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  Farago finds a task he has to do back in the cabin. The technicians look embarrassed. They have no idea who we are or what we’re going to do next.

  It’s awkward.

  “It’s like we’ve known each other our entire lives,” Ishikawa says.

  “I don’t know what to do next,” Tak says, with a long look at me. “Might go join Joe and DJ, if they let me. What about you?”

  “I’m going to Seattle,” I say. “If anyone will have me.”

  Farago is back in earshot, up in the hold.

  “They still allow hitchhiking?” I ask him, leaning around the outer bulkhead.

  “Sure!” he says. “If you don’t like the ambulances, I could probably get you any kind of vehicle you want. Might take an hour. Base is on half-duty status, mostly empty now.”

  Borden shakes her head and crinkles the bridge of her nose, looking across the tarmac. We all know what she’s feeling. We’re done. We survived, but everybody on Earth has moved on and we’re left out.

  I nod and say that an ambulance is fine, to start.

  Tak says he wants, needs, to go back to Japan. Ishida says she’s going to stay stateside for the time being, feels more comfortable here. Borden and Ishikawa are going with the truck that will carry the egg.

  And then, we just climb into our conveyances and spread out. We don’t say good-bye, just let the truck and ambulances take us every which direction.

  I’m intent on getting my Earth legs back as fast as I can, and that means walking, running, with as little help as possible. I tell the two technicians to drop me off at the demob.

  The technicians, both young, both female, both Marines, look at each other before the senior in rank, a corporal, answers. “It isn’t open anymore. Everybody’s back who’s coming back.” They want to ask me, “Who the fuck are you, anyway?” But they don’t.

  “How long?” I ask.

  “Seventeen years since they stopped shipping us up and out,” the corporal says. “We think we should take you to Madigan and get you checked out.”

  “No thank you,” I say. “I’d like to walk. Just let me out right over there. Okay?”

  Another look. With no contradictory orders, they comply.

  Pretty soon I realize that nobody down here cares one way or another. Earth, or at least Lewis-McCord, is no longer on alert. I walk. Grass grows in patches through cracks in the airstrip concrete and sidewalks. I don’t run into anybody. There are people driving and walking, way far away, but the base is almost deserted.

  I’m alone. For once, I’m alone and it feels good. No voices in my head.

  I pass through the open gates, guard shack empty, and walk across an overpass to the businesses on the other side of the freeway. Not many people present there, either. It’s early in the morning, traffic on the freeway is light, sun is just breaking through the clouds of the far eastern horizon. I can barely make out Rainier. It has its own spreading white mushroom cap, but that’s breaking up and showing the snowy slopes of the very real and terrestrial volcano—still there.

  Still here.

  I walk along the marginal road. I can still walk. I can still take a breath. The air is unbelievably sweet and everything is so amazingly wide open. I want to cry, really want to cry, but the tears aren’t there.

  Not yet.

  My head is … okay, for now. I’m as home as I’m ever going to be, and I’m going to have to figure out if that makes me happy, might ever make me whole again.

  I wonder what Borden’s going to arrange for the egg. I vow I’ll check up on that as soon as I get my act together, my civilian act.

  But I doubt she’ll tell me.

  Joe or Jacobi, or both, will get things done on Mars—maybe help them dispose of the spent-matter surplus out on some plain somewhere. But Joe won’t stay there forever.

  I should look up the others, too, wherever they’ve hauled off to. We’ll probably run into each other in the next few months, one way or another. I need friends. I know that, but for the moment the luxury of being lonely, of walking with my own trembling legs along the asphalt and over the gravel, then breaking from the road and entering the unguarded scrub woods …

  I wonder if I can find the Muskies.

  More important for the moment, I wonder if somebody will give me a ride into downtown. Wonder if the apartment is still there, still ours, and will recognize me. Wonder if Pike Place Market is still open, still active. I’d love to grab a fresh bunch of celery and chow down. But I don’t have any money. No ID. I don’t want to ask for help, but the technicians gave me a list of numbers to call, and some advice on how to pick up my last paycheck, if there are still accounts for former Skyrines.

  If some cop stops me, I might spend the night in jail, as a vagrant.

  I keep getting this falling sensation in my head, but I’m not falling. I’m walking and looking and breathing and everything’s all right, nothing external is challenging me. Pretty soon I’m going to get hungry, and then I’ll have to figure things out.

  The marginal road goes on and on, past boarded-up businesses—fast food, payday loans, car dealerships—all closed. Effectively, no more SBLM.

