---

We Who Live in the Heart (Part 3 of 3)

By Kelly Robson

(…Continued from Part 2)

Once we’re in the equatorial stream, we ride the wind until we get into the right general area. Then we wipe off the appetite suppressant, and hunger sends us straight into the arms of the nearest electrical storm.

The urge to feed is a powerful motivator for most organisms. Mama chases all the algae she can find, and gobbles it double-time. For us on the inside, it’s like an old-style history doc. Everyone stays strapped in their hammocks and rides out the weather as we pitch around on the high seas.

I always enjoy the feeding frenzy; it gets the blood flowing.

I’d just settled to enjoy the wild ride when Ricci pinged me.

Two crews tried surgical interventions on the regenerated tissue. Let me know what you think, okay? Maybe now we can convince them to let you help.

The message was accompanied by bookmarks to live feeds from the supply ships. The first feed showed a whale wedging itself backward into a crevasse, its petals waving back and forth as it wiggled deeper into the canyon-like crack in the ice.

The other feed showed a whale scraping its main valve along a serrated ridge of ice. Its oval body stretched and flexed, its bladders bulged. Its petals curled inward then snapped into rigid extension as the force of its body crashed down on the ice’s knife edge.

Inside both whales, tiny specks bounced through the sinuses. I could only imagine what the crew was doing — what I would do in that situation. If they wanted to live, they had to leave. Fast.

A chill slipped under my skin. My fault. If those whales died, if those crews died, I was to blame. Me alone. Not the two crews. They were obviously desperate enough to try anything. I should have contacted them myself, and offered whatever false apologies would get them to accept my help.

But chances are it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, except they would have had me to blame. Another entry in my list of crimes.

Frost spread across my flesh and raised goosebumps. I tugged on my hammock’s buckles to make sure they were secure against the constant pitching and heaving, dialed up the temperature, and snuggled deeper into my quilt. I fired up my simulation model and wandered through towering mountains of pseudoneural tissue, pondering the problem, delving deeper and deeper through chains of crystalized tissue until they danced behind my eyelids. Swirling, stacking, combining and recombining…

I was nearly asleep when I heard Ricci’s voice.

“Hey, Doc, can we talk?”

I thought I was dreaming. But no, she was right outside my hammock, gripping the tethers and getting knocked off her feet with every jolt and flex. Her goggled and masked face was lit by a mad flurry of light from the bolts coruscating in every direction just beyond the skin.

“Are you nuts?” I yanked open the hammock seal. “Get in here.”

She plunged through the electrostatic barrier and rolled to the far side of my bed. When she came up, her hair stood on end with static electricity.

“Whoa.” She swiped off her goggles and breather, stuffed them in one of the hammock pouches, then flattened the dark nimbus of her hair with her palms and grinned. “It’s wild out there.”

I pulled my quilt up to my chin and scowled. “That was stupid.”

“Yeah, I know but you didn’t ping me back. This is an important situation, right? Life or death.”

I sighed. “If you want to rescue people, there are vocations for that.”

“Don’t we have a duty to help people when we can?”

“Some people don’t want to be helped. They just want to be left alone.”

“Like you?”

“Nothing you’re doing is helping me, Ricci.”

“Okay, okay. But if we can figure out a way to help, that’s good too. Better than good. Everyone wins.”

Lying there in my hammock, facing Ricci sprawled at the opposite end and taking up more than half of the space, I finally figured out what kind of person she was.

“You’re a meddler, Ricci. A busybody. You were wasted in the sciences. You should have studied social dynamics and targeted a career in one-on-one social work.”

She laughed.

“Listen.” I held out my hand, palm up. She took it right away, didn’t hesitate. Her hand was warm. Almost feverish. “If you want to stay in the crew, you have to relax. Okay? We can’t have emergencies every week. None of us are here for that.”

She squeezed my hand and nodded.

“A little excitement is fine, once in a while,” I continued. “Obviously this is an extraordinary situation. But if you keep looking for adventure, we’ll shunt you back to Jane without a second thought.”

She twisted the grip into a handshake and gave me two formal pumps. Then she reached for the hammock seal. She would have climbed out into the maelstrom if I hadn’t stopped her.

“You can’t do that,” I yelled. “No wandering around when we’re in a feeding frenzy. You’ll get killed. Kill us too, if you go through the wrong bladder wall.”

She smiled then, like she didn’t believe me, like it was just some excuse to keep her in my hammock. And when she settled back down, it wasn’t at the opposite end. She snuggled in right beside me, companionable as anything, or even more.

“Don’t you get lonely, Doc?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Not much.”

Our hammocks are roomy, but Ricci didn’t give me much space, and though the tethers absorb movement, we were still jostling against each other.

“Because you don’t need anybody or anything.” Her voice in my ear, soft as a caress.

“Something like that.”

“Maybe, eventually, you’ll change your mind about that.”

What happened next wasn’t my idea. I was long out of practice, but Ricci had my full and enthusiastic cooperation.

---

Down belowground, I was a surgeon, and a good one. My specialty was splicing neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus. My skills were in high demand. So high, in fact, that I had a massive support team.

I’m not talking about a part-time admin or social facilitator. Anyone can have those. I had an entire cadre of people fully dedicated to making sure that if I spent most of my time working and sleeping, what little time remained would be optimized to support physical, emotional, and intellectual health. All my needs were plotted and graphed. People had meetings to argue, for example, over what type of sex best maintained my healthiest emotional state, and once that was decided, they’d argue over the best way to offer that opportunity to me.

That’s just an example. I’m only guessing. They kept the administrative muddle under veil. Day-to-day, I only had contact with a few of my staff, and usually I was too busy with my own work to think about theirs. But for a lot of people, I was a billable-hours bonanza.

But despite all their hard work, despite the hedonics modeling, best-practice scenarios, and time-tested decision trees, I burned out.

It wasn’t their fault. It was mine. I was, and remain, only human.

I could have just reduced my surgery time. I could have switched to teaching or coaching other surgeons. But no. Some people approach life like it’s an all-or-nothing game. That’s me. I couldn’t be all, so I decided to become nothing.

Until Ricci came along, that is.

When the storm ended, the two of us had to face a gauntlet of salacious grins and saucy comments. I didn’t blush, or at least not much. Ricci had put the spark of life in a part of me that had been dark for far too long. I was proud to have her in my crew, in my hammock, in my life.

The whole hab gave us a hard time. The joke that gave them the biggest fits, and made even Vula cling helplessly to the rumpus room netting as she convulsed with laughter, involved the two of us calling for evac and setting up a crèche in the most socially conservative hab down belowground. Something about imagining us in swathed in religious habits and swarming with crechies tweaked everyone’s funny bones.

Ricci weathered the ridicule better than me. I left to fill the water kegs, and by the time I returned, the hilarity had worn itself out.

The eight of us lounged in the rumpus room, the netting gently swaying to and fro as we drifted in bright directional light of the aquapause. Water spilled off the skin and threw dappled shadows across the room. Vula had launched the media drones and we’d all settled down to watch the feeds.

More than once I caught myself brainlessly staring at Ricci, but I kept my goggles on so nobody noticed. I hope.

Two hundred kilometers to the northwest and far below us, the seventeen remaining whales congregated in the swirling winds above a dome-shaped mesa that calved monstrous sheets of ice down its massive flanks. A dark electrical storm massed on the horizon, with all its promise of rich concentrations of algae, but the whales didn’t move toward it, just kept circulating and converging, plucking at each other’s skin.

Three hundred kilometers west lay the abandoned corpses of two whales, their deflated bladders draped over warped sinus skeletons half-buried in slush.

Our media drones got there too late to trap the whales’ death throes, and I was glad. But Vula and Bouche trapped great visuals of the rescue, showing the valiant supply ship crews swooping in to pluck brightly colored bodybags out of the air. Maybe the crews put a little more of a spin on their maneuvering than they needed too, but who could blame them? They rarely got a job worth bragging about.

One of Bouche’s media broker friends put the rescue feeds out to market. They started getting good play right away. Bouche fired the media licensing statement into the middle of the room. The numbers glowed green and flickered as they climbed.

“Look at these fees,” she said. “This will underwrite our power consumption for a couple years.”

“That’s great, Bouchie,” I murmured, and flicked the statement out of my visual field.

Night was coming, and it presented a hard deadline. If the whales didn’t move before dark, they’d all die.

Ricci moved closer to me in the netting and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I turned my head and touched my lips to her temple, just for a moment. I was deep in my brain simulation, working on the problem. But I kept an eye on the feeds. When the whales collided, I held my breath. As the bladders stretched and bulged, I cringed, certain they’d reach their elastic limit and we would see a whale pop, its massive sinuses rupture, its skin tear away and its body plunge to splatter on the icy surface below. But they didn’t. They bounced off each other in slow motion and resumed their aimless circulation.

Hours passed. Eddy got up, extruded a meal, and passed the containers around the netting. Chara and Treasure slipped out of the room. Vula was only half-present – she was working in her studio, sculpting maquettes of popped bladders and painfully twisted corpses.

Eddy yawned. “How long can these whales live without feeding?”

I forced a stream of breath through my lips, fluttering the fringe of my bangs. “I don’t know. Indefinitely, maybe, if the crews can figure out a way to provide nutrition internally.”

“If they keep their whales fed, maybe they’ll just keep stumbling around, crashing into each other.” Vula’s voice was slurred, her eyes unfocused as she juggled multiple streams.

“I’m more worried about nightfall, actually,” I said.

Ever since we’d dragged ourselves out of my hammock, Ricci had been trying to pry information from emergency response up the beanstalk, from the supply ship crews who were circling site, and from the whale crews. They were getting increasingly frantic as time clicked by, and keeping us informed wasn’t high on their list of priorities.

I rested my palm on the inside of Ricci’s knee. “Are the other crews talking to you yet?”

She sat up straight and gave me a pained smile. “A little. I wasn’t getting anywhere, but Jane’s been giving me some tips.”

That woke everyone up. Even Vula snapped right out of her creative fugue.

“Is Jane helping us?” Chara asked, and when Ricci nodded she demanded, “Why are you keeping her to yourself?”

Ricci shrugged. “Jane doesn’t know anything about whales.”

“If she’s been helping you maybe she can help us too,” said Eddy.

“Yeah, come on Ricci, stop hogging Jane.” Bouche raked her fingers through her hair, sculpting it into artful tufts. “I want to know what she thinks of all this.”

“All right,” Ricci said. “I’ll ask her.”

A few moments later she fired Jane’s feed into the room and adjusted the perspective so her friend seemed to be sitting in the middle of the room. She wore a baggy black tunic and trousers, and her hair was gathered into a pony tail that draped over the back of her chair. The pinnas of her ears were perforated in a delicate lace pattern.

Treasure and Chara came barreling down the access sinus and plunged through the hatch. They hopped over to their usual spot in the netting and settled in. Jane waved at them.

“We’re making you an honorary crew member,” Eddy told Jane. “Ricci has to share you with us. We all get equal Jane time.”

“I didn’t agree to that,” said Ricci.

“Fight over me later, when everyone’s safe.” Jane said. “I don’t understand why the other crews are delaying evacuation. Who would risk dying when they can just leave?”

Everyone laughed.

“This cadre self-selects for extremists.” Eddy rotated her finger over her head, encompassing all of us in the gesture. “People like us would rather die than back down.”

“I guess you’re not alone in that,” said Jane. “Every hab has plenty of stubborn people.”

“But unlike them, we built everything we have,” I said. “That makes it much harder to give up.”

“Looks like someone finally made a decision, though.” Ricci maximized the main feed. Jane wheeled around to join us at the netting.

Glowing dots tracked tiny specks across the wide mesa, pursued by flashing trails of locational data. Vula’s media drones zoomed in, showing a succession of brightly colored, hard-shell bodybags shunting though the main valves. Sleet built up along their edges, quickly hardening to a solid coating of ice.

“Quitters,” Treasure murmured under her breath.

Jane looked shocked.

“If you think you know what you’d do in their place, you’re wrong,” I said. “Nobody knows.”

“I’d stay,” Treasure said. “I’ll never leave Mama.”

Chara grinned. “Me too. We’ll die together if we had to.”

Bouche pointed at the two of them. “If we ever have to evac, you two are going last.”

Jane expression of shock widened, then she gathered herself into a detached and professional calm.

Ricci squeezed my hand. “The supply ships want to shuttle some of the evacuees to us instead of taking them all the way to the beanstalk. How many can we carry?”

I checked the mass budget and made a few quick calculations. “About twenty. More if we dump mass.” I raised my voice. “Let’s pitch and ditch everything we can. If it’s not enough we can think about culling a little water and feedstock. Is everyone okay with that?”

To my surprise, nobody argued. I’d rarely seen the crew move so fast, but with Jane around everyone wanted to look like a hero.

---

Life has rarely felt as sunny as it did that day.

Watching the others abandon their whales was deeply satisfying. It’s not often in life you can count your victories, but each of those candy-colored, human-sized pods was a score for me and a big, glaring zero for my old, unlamented colleagues. I’d outlasted them.

Not only that, but I had a new lover, a mostly-harmonious crew of friends, and the freedom to go anywhere and do anything I liked, as long as it could be done from within the creature I called home.

But mostly, I loved having an important job to do.

I checked our location to make sure we were far enough away that if the other whales began to drift, they wouldn’t wander into the debris stream. Then we paired into work teams, pulled redundant equipment, ferried it to the main valve, and jettisoned it.

I kept a tight eye on the mass budget, watched for tissue stress around the valve, and made strict calls on what to chuck and what to keep.

Hygiene and maintenance bots were sacrosanct. Toilets and hygiene stations, too. Safety equipment, netting, hammocks – all essential. But each of us had fifty kilos of personal effects. I ditched mine first. Clothes, jewelry, mementos, a few pieces of art – some of it real artisan work but not worth a human life. Vula tossed a dozen little sculptures, all gifts from friends and admirers. Eddy was glad to have an excuse to throw out the guitar she’d never learned to learn to play. Treasure had a box of ancient hand-painted dinnerware inherited from her crèche; absolutely irreplaceable, but they went too. Chara threw out her devotional shrine. It was gold and took up most of her mass allowance, but we could fab another.

We even tossed the orang bot. We all liked the furry thing, but it was heavy. Bouche stripped out its proprietary motor modules and tossed the shell. We’d fab another, eventually.

If we’d had time for second thoughts, maybe the decisions would have been more difficult. Or maybe not. People were watching, and we knew it. Having an audience helped us cooperate.

It wasn’t just Jane we were trying to impress. Bouche’s media output was gathering a lot of followers. We weren’t just trapping the drama anymore, we were part of the story.

Bouche monitored our followship, both the raw access stats and the digested analysis from the PR firm she’d engaged to boost the feed’s profile. When the first supply ship backed up to our valve and we began pulling bodybags inside, Bouche whooped. Our numbers had just gone atmospheric.

We were a clown show, though. Eight of us crowded in the isthmus sinus, shuttling bodybags, everyone bouncing around madly and getting in each other’s way. Jane helped sort us out by monitoring the overhead cameras and doing crowd control. Me, I tried not to be an obstruction while making load-balancing decisions. Though we’d never taken on so much weight at once, I didn’t anticipate any problems. But I only looked at strict mathematical tolerances. I’m not an engineer; I didn’t consider the knock-on effects of the sudden mass shift.

In the end, we took on thirty-eight bodybags. We were still distributing them throughout the sinuses when Ricci reported the rescue was over.

That’s it. The cargo ships have forty-five bodybags. They’re making the run to the beanstalk now.

Is that all? If the ships are full, we could prune some feedstock.

Everyone else is staying. They’re still betting their whales will move.

When the last bodybag was secured so it wouldn’t pitch through a bladder, I might have noticed we were drifting toward the mesa. But I was too busy making sure the new cargo was secure and accounted for.

I pinged each unit, loaded their signatures into the maintenance dashboard, mapped their locations, checked the data in the mass budget, created a new dashboard for monitoring the new cargo’s power consumption, consumables, and useful life. Finally, I cross-checked our manifest against the records the supply ships had given us.

That was when I realized we were carrying two members of my original crew.

When Ricci found me, I was pacing the dorsal sinus, up and down, arguing with myself. Mostly silently.

“If you’re having some kind of emotional crisis, I’m sure Jane would love to help,” she said.

I spun on my heel and stomped away, bouncing off the walls.

She yelled after me. “Not me though. I don’t actually care about your emotional problems.”

I bounced off a wall once more and stopped, both hands gripping its clear ridged surface.

“No?” I asked. “Why don’t you care?”

“Because I’m too self-involved.”

I laughed. Ricci reached out and ruffled her fingers through the short hair on the back of my neck. Her touch sent an electric jolt through my nerves.

“Maybe that’s why we get along so well,” she said softly. “We’re a lot alike.”

Kissing while wearing goggles and a breather is awkward and unsatisfying. I pulled her close and pressed my palms to the soft pad of flesh at the base of her spine. I held her until she got restless, then she took my hand and led me to the rumpus room.

Bouche lounged in the netting, eyes closed.

“Bouchie is giving a media interview,” Ricci whispered. “An agent is booking her appearances and negotiating fees. If we get enough, we can upgrade the extruder and subscribe to a new recipe bank.”

I pulled a bulb out of the extruder. “She’ll be hero of the hab.”

“You could wake them up, you know.”

“Wake up who?” I asked, and took a deep swig of sweet caffeine.

“Your old buddies. In the bodybags. Wake them up. Have it out.”

I managed to swallow without choking. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Maybe they’ll apologize.”

I laughed, a little too hard, a little too long, and only stopped when Ricci began to looked offended.

“We can’t wake them,” I said. “Where would they sleep until we got to the beanstalk?”

“They can have my hammock.” She sidled close. “I’ll bunk with you.”

We kissed then, and properly. Thoroughly. Until I met Ricci, I’d been a shrunken bladder; nobody knew my possible dimensions. Ricci filled me up. I expanded, large enough to contain whole universes.

“No. They’re old news.” I kissed her again and ran my finger along the edge of her jaw. “It was another life. They doesn’t matter anymore.”

Strange thing was, saying those words made it true. All I cared about was Ricci, and all I could see was the glowing possibility of a future together, rising over a broad horizon.

---

Twilight began to move over us. We only had a little time to spare before we recalled the media drones, wiped off the appetite suppressant, and left the other crews to freeze in the dark.

We gathered in the rumpus room, all watching the same feed. Whales circulated above the mesa. Slanting sunlight cast deep orange reflections across their skins, their windward surfaces creamy with blowing snow. Inside, dark spots bounced around the sinuses. If I held my breath, I could almost hear their words, follow their arguments. When I bit my lip, I tasted their tears.

“More than a hundred people,” Jane said. “I still don’t understand why they’d decide to commit suicide. A few maybe, but not so many.”

“Some will evac before it’s too late.” Vula shrugged. “And as for the rest, it’s their own decision. I can’t say I would do anything different. And I hope I never find out.”

I shivered. “Agreed.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Jane said. “Someone must be exercising duress.”

“Nobody forces anyone to do anything out here, any more than they do down belowground,” said Treasure.

“Yeah,” said Chara. “We’re not crechies, Jane. We do what we want.”

Jane sputtered, trying to apologize.

“It’s okay,” Eddy told her. “We’re all upset. None of us really understand.”

“The whales still might move,” said Bouche. “They can spend a little time in the dark, right Doc?”

I set a timer with a generous margin for error and fired it into the middle of the room. “Eight minutes, then we have to leave. The other whales will have a little more than thirty minutes before they freeze at full dark. Then their bladders burst.”

Chara and Treasure pulled themselves out of the netting.

“We’re not watching this,” Chara said. “If you want to hang overhead and root for them to evac, go ahead.”

We all waved goodnight. The two of them stumped away to their hammock, and silence settled over the rumpus room. Just the whoosh and murmur of the bladders, and the faint skiff of wind over the skin. A few early stars winked through the clouds. They seemed compassionate, somehow. Understanding. Looking at those bright pinpoints, I understood how on ancient Earth, people might use the stars to conjure gods.

I put my arm around Ricci’s shoulders and drew her close. She let me hold her for two minutes, no more, and then she pulled away.

“I can’t watch this either,” she said. “I have to do something.”

“I know.” I drew her hand back just for a moment and planted a kiss on the palm. “It’s hard.”

Vula nodded, and Jane, too. Eddy and Bouche both got up and hugged her. Eleanora kept her head down, hiding her tears. The electrostatic membrane crackled as Ricci left.

“Do you know some of the people down there, Doc?” asked Jane.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Not for a long time.”

We fell quiet again, watching the numbers on the countdown. Ricci had left her shadow beside me. I felt her cold absence; something missing that should be whole. I could have spied on her, see where she’d gone, but no. She deserved her privacy.

The first little quake shuddering through the sinuses told me exactly where she was.

I checked our location, blinked, and then checked it again. We were right over the mesa, above the other whales, all seventeen of them. Wind, bad luck, or instinct had had brought us there – but did it matter? Ricci – her location mattered. She was in the caudal stump, with the waste pellets, and the secondary valve.

No. Ricci, no. I slapped my breather on and launched myself out of the rumpus room, running aft as fast as I could. Don’t do that. Stop.

I lost my footing and bounced hard. You might hit them. You might…

Kill them.

When I got to the caudal stump, Ricci was just clicking the last pellet through the valve. If we’d dumped them during the pitch and ditch, none of it would have happened. But dry waste is light. We’d accumulated ten pellets, only five kilograms, so I hadn’t bothered with them.

But a half-kilo pellet falling from a height can do a lot of damage.

I fired the feed into the middle of the sinus. One whale was thrashing on the slushy mesa surface, half-obscured by the concussive debris. Two more were falling, twisting in agony, their bladders tattered and flapping. Another three would have escaped damage, but they circulated into the path of the oncoming pellets, Each one burst in turn, as if a giant hand had reached down and squeezed the life out of them.

Ricci was in my arms, then. Both of us quaking, falling to our knees. Holding each other and squeezing hard, as if we could break each other’s bones with the force of our own mistakes.

---

Six whales. Twenty-two people. All dead.

The other eleven whales scattered. One fled east and plunged through the twilight band into night. Its skin and bladders froze and burst, and its sinus skeleton shattered on the jagged ice. Its crew had been one of the most stubborn  — none had evacuated. They all died. Ten people.

In total, thirty-two died because Ricci made an unwise decision.

The remaining ten whales re-congregated over a slushy depression near the beanstalk. Ricci had bought the surviving crews a few more hours, so they tried a solution along the lines Ricci had discovered. Ice climbers use drones with controlled explosive capabilities to stabilize  their climbing routes. They tried a test; it worked – the whales fled again, but in the wrong direction and re-congregated close to the leading edge of night.

In the end, the others evacuated. All seventy got in their bodybags and called for evac.

By strict accounting, Ricci’s actions led to a positive outcome. I remind her of that whenever I can. She says it doesn’t matter — we don’t play math games with human lives. Dead is dead, and nothing will change that.

And she’s right, because the moment she dumped those pellets, Ricci became the most notorious murderer our planet has ever known.

The other habs insist we hand her over to a conflict resolution panel. They’ve sent negotiators, diplomats — they’ve even sent Jane — but we won’t give her up. To them, that proves we’re dangerous. Criminals. Outlaws.

But we live in the heart of the matter, and we see it a little differently.

Ricci did nothing wrong. It was a desperate situation and she made a desperate call. Any one of us might have done the same thing, if we’d been smart enough to think of it.

We’re a solid band of outlaws, now. Vula, Treasure, Chara, Eddy, Bouche, Eleanora, Ricci, and me. We refuse to play nice with the other habs. They could cut off our feedstock, power, and data, but we’re betting they won’t. If they did, our blood would be on their hands.

So none of us are going anywhere. Why would we leave? The whole planet is ours, with unlimited horizons.

---

Host Commentary

By Alasdair Stuart

‘Am I asking too many questions, Doc?’

We’ve come a long way from there, and no distance at all. Ricci’s outsider status means they occupy a quantum superposition in the story and in the ethics of this remarkable world. They make a good call for the right reasons. They help. They inadvertently kill so many people. They’re a hero. A murderer. An outcast. A partner, Loveless and worthy of love. Every opinion and perspective possible picking its way across society the way Doc, Ricci and the rest pick their way through the whale.

I hate that this happens but I love that this sort of complexity, this collision, once again, happens. This time it’s pressure and hope, inexperience and brutal reality and the horrifying literal collision of small objects, large creatures and physics.

One of the first notes I made for this part was ‘individuality as defiance’ and that’s doubly true by the time you get to the end of the story. That sense of rising to the occasion, and how sometimes, through no fault but circumstance, you aren’t enough or it doesn’t go right enough is heartbreaking and omnipresent here. I love the line about the supply ship crews hotdogging, because why wouldn’t you? I love, too that our crew’s heroism is defined by their pragmatism. They’ll help. They’ll get paid. 

But this line is where the story lives for me:

“If you think you know what you’d do in their place, you’re wrong,” I said. “Nobody knows.”

It’s not that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are are wrong, it’s just that they need beta readers. Robson has such a kind view of people and I adore that this line echoes so hard throughout the rest of the story and the ending especially. This is a story about everyone doing their best, everyone moving outside their comfort zone and it mostly working. Small choices with massive consequences, individual people heading for the same horizon in an infinity of directions. A horizon that’s always there but never quite there enough. The agony of that and the joy of another chance to get it right, in the company of the people you love.

Brilliant work, thanks everyone. 

Onto the subject of subscribing and support:  Escape Pod has long survived on donations alone, and even though there’s ads now, subscribing through our Patreon remains the best way to ensure we can keep bringing you one story, told well. And, if you subscribe at the $7 tier, you can get rid of the ads again! So if you’d like to support what we and the rest of Escape Artists do, please join our Patreon at patreon.com/EAPodcasts through your browser, to avoid paying the app store fees. Prefer another method? There are details for supporting us via Twitch, Amazon Prime, Ko-Fi and PayPal on EscapeArtists.net, or you can reach out directly by email at donations@escapeartists.net with any questions and someone will get back to you.

The legal bit: Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. That means you can share it, and please do!, but you cannot sell it and you cannot change it; if you want specifics, check creativecommons.org. Our music is by Daikaiju.

Oh and one last thing, Columbo style. Escape Pod is proud to say that we have partnered with Sleepphones headphones to provide a special Escape Pod branded set of headphones. 

SleepPhones® headphones are soft headphones that you can wear while you sleep. In fact, Marguerite has a pair she wears on international flights. They’re comfortable, slim and essentially ‘headphones in a headband’. So you put it on, unplug and surround yourself in an ultimate sound experience – without disturbing, or being disturbed by, the person next to you. SleepPhones® headphones were designed by a family doctor and provide wearable comfort that’s literally music to your ears and they’re available with both standard 3.5mm audio jacks and Bluetooth.

They’re easy to clean, comfortable and now you can get them with our logo on the headband! And you can get a 10% discount off your order of the Escape Pod branded sleep phones if you use the coupon code EscapePOD (all one word.)

Follow the link in our shownotes to Sleepphones and remember the code ESCAPEPOD to get 10% off!

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Daikaijiu.

We’ll see you next week. Before then, we’re sending you off into the week with this, from Cloudward Ho.

On high we go to break the binding bond,

Spur outward past beyond,

Set blaze to bravery’s light,

Bring hope to starry night,

Set wrongs to right, and freedom’s fight

To ever chase the day in winged flight

On high we go

Cloudward, ho