Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95
Author: Robert Silverberg
Date: 2013-08-31 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Anthologies
Description: The stories in this volume were written between July of 1990 and March of 1995--the second half of the fifth decade of my career as a science-fiction writer. I don't think I could have imagined, when I began that career in the early 1950s, that science-fiction publishing would evolve the way it did over the next forty years. Here, then, is the cream of the Silverberg output, 1990-95. I suppose I wrote more short stories in the first six months of 1957 than in that entire six-year period; but so be it. It's a different world today. I look back nostalgically on the small-town atmosphere of the e
Publisher: Subterranean

Copyright

Hot Times in Magma City © 2013 by Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved.

Interior design © 2013 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.
All rights reserved.

First Edition

978-1-59606-588-8

Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
www.subterraneanpress.com

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“In the Clone Zone” first appeared in Playboy, March 1991.

“Hunters in the Forest” first appeared in Omni, October 1991.

“A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple” first appeared in After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, January 1992, edited by Martin H. Greenberg.

“Thebes of the Hundred Gates” was first published by Axolotl/Pulphouse, January 1992. However, the version reproduced here is that of Bantam Spectra, July 1992, except for the beginning of Chapter Eleven to which a missing paragraph and quatrain is restored.

“It Comes and Goes” first appeared in Playboy, January 1992. However, the version reproduced here is the Author’s original version.

“Looking for the Fountain” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1992.

“The Way to Spook City” first appeared in Playboy, August 1992.

“The Red Blaze is the Morning” first appeared in New Legends, May 1995, edited by Greg Bear and Martin H. Greenberg.

“Death Do Us Part” first appeared in Omni On-Line, December 1996. However, the version reproduced here is that which appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1997.

“The Martian Invasion: Journals of Henry James” first appeared in Omni On-Line, May 1996. However, the version reproduced here is that which appeared in The War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, June 1996, edited by Kevin J. Anderson.

“Crossing into the Empire” first appeared in David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination, December 1996, edited by David Copperfield and Janet Berliner.

“The Second Shield” first appeared in Playboy, December 1995.

“Hot Times in Magma City” first appeared in Omni On-Line, May 1995. However, the version reproduced here is that which appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1995.

Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, by Agberg, Ltd.

Introductory matter copyright © 2013 by Agberg, Ltd.

Illustrations are reproduced from source text of first publication or as from indicated above.

Dedication

For
Byron Preiss
Martin H. Greenberg
Lou Aronica
Gregory Benford
Gardner Dozois
Greg Bear
Kevin Anderson
Janet Berliner
Ellen Datlow
Keith Ferrell
And—of course—Alice K. Turner

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

In the Clone Zone

Hunters in the Forest

A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple

Thebes of the Hundred Gates

It Comes and Goes

Looking for the Fountain

The Way to Spook City

The Red Blaze is the Morning

Death Do Us Part

The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James

Crossing into the Empire

The Second Shield

Hot Times in Magma City

INTRODUCTION

The stories in this volume were written between July of 1990 and March of 1995—the second half of the fifth decade of my career as a science-fiction writer. I don’t think I could have imagined, when I began that career in the early 1950’s, that science-fiction publishing would evolve the way it did over the next forty years.

Science fiction was small-time stuff, back there in the first years of President Eisenhower’s era. There were forty or fifty writers, maybe, who strived to amuse an audience (largely made up of boys and young men) that could not have amounted to as many as a hundred thousand people. The bulk of the science fiction that was published in those days appeared in magazine form: fifteen or twenty existed at any one time, usually, most of them little scruffy things, printed on cheap paper, with names like Marvel Science Fiction, Dynamic Science Fiction, Planet Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories. They had garish covers and paid the writers next to nothing, but you could live pretty well on next to nothing then, if you raked in those next-to-nothing checks often enough. It was an era of deft and prolific writers—Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Philip José Farmer, and many more, including, by 1954, the very young Robert Silverberg.

We all read every magazine and kept up to date on all of our colleagues’ work; we knew the editors and their quirks; we all knew each other, too, since most of us were clustered either in the New York area or in and around Los Angeles. Professional science-fictiondom back then was like a small town. (With a small town’s proclivity for soap-opera sexuality, too: most of our marriages were tenuous things and the rate of marital breakup and rearrangement was quite extraordinary. X, after divorcing his wife Y so that she could marry Z, would marry B’s former wife Q, who also had been formerly married to P, who now was married to C’s ex-wife J, and so on and so on around the circle in dizzying fashion. I was just a little too young, then, to have become involved in all that, though I had my own entanglements a couple of decades later.)

Life would have been considerably less hectic if we could have written just one novel or maybe two a year instead of having to churn out ten or twenty short stories, but there was no real market for science fiction in book form in the early 1950’s. A couple of hardcover publishers and one or two paperback houses did have something like regular science-fiction programs—a book or two a month—but they concentrated mainly on reprints of work that had previously appeared in the magazines, all of it by the best-known authors—such titles as Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. For most of us, proposing a new novel to a publisher and walking away with a nice contract simply wasn’t possible.

Nor did Hollywood have much to offer. Nowadays we see a new hundred-million-dollar-budget science-fiction epic opening every few weeks, but the s-f movies of the 50’s were few and far between—Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, This Island Earth—and no vast sums were lavished on them by their makers. Television offered the creaky kiddie show Captain Video and not much else.

How different it all is today, as television bristles with a dozen different s-f shows a week, crowds swarm the movie theaters to see the latest futuristic special-effects extravaganza, and hundreds and even thousands of science-fiction and fantasy novels pour from the presses every year (the most successful of them linked to television or movie sources.) Books and movies and television have become the essence of the thing; the old-fashioned science-fiction magazine is all but extinct and short story-writing is a marginal activity pursued mainly by beginners, part-time professionals, and sentimental oldsters like me. It’s not something that one does for the money, because there’s not really any money in it. The rates per word that the s-f magazines pay for their material have actually declined sharply over the last forty years, after adjustment for inflation. (In some cases, magazines were paying the same word rates in absolute dollars in the nineties that we were getting back in the fifties, though the purchasing power of the dollar had declined by something like ninety percent!) And although by 1990 magazines like Playboy and Omni were paying ten and even twenty times as much for short stories as the highest-paying magazines of 1955 were able to offer, they were buying no more than one or two stories a month, hardly enough to keep a population of hungry free-lancers in bagels, and not even Playboy’s lofty fees were really that much superior to those of the old days, after adjustment for inflation.

But, as I’ve said in other volumes in this series, money is not the only or even the primary reason why people write science fiction, and I have kept on writing short stories all these years, if only to keep my hand in, a story or two a year, more than that if someone comes to me with a tempting project, some anthology with an interesting theme, perhaps. Some writers—me, for example—are prone to have quite a few story ideas a year, but writing quite a few novels a year is hardly a feasible proposition. (And some good story ideas simply aren’t suitable for development to novel length, anyway, though they make lovely short stories.)

Here, then, is the cream of the Silverberg output, 1990-95. I suppose I wrote more short stories in the first six months of 1957 than in that entire six-year period; but so be it. It’s a different world today. I look back nostalgically on the small-town atmosphere of the era in which I began my career, and there are times when I’d be glad to “call back yesterday, bid time return.” As Shakespeare pointed out, though, that can’t be done. The one recourse is the one I have chosen, which is to soldier staunchly onward through the years, come what may, writing a story or two here and a book there, while the world changes out of all recognition around me. And so—to leap neatly from the Bard of Avon to F. Scott Fitzgerald—“so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

—Robert Silverberg

IN THE CLONE ZONE

In the years when I was writing the stories that are collected here, I routinely sent one every summer to Alice Turner of Playboy, and generally she bought it, although most of the time we went through an elaborate duel over the length and structure of the story before one or the other of us gave up. Since a story I had tried on her in May, 1990 had wound up at Amazing Stories instead, I felt obliged to come up with something else for Alice that year. So, a month or so after that one, I spent some time pondering various dramatic (and melo-dramatic) aspects of cloning human beings, and came up with this sinister little item, seven years ahead of the headlines about the cloned sheep Dolly. Alice thought it needed a little trimming, of course. