take it slowly. It’s been a while since you’ve been awake.”

The voice is familiar.  It sounds like — it’s Dr. Rivetti.  The last time he woke up and Rivetti was there, Steven remembers, she’d just overseen the transfer of his consciousness into Marc’s body — 

— Marc?

Steven tries to speak, but his mouth is dry and his throat feels raw, and what comes out is little more than a croak. 

“Talking’s maybe a bit ambitious right now,” Rivetti says.  “Here, take a sip of water.  Just a sip.”

The bed — he is lying down, he realizes — tilts up and he feels a straw being placed between his lips.  He sips as instructed and is rewarded with the heavenly sensation of chilled water on his tongue.  He tries opening his eyes again; the light is still bright, but now he can just about tolerate it.

He sips water and gradually his throat stops feeling like it’s lined with sandpaper.  

He’s in a hospital room, albeit a very fancy one.  It’s very big, easily larger than his quarters on Ganymede.  One entire wall is a viewing port through which Steven can see a red-orange planet hanging against the star field.

Rivetti must see him looking at it, because she says, “Yes, that’s Allieve down there.  You made it.”

It worked.  Then, without thinking, because it is second nature to him now, Steven says, “Marc, look, it worked. We did it.”

Nothing.

A wave of cold fear settles over him.  He looks at Rivetti, scared to ask the question.  “Is he –?”

“No,” Rivetti says quickly.  “No, Steven – it’s okay.  You both made it.”

He stares at her, half-afraid that she’s decided to tell him a comforting lie because the truth would be too hard.  But she’s smiling at him, and nodding.  “He’s there.  He’s not conscious at the minute, but he’s there.  Look.”  

She swipes at a control panel on the side of the bed and the now-familiar neural map projection springs into existence.  The upper spinning galaxy shape — the visual representation of Steven’s mind — looks much as it has the other times he’s seen it.  The lower projection looks very different. It’s faint and ragged around the edges, indistinct where it should be sharply delineated.

Something about seeing visual evidence of Marc’s existence reassures Steven in a way that Rivetti’s words by themselves didn’t.  But – “He looks terrible," Steven says. 

“Believe me, that’s a lot better than it was,” Rivetti says.  “Coming to Allieve was a smart call.  There was a rescue team on the Taweret thirty minutes after you came out of the node and the composite specialists here were able to start getting you stabilized very quickly.  Even so, when I got here there was still a lot of work left to do to rebuild Marc’s neural pattern.”

The journey from Ganymede to Allieve is one Steven plotted many times in his old life; it can’t be done in less than three weeks and two nodes.  If ViaStellar brought Rivetti all the way from Ganymede and she’s been here for some time — “How long have we been here?” he asks.

“You’ve been in an induced coma for just over six weeks.  We couldn’t risk allowing you to be conscious for any length of time in case you accidentally triggered a sync with Marc while his neural pattern was still too disrupted to reject it. He was almost gone after the sync you did to get here. We wouldn’t have been able to bring him back a second time.”

“I thought he was gone,” Steven says.  He closes his eyes.  “During the jump, I could feel him just… draining away.  I couldn’t stop it.  But that man — Larsson — he was going to start killing people in the stasis pods, and there was no other way to stop him —“

“You did the right thing,” says a new voice in a familiar Scottish accent.  

Steven opens his eyes again.  “Shelly!”

Shelly and Meera are standing just behind Rivetti.  He didn’t hear them come in.  They’re smiling and they’re holding — oddly — a kind of funnel filled with a selection of what look to Steven like actual flowers.  He’s never seen flowers in real life before.  

“You did the right thing,” Meera says, echoing Shelly, “because there were 540 people in the Taweret’s stasis pods, and they are all alive and well.” 

“Including us,” Shelly adds.  She holds out the flowers to him.  “These are for you.”

“Thank you,” Steven says politely.  “Umm, why?”

Meera almost rolls their body’s eyes.  “Shell insisted.  It is an Earth thing, apparently.  Although why one would waste hydroponics resources on non-edible plant life, I do not understand.”

“Flowers cheer up a room,” Shelly says, and Steven senses this is not the first time this disagreement has played out between them. 

“I’ll find something to put those in,” Rivetti offers.

“Thank you, Carla,” Shelly says, handing her the flowers.  Rivetti disappears with them.

When she’s gone, Steven says, “There’s quite a lot I need to explain.”

Meera holds up a hand.  “Less than you think, probably.  The Taweret’s passengers are still in stasis, but they brought us out to help with the investigation.”

Shelly adds, “We’ve seen the recordings from the ship’s security feeds.”

Steven nods, relieved that he’s not going to have to start from the beginning with: So it turned out there was a contract out on Marc and the ship got hijacked.

“The jump you executed to get here was 8 minutes and 21 seconds long,” Meera tells him.  “For the last ten seconds of it, you were traveling unsynced through Z-space.  It is a miracle you did not miss the exit node.”

“I didn’t know what else to do.  The sync was killing Marc, and there wasn’t going to be anything left of him if I didn’t stop it.”

Shelly nods and then, unexpectedly, takes his hand in hers and squeezes it tightly.  Then Meera shifts in, and Steven expects her to let go of his hand, but she doesn’t – instead she leans in and embraces him in a tight hug.  It’s so unexpected coming from Meera that for an instant he thinks he somehow missed Shelly taking over.  Quietly, she says, “If I had to be without Shelly, or she without me…”  She shakes her head.  

They understand, he thinks.  You can’t be half a composite.  

“What about Larsson?” he asks to change the subject. 

“He spent 8 minutes and 21 seconds awake in Z-space,” Shelly tells him.  She shrugs.  “The body’s breathing, but there’s not much of him left.  The other man was the same.”

“It is no great loss,” Meera says darkly.

No great loss — exactly the words Marc had used about himself.  And maybe the universe is better off without Nils Larsson in it, but Marc was prepared to die because he didn’t think his life was worth anything, and Steven can’t bring himself to think of any life as worthless.  He remembers again what it felt like to crush the other composite’s neck and watch the body fall and he tries not to shudder.  

Maybe some of what he’s feeling shows on his face, because Shelly says quickly, “But you’ve just woken up, so this isn’t the time to start this.  Let’s just say that ViaStellar’s Public Relations team has decided to lean hard into the ‘brave pilot saves ship’ narrative.”

Rivetti returns with the flowers in a large jug of water.  She sets them on the ledge underneath the viewing portal, so they sit in jaunty juxtaposition with the red gas giant below.  Shelly’s right, they are pretty, Steven thinks.  He tries to stifle a yawn, fails, and Rivetti says, “All right, that’s probably enough for now.  Visiting hours are over for today.”

Meera and Shelly leave, but not before promising to come back tomorrow.  Rivetti runs some more checks on Steven and appears satisfied.  “I’ll let you rest now,” she says.

“I’ve been resting for six weeks.”

“Yes, and you need to keep resting because you’re nowhere near recovered yet.”

“Is Marc going to wake up soon?”

Rivetti sits down next to the bed again.  “His neural pattern is sufficiently stable that there’s no longer a risk of you unintentionally syncing with him.  Yesterday he started having some brief intervals of increased activity, which would indicate that he’s either conscious or close to it for very short periods, but he hasn’t been strong enough to manifest externally yet.  I decided to bring you out of the coma now partly to avoid the possibility of him being conscious in a body he couldn’t make wake up.  He should get progressively stronger from now on, but I can’t tell you when he’ll be able to engage fully with the body again. It could be a couple of days or a couple of weeks.”

“I won’t be able to relax until I talk to him.”

“I understand,” Rivetti says. She doesn’t – she can’t – but Steven doesn’t hold it against her.  She’s not a composite, after all. 

She gets up to go, reaching for the bed’s controls to turn off the neural map holoprojection.

“Could you leave that on, please?”

“Of course,” Rivetti says.  “I’ll be back to check on you later.  Don’t go anywhere.”

There is little chance of that, because in the days that follow, Steven spends most of his time asleep.  He sleeps twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch, and still feels tired when he wakes up.  

When he’s not sleeping, he eats the meals which are brought to him – the food is much, much better than anything he ever ate on Ganymede – and takes short daily walks up and down the hallway, which he motivates himself to get through by thinking about how annoyed Marc will be if he wakes up and finds out Steven hasn’t done anything to start rebuilding their lost muscle tone.  Meera and Shelly call in to see him every day, and he’s glad to have their company, even though their visits leave him feeling Marc’s absence more keenly.  He ends up spending most of his time just watching the neural map holoprojection next to the bed, looking at the image which shows Marc’s mind slowly healing and silently willing it along.  

During the short periods the projection gets a little brighter and more active, Steven talks to Marc, in case he’s sufficiently awake to hear.  When he gets tired talking or runs out of things to say, he turns on the room’s media center and plays an old movie or holovid show – one of the ones he knows Marc likes, with lots of chases and explosions.  Sometimes he just gives the entertainment center virtual assistant a set of criteria and lets it pick something at random.  

Which is how, a week after first waking up, Steven finds himself half-watching something which is so ancient it’s not even a holovid, but an old-style 2-dimensional moving image.  The story is about a man trying to get into a building where his wife is being held hostage, but Steven’s not really paying attention.  He turns it off before the end. 

“Hey,” Marc says, “I was watching that.”

His speech is too slow and a little slurred, but it’s him.

Steven exhales like he’s been holding his breath for a week.  Something tight in his chest loosens.   

“Welcome back,” he says.  “How are you feeling?”

“Like I have the worst hangover ever,” Marc says.  “I can’t stay awake for more than twenty minutes at a stretch and everything feels fuzzy.  I’m not going to be playing chess any time soon.”

“I’m sorry,” Steven tells him.

“For what?  I’m here.   You did it.”

“I nearly killed you,” Steven says unhappily.  A part of him knows that he should probably wait to have this conversation until they’re both further along the path to recovery, but he’s already been waiting to get this off his chest since the moment he woke up.  “That last jump wasn’t syncing, it was… I was consuming you.  You were just disappearing and I couldn’t not do it, I couldn’t stop it.  It was awful.”  

“It wasn’t your fault,” Marc tells him.  “I was completely fucked up.  First of all I couldn’t connect to the body and then, when the sync started, I couldn’t make my own mind work the way I knew it should.  It was like… you know when you’re trying to carry water in your hands and it pours through your fingers?  It was like that, except what was draining away was me.   I couldn’t remember what I was losing, and I kept getting smaller and smaller, until it felt like I was just one thought, and the thought was, Hold on."

“I didn’t think you heard that.”

“I heard.  I held on.”  Marc pauses.  “I’m sorry.  You never should’ve been dragged into my mess.  When I was in jail on Mars and the lawyers showed up, and they told me I could be a composite and work for ViaStellar, part of the reason I said yes was because I figured that I’d fucked up everything so badly that I didn’t deserve to run my own life.  I wanted to hand everything over to someone else so I wouldn’t have to think or feel anything any more. I never even stopped to think who that other person might be or what I was going to pull them into.”

“You know,” Steven says, “I spent my whole life slowly getting sicker.  Getting on to the composite program and getting a match was the only way out I could see, so I just focused on that.  I never really stopped to think about what it would really mean, sharing one life with someone else.  Someone with their own problems.”  He chuckles.

“What’s funny?”

“Dr. Rivetti was right.  We always were more or less the same person.”

“No way are we the same,” Marc objects.  “You’re smarter than me, for a start.”

“You came up with the plan,” Steven reminds him.  “Using Larsson’s own ship’s zip drive to jump the Taweret – that was your idea.”

“Yeah, and we wouldn’t have needed a plan if I hadn’t made a whole bunch of dumb decisions that ended up with Nils Larsson trying to kill me.”

“If one of those dumb decisions was agreeing to be a composite, I might have to be offended.”  

Steven intends that as a joke, and he isn’t expecting the long silence that follows.  It stretches out for so long that he begins to wonder if Marc’s gone to sleep again.  But Marc’s neural map projection is bright and active; he’s still there. 

“No,” Marc replies at last.  “I made so many bad choices, for so long, and then finally I made one good choice by accident, because I didn’t think it was a choice.  But I got that one thing right, and that was the only thing that mattered, because it saved me. You saved me.”

“I was only returning the favor,” Steven says.  “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“I think I started getting some of your memories, right at the end of the sync.  One of them was a desert – it must have been on Earth somewhere.  It was nighttime and very cold, and Earth’s moon was so clear in the sky that I could see the lunar settlements.  Where was that?”

“That sounds like Egypt,” Marc says.  “I was based there for a while.” 

“Did you visit the pyramids?”

“No.  Somehow I never got round to it.”  Then, after a second or two, Marc asks, “Do you still want to go there?”

“Of course I do,” Steven says.  “I’ve wanted to go to Egypt and see the pyramids since I was eight years old.”

“Okay, then.  When we go to Earth, that’s where we’ll go first.  How does that sound?”

“That sounds good,” Steven says.  “Let’s do that.”

They are both quiet for a while after that.  Steven’s just about to ask Marc if he wants him to turn the movie on again when Marc says, “Okay, talking is fucking exhausting.   I’m going to have to check out for a while.”

“Go and rest.  I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Marc goes quiet, and Steven can see the neural map projection next to the bed dimming and slowing as he slips back into a deep and restorative sleep.  

Steven won’t be far behind him, but before he drifts off, he spends a few moments just looking out of the window of their room on Allieve Station.  The view of the planet the station orbits is impressive, it’s true, but that’s not what Steven wants to look at before he goes to sleep. 

He is looking out beyond the world below them, at the infinite horizon of stars.  Somewhere out there are all the planets he used to send ships to: Silvergate, Meili-Difang, Gideon’s World, Juranta, Nepth, Breonso.  And Earth, too, with its lakes and deserts and cities a thousand times the size of Ganymede and ancient wonders and all of it.  It is all there to be seen.  

He falls asleep thinking about all the places they will go.