On a Thursday afternoon, Tara and her best friend Caimile played marbles on the sidewalk outside the gray brick apartment building in Buffalo where Tara and her father lived. Caimile was the same age as Tara, and about the same size. Their dresses matched, except for the color.

Tara's favorite marble looked like a little globe, with milky white oceans and continents painted blue. She liked to thumb Antarctica before shooting this marble across the sidewalksphere where all their little worlds settled into the porous texture of the concrete.

Their legs sore from squatting over the marbles, Tara and Caimile took standing breaks every few minutes and pretended they were animals. Caimile was a giraffe, and she tilted her head back as though this elongated her neck. Tara took her sandals off and tried to pick up a marble with her toes, which now were her talons. She squawked. She was a bird.

"What kind of a bird are you?" Caimile asked.

"A red one," Tara said. Her dress was red. Caimile's was green. Caimile was a green giraffe.

"Let's play helicopter," Caimile said. She took Tara's hands in her own and sidestepped into a dance, then faster into a full spin.

Tara giggled as she tried to keep up with Caimile's steps, first on the sidewalk, then spilling out onto the patches of dirt flanking the sidewalk. Tara bit her lip and watched her feet. She didn't want to step on the broken lime-colored glass, all sprinkled and shiny on the dirt. She didn't want Caimile to step on her feet. She heard then felt the beat of her box braids against the side of her head.

Then Tara stepped on a marble: her favorite marble, the one that looked like Earth. She felt it fling out from under her, behind her, as her foot kicked back into the air. She spun her head around both ways, trying to see which way the marble flew, but she was dizzy and off balance from all the spinning.

Tara's other foot followed back and out, and then she was looking at Caimile, whose feet still danced on the ground. Caimile swung Tara like a purse. She swung Tara around her as she continued to turn. Tara would have been airborne if her friend were to let go. Tara would have been a bird.

And just when Tara thought Caimile would have to let go because the spin itself was pulling her away and into the air, she screamed, two parts terror, one part glee. She pulled herself in towards Caimile. They hugged each other as they stopped.

"You're really strong," Tara said, after getting control of her breath again.

"You're really light," Caimile said. "I bet I could throw you over Mrs. Nelson's fence."

"You could not," Tara said. Mrs. Nelson was an angry old white woman who lived in a small house down the block. She was the only white person Tara knew by name. Sometimes Mrs. Nelson yelled at the kids in the neighborhood, so sometimes they threw stuff at her windows. But never a person. "I mean, could you?"

And, though Tara didn't break anything—not a bone, not a window—on her first attempt over Mrs. Nelson's chain link fence, Tara's father told her it was just because she was lucky. He wasn't yelling, he said as he swabbed her scraped knee with something from a brown plastic bottle. But she needed to be more careful. He wasn't angry, he said. He was just concerned.

Tara's bones were not like other people's bones, her father told her. "All bones are light, but yours are really light. Fragile."

"Like a bird's?" Tara asked.

"No, not hollow like a bird's," her father said.

Tara's eyes opened wide. A bird's bones were hollow? This was her most favorite thing, ever.

"They're just fragile," her father said, not yelling, not angry. "You also have some baby teeth in your mouth, where no adult teeth grow under them. We didn't have fluoride in the water when you were a baby, and we think..."

But Tara wasn't listening. She was wondering about the bones of birds and all the neat stuff they could keep inside them. She wondered if she'd ever find her marble again, the one that looked like a milky Earth. And more than anything else she wondered whether she was light enough to fly over Mrs. Nelson's fence.

Tomorrow she would have to find out.

#

Chris Moser was thirteen when he shot his first object into space from Chatham County, North Carolina.

Moser—as he preferred to be called—had actually figured out how to do it when he was twelve, but it took another year to calculate the right trajectory and exact launch window that would put his rocket into proper orbit from where they lived. One morning, finally confident in his preparations, he brought an empty Cherrygale can to breakfast. He placed it neatly in the middle of his empty plate.

"You're not having soda for breakfast," his mother said.

"I know," Moser said. "This can is going to be the first manmade object to go around the sun."

His father said, "Well, you still need to eat something."

"In six months," Moser said, "It will return to Earth. I wanted to put some recording device in it, but it was too heavy with the engine, and it probably wouldn't survive anyway."

"Six months?" His parents looked at each other the way they looked at each other when they thought they knew something Moser didn't know. "You mean a year? It takes a year to go around the sun, you know."

"Yes, Dad," Moser said slowly, patiently. "I know."

"A year then," his father said.

Moser sighed, looking at the hint of his own reflection in the rim of the Cherrygale can. It was vague enough that it could have been anyone's reflection. He liked to think it was the reflection of Christopher Columbus.

"It takes a year for us," Moser said. "And it takes a year for the can going in the opposite direction. In six months, we'll meet again, on the other side of the sun."

His father made an exaggerated kissing noise as he sucked on his own bottom lip for a moment, and then: "I was just kidding you, Chris. Six months sounds about right. Good luck with that."

"It's going to be awesome," Moser said.

Six months later, when the can didn't come back down as predicted, his mother and father were very nice about it, even after begrudgingly driving him halfway across the state to the side of the lake where Moser thought it should return. They even offered to wait a little longer, but Moser said there was no point. If he was off by a minute, he was off by hundreds of miles. More than likely the Cherrygale can never made it into orbit, if it even cleared the atmosphere in the first place.

"You got it off the ground, that's something to be proud of," his father said on the drive home.

"Maybe it burned up in the atmosphere," his mother said. "Doesn't that happen? Sometimes?"

His father suggested: "Extra wind? Something you didn't calculate?"

"Maybe," Moser said. He was only half-listening.

"An asteroid field? Like in your video game?"

"Mom, the chances of that..."

"We can't know every variable, Chris. Just predicting the weather is a crapshoot."

"Maybe it hit a bird," his mother said.

NINE
THE HOLLOW BONES OF THE BUDDHA

Tara was sixteen and had never left Buffalo when she lost her virginity in the flower shop owned by David's parents. It was a life experience she figured she was ready to have. She was going to be a poet, like Rita Dove or Maya Angelou, both of whom had lots of life experience. It was late in the summer. She had a lot to do.

On the way into the flower shop, David told her how much he liked the thing she wrote for English class. "You know," he said. "That thing about angels. You should totally publish it."

"I will," Tara said. "I'm going to be poet laureate."

David had a hidden stash of marijuana in one of the few plastic plants towards the back of the shop. "They used to be real," David said, "But mom never waters anything she can't sell, so they died."

He and Tara sat on the tile floor behind the register, and there she got high for the first time. Tara wore shorts and a camisole. The tile was cold. She leaned against the refrigerated glass case, which was even colder.

Tara decided to tell David a secret. At first she thought she'd save it for herself, and put it in a poem. But there would be many secrets to come along that she could keep for herself. She planned on having lots of life experience. She planned on being mysterious.

"It feels like the smoke is in my bones," Tara said.

"I know," David said.

"No, I mean like it's trapped in there."

"Cool."

Tara told him that her bones were hollow, which she knew wasn't true. A bird's bones were hollow but strong. Hers were just brittle, only about five pounds lighter than they should be. But it was important that she make it sound cooler than her father had made it sound when he had explained it to her. It was important that she focus.

"I'm not yelling," she said. She couldn't feel her lips moving when she spoke. It was like ventriloquism. Or telepathy.

David said, "Yeah, you're like the reincarnated Buddha."

All Tara knew about Buddhism was something about breathing and letting go. She asked: "Does the Buddha have hollow bones?"

"Probably," David said. "Take off your shirt."

Her eyes were puffy and her nose ran. She didn't know whether it was the weed or whether she was allergic to one of the pretty flowers or whether this was just one of those moments when she would cry. There weren't many so far, but there were some. All poets cried.

Surrounded by so much green, Tara felt like she was in a jungle and she never wanted to go home. She concentrated on her breathing. She wondered whether they'd ever let a reincarnated Buddha become poet laureate. She wondered whether David would somehow always be inside her, like the smoke.

"Don't break me," she said.

"Okay," he said, his hand on her cheek.

#

Moser excelled in physics and engineering while attending Akron University in northern Ohio. He excelled sometimes to the detriment of any social life.

His favorite professor seemed particularly encouraging and interested in Moser, so much so that Moser decided to tell her about the Cherrygale soda can he launched into space seven years earlier. He wanted to know her opinion about what went wrong, though he suspected it was a wind problem, that he would have needed to manually correct any minor disturbances in its trajectory. He did not brag when he told his professor about it. He wanted to brag, but he didn't.

"This is a crazy notion," she responded, suddenly more rigid and professional than he had seen her with even the most unruly of students. "And it sounds like a very dangerous experiment which you shouldn't have tried."

Shamed, Moser walked quickly back to his dorm room. To think he had wanted to brag to her about his experiment. His roommate Aaron got up from his bed and punched Moser in the arm playfully when he saw Moser's dour look. He asked Moser what was wrong. He asked whether he'd eaten breakfast yet.

"Got chewed out by Reynolds. She really respected me, you know? I should have kept my mouth shut."

Aaron made a farting noise, called Reynolds a jackass, and told Moser not to worry about it. Aaron was on the MBA track and probably had not met Moser's favorite professor.

Moser listened with only half his brain. The other half quietly purged some of the more far-fetched ideas from his head. Becoming an astronaut. Developing new sustainable energy sources. These ideas were slow-acting poisons, he'd realized on the walk back to his dorm room, and he had wasted far too much time on them. He was twenty years old with twenty years wasted, twenty poisoned years he could never get back.

Moser picked up his notebook and ripped out page after page, tossing them at the trash. Aaron stood over his shoulder as he did so. Aaron smelled like cigarette smoke and stale beer, as though he hadn't brushed his teeth or washed his face since his date of the previous night.

"What's with all the triangles?" Aaron asked.

Moser had pages of them, simple illustrations of rounded-corner triangles with numbers scribbled in the margins. It was just an idea, and each triangle he'd designed and refined now represented a girl he could have hooked up with. Each one was a party he could have attended with Aaron. In the future, Moser would look for rounded triangles on all potentially poisonous ideas, just as he would look for the V-shaped heads to identify venomous snakes back home.

Moser didn't want to explain anything, waste another breath on a silly project, but he felt he shouldn't just close up the one time Aaron showed actual interest in what he was working on.

"It's a mirror," Moser said.

"Oh."

Moser hesitated. Aaron probably wasn't studied enough to laugh at him. Worst case scenario would be scaring Aaron into never asking him another question, and frankly Moser could use the alone-time. He decided to risk it.

"It's a space mirror, light enough to launch into orbit inexpensively. If we ever terraform Mars into something habitable, a relatively small number of these mirrors orbiting Mars could help trap the sun's heat within the planet's atmosphere."

"Cool," Aaron said, and then nodded blankly.

Moser considered whether he should explain what it meant to terraform Mars, how incredibly huge and important a task like that could be. Aaron wasn't stupid, but sometimes he lost himself in his get-rich-quick schemes as surely as Moser probably lost himself in poisoned science and invention.

"Mars can suck it, man," Aaron said finally. "I'm cold right now. Will this thing work on Akron?"

Moser didn't know. He had never thought of that.

"Breakfast?"

. . .

Continued in the February 2007 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. "Outgoing" is also available:

• In custom printed-and-delivered books from Anthology Builder
• As an ebook download at Fictionwise (multiple formats for multiple devices)
• As an ebook download for the Amazon Kindle
• (SFWA Members Only) in the Nebula Awards section of the SFWA site.

Filed under Stories, Stories-Fiction