  The Hawksbill we rode back on has taken off from the cracked, overgrown runway, flown over me on the marginal road, leaving a smelly rainbow trail, flying off to I do not have the slightest idea where.

  My God. I’ve seen it all, almost from the start and now past the finish. We’ve shed the Gurus, and while there’s still a military—where are they stationed?

  A small pink car whizzes by, like a grapefruit on wheels. I stick out my thumb. My beard is thick; I could be any sort of psycho. The grapefruit doesn’t even slow.

  But another car, an older green hybrid, slows, stops, backs up, and the passenger-side window rolls down.

  “Where you heading?” a young woman asks, checking me over, not unkindly, as if I might have lice.

  “Well, I’d like to get to Disneyland, eventually.”

  She looks at me with a squint. “Can’t take you that far,” she says. “How long you been hitching?”

  “Long time,” I say.

  She unlocks the door and I climb into the kind woman’s car. “You look like a soldier,” she says.

  “Am I that far gone?”

  She smiles. “My father used to fly out of here.” Then she looks at me more closely, with a frown. “There was that one ship this morning … But that can’t be you. Can it? They were coming back from Mars or someplace. It was on the Net.”

  I shake my head. “What year is it?”

  That same expression, but she tells me. I thought I heard seventeen years, but that didn’t account for how long we’d been gone, overall, before the war was declared over and the Wait Staff and Gurus were cleared up, cleared out, handed over to the starshina’s ship.

  Time has really been messed up for those who went to the limit and returned. It’s been thirty years since we flew out to Mars.

  There are still cars, but they don’t fly—so I suppose we’re on our own again, moving at our own human pace.

  I GET OUT in downtown Seattle and say thanks and good-bye. I decide against Pike Place Market, since I don’t have money, and walk across the city, my legs barely able to move as I approach the tower where our apartment was. The tower is still there. It looks older, not so well taken care of.

  At the front glass entrance, I poke in the old security code.

  Wonder of wonders, the door opens.

  I take the shuddering elevator up to the right floor, and as the door opens to let me out, I see an elderly woman with white-flecked black hair, quite plump, wearing a nicely tailored pantsuit, waiting for me.

  “Welcome back, Skyrine!” she says.

  At my look, she puts her hands on her ample hips and gives me a glare.

  “It’s Alice, First Lieutenant Alice Harper—fuckhead!” she says. “I heard you might be coming back. Joe sent me a call from Mars. He says you should look me up, and here you are! Anybody else w
ith you?”

  I tell her not yet.

  The apartment’s very different, but there’s a spare bedroom, I meet Alice’s husband, a nice enough guy, a former Air Force flight surgeon, but not a prick about it—they’ve been married twenty years and living here, taking care of the place—

  But first, Alice goes to the refrigerator and brings me a head of celery, green and freshly washed, dripping. “I remember, Vinnie,” she says. “Welcome home.”

  I take the celery and hold it in my hands, not quite sure what to do with something so utterly precious.

  “What about Teal?” I ask.

  Alice takes a deep breath. “She’s in Africa, I think,” she says. “She’s widowed again, and Division Four buddies tell me she’s been asking if she can return to Mars. Martians always want to go home, isn’t that right, Stu?” she asks her husband.

  He smiles. “That’s what we hear. But she’s pretty old now.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Alice asks. Stu demurs.

  They hand me a glass of apple juice that gives me a solid sugar high, and Stu loans me a pair of pajamas—real pajamas, flannel, corded—and then they take me to the guest room and insist I sleep and after that, join them for breakfast.

  SAYONARA

  The room is quiet.

  I try to sleep, but still can’t. All night I toss and turn, and then comes the panic attack—I could feel it coming—a sudden fear that Ulyanova never actually cleared my head, that it was all deception, and that the last instauration has been upon me ever since I got back, maybe even before, and my head is still filled with Guru shit waiting to bring me up short, bring me down, fill me with fear, make me interesting again.

  I keep asking myself, and keep trying to stop these questions—

  What next?

  Why would the mover of moons and planets have come alive while we were watching?

  I lie on the bed in a pool of rank sweat, as if I’m about to be executed, when I receive another kind of dream.

  A genuine, human vision.

  It’s Ulyanova. She assures me I’m free—we are all about to be free. Looking through her eyes, I see Litvinov and Verushka, and I see Kumar, all standing by the window of the apartment in Moscow, enjoying what seems to be a glorious Russian summer, the air balmy, birds flying, sounds of children playing. They’re eating bread with thick sweet butter, and soup, and sausages.

  They’re waiting. Laughing. Even Litvinov.

  They seem happy.

  The sun is growing brighter. Much, much brighter.

  It’s over, Vinnie.

  Their end is quick.

  I wake up. The curtains have been drawn, but the morning is upon us, and I don’t feel anybody or anything out there. No voices. No presences. My head is really and truly empty, except for my own memories, my own thoughts, which will take me a long while to deal with. But …

  I’m still human. I’m still here.

  And Gurus lie.

  All except one.

  PUTTING ON FLESH

  I take walks around Seattle every day, building up my muscles, my strength, airing out my head and my thoughts, just watching people go on about living. For the first few weeks, I felt both deeply sad and somehow superior, for all the amazing and terrifying and deadly things I’ve seen and the brave and insanely dedicated people I’ve known and faraway places I’ve been. Here, people just walk, just drive, just talk, sitting in coffee shops, some staring at nothing as their implants guide them around the world …

  Not every second could be their last.

  These people I understand and envy and pity at the same time.

  Mostly at the ends of my hikes I find a place that’s new and peaceful and observe the play of light and shadow on trees, or the sheen and sparkle of rain and grayness, on buildings, on faces, on gardens and flowers and clouds and birds and squirrels, and slowly get back to realizing that the simplest pleasures are the most important, the biggest reasons we’re here—if there is ever an explanation for being alive, for observing, for taking up space and eating food.

  For not being a War Dog much longer.

  Assuming true physical form, true emotion.

  Putting on flesh.

  One evening at dusk I make my way back to the condominium, where Alice and her husband are setting out dinner in front of that fabulous view of Puget Sound. They put a whiskey-and-soda in my hand—I can drink again, after a week or two when anything of the sort made me queasy, just as if I were still sweating out Cosmoline.

  And Alice tells me, setting out a fourth place at the table, that she’s invited a guest to join us.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she says, with a cat-on-mouse expression that dares me to object, to get all pissy and closed down and neurotic. I don’t dare do that, so I smile and ask who it is. I know it isn’t Joe or DJ. I’d feel them, somehow.

  But then I do feel who it is.

  “It’s a young woman,” Alice says, more cat than ever, playing with me, playing with me for what she thinks is my own good. “She’s in town finishing medical treatments and she asked if we were open to a visit.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “She says you were very sweet out there”—Alice waves her hand at the sky—“when you weren’t being a complete bastard—but you were pretty sweet to her when it counted. She says don’t expect anything, but she’d like to see you again. I answered for you.”

  Someone else putting on flesh.

  Stu brings in a freshly opened bottle of wine. The deep green bottle glints in the setting sun. His golden smile is big enough to show teeth. He wants me out of here as soon as possible. “We’re having pinot noir with the salmon,” he says. “Special occasion.”

  God save me.

  UPGRADES

  We’ve been home three years, and I won’t go into our life after war, except to add that Joe has sent me a package from Mars, possible now that relations are reestablished—but no doubt incredibly expensive.

  Chihiro and I open the box with a sense of strong doubt. In the box is a vial of beige powder—Ice Moon Tea, I suspect—and a note scrawled with a shaky hand in pencil on rough paper.

  The note reads, “Heard the good news! Don’t want to upset the domestic applecart, but you’ve had enough peace and quiet. You and Ishida should both return to Mars. We’ve found Teal’s daughter. She’s much more than we could have expected. Major upgrade. She says big changes are coming—good changes. I can’t deal with her all by myself, old friends!

  “Come back and see.”

  Also by GREG BEAR

  Hegira

  Beyond Heaven’s River

  Psychlone

  Strength of Stones

  The Wind from a Burning Woman (collection)

  Corona

  Songs of Earth and Power

  Blood Music

  Eon

  The Forge of God

  Tangents (collection)

  Sleepside Story

  Queen of Angels

  Eternity

  Anvil of Stars

  Bear’s Fantasies (collection)

  Heads

  Moving Mars

  New Legends (anthology)

  Dinosaur Summer

  Foundation and Chaos

  Slant

  Darwin’s Radio

  Collected Stories of Greg Bear

  Vitals

  Darwin’s Children

  Dead Lines

  Quantico

  City at the End of Time

  Mariposa

  Hull Zero Three

  Halo Forerunner Trilogy

  War Dogs

  Killing Titan

  Take Back the Sky

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