But I did understand the inky-footed ant.

“Will you really turn my nu-home into any shape I want?” I asked with a little sniff.

“But of course, Signorina! It will be my joy. My delight. As long as you do not ask me to open the portal.”

“I won’t ask you to do that. If you promise?”

“For you, I would promise the stars, the moon…”

“Do you promise me that if you really love me you will change the shape into my wildest dream? No opening the portal, of course.”

“I promise. It will be my pleasure,” said the Harry’s Bar unit.

“Well, I’ll try a few,” I said, doing my best to sound interested without betraying the hammering of my heart. “What about a tall, thin tower?”

The walls drew in. Pretty soon there was barely room for a spiral stair going up. I clapped my hands. “Wonderful. You really are in control of it.”

“Ah, that was easy,” said the bot. “What about the Taj Mahal?”

“No. I want a Boy’s surface,” I said calmly.

The bot paused. “A what?”

“A Boy’s surface. Search under mathematics.”

There was a long pause. Long for a bot, anyway. “I can do the immersion…”

“Prove you love me. Show me the real thing,” I said, patting the Harry’s Bar’s upper surface. It hadn’t known what a Boy’s surface was. Perhaps it wouldn’t realize what it implied.

The nu-home began to change. It was obviously taking a lot of the calculating power because the livvy screening went blank and the walls returned to their natural beige. The pictures of the Boy’s surface had looked like a three-legged octopus eating itself. And that inky-footed ant had walked from the outside to the inside… of something born out of a sphere.

“Super,” I said, walking away as nonchalantly as I could. “Fix me a manticore special, would you.”

I hated manticores. But they took even a sophisticated machine like Harry’s Bar a good two minutes to make, and I had slipped my shoes off and was stumbling into one of the octopus arms. With any luck that rolled Mobius would take me out, even if I didn’t have ink on my feet. I ran for my freedom. Ran as fast as I could up the twisting passage. It was closing as I ran. But conformational surfaces take a while to change. Behind me, a despairing “Signorina, your manticore special” echoed.

I could see natural light, and I dived and crawled frantically through the gap to tumble out onto the grass.

Well, I was out. Out into a beautiful late afternoon.

But, well, wherever out was, it wasn’t the Greater United States. Or not as I remembered it. The flag on the flagpole outside the white stucco building had far too few stars. And the hillside was plaited with vines with autumn colors. There was a moment of shock… and then relief. It might not be the Greater United States. But it was out. Free. A life-prisoner is entitled to a bit of post-traumatic stress craziness when they break out. And, well, this looked nicer than home.

Maybe the clear air did something for my head. I remembered seeing something about non-Euclidean space in that math module. Stuff like pinch points and pseudo-Riemannian manifolds and extra dimensions had floated right above me.

But in the meantime, there was a really cute boy staring at me. I’d been half-convinced I’d never see one again.

And I felt I owed my interest in boys something.

Editor’s note: Do a search online for “Boy’s surface mathematics” when you get a chance. It’s fascinating.

TRAINER OF WHALES by Brenda Cooper

Kitha strained to see past the farm’s lights up into the darkness of the sea. Three great blue whales swam overheard, towing white nets full of sea-city products like farmed fish, sponges, and hand-made jewelry. Even harnessed, with the big bulky nets trailing beside them, the whales seemed full of grace and power. Kitha, on the other hand, was heavy in her farming suit, the weights around her waist set to keep her at just the right height to mind the deep-sea kelp that Downbelow Dome farmed. The waving multicolored fronds had once captivated her. She had made games of counting colorful engineered symbiote-fish and checking the great plants for damage and parasites, priding herself on how well she saw every detail of the beds. But now, a year into her new job, the enormity of her lost dreams was heavier than her pressurized and weighted suit.

Her sigh sent a froth of tiny bubbles up from her breather, a trail of precious air leaking along her face. She kicked hard, forcing her eyes down. It was off-harvest season, and all she had to do for the gene-engineered food crop was measure fronds and watch for broken stems.

A familiar attention-code sang into her ear. Kitha tongued her breather away so she could talk. “Jonathan? How was school?” They’d argued this morning, and she wasn’t even sure he’d gone to school.

“Boring, Mom. Can I go to Lincka’s? Her mom is home this shift and she promised to create cookies and set out a game for us.”

Kitha winced. It was good Jonathan wanted to be around an adult. If only he wanted to be around her as much as she wanted to be a good mother. “Sure, honey. But you have to be home by seven.”

“But bedtime’s not until nine!” he protested.

Kitha would be off shift at six, and this meant she’d go home to an empty apartment. She inhaled, biting down on her breather so hard she was afraid to open her mouth in case she’d punctured the damn thing. Having Jonathan had driven her from school, from the biggest underwater city of all, New Seadon, to this godforsaken boring job. But it paid well enough-barely-to keep her ten-year-old boy both in school and far, far away from his father. She glanced up again before she answered, but the whales had gone on, surely halfway to the next sea-city by now. She relaxed her jaw. Her breather still worked. She’d stress-fractured two of them in last six months and was down to one spare. “Eight.”

He must have known by her tone of voice that he wasn’t about to get more time. He just said, “Sure, Mom. See you at eight.” As usual, he sounded disgusted with her.

She sighed again and dove deeper into the brown forest, brushing aside a twenty-foot strand of kelp, careful not to tangle her feet. If only she’d been able to figure out how to finish school herself. She dreamed of becoming a whale-trainer. Up until last year when she took this nothing job and moved to this nothing dome, she’d been on her way to a bio-trainer school. She’d read every book she could find on whales and practiced training techniques on the rather dumb dolphin-bots that watched the perimeter of the fields. She never got close enough to real whales to practice on them. But since she’d given up her dreams for Jonathan, she only watched the great, beautiful beasts. Dreams, swimming out of her reach.

The next hour of her shift seemed to take ten hours. Finally, the half-shift prep tones filled her bubble-helmet. She started back, mouth watering as she thought about the roast fish that waited for her in the common shift kitchen.

Kelp slapped her all along her left side, and she swirled sideways, disoriented. Kelp slapped her right, pushing her back. A warning scream belled out of the speakers in her helmet and then went silent.

An undersea quake.

Downbelow Dome. Surely the warning would keep going off if the city was okay. Or at least an all-clear. The kelp around her still swayed back and forth as if an unseen hand shook its roots. What had her safety manual said about earthquakes?

She pumped her legs, dodging kelp, telling herself it was over and long floating objects in motion tended to stay in motion.

Jonathan. She swam harder, her focus suddenly clear.

Don’t think about having just an hour of air, she thought. Breathe slowly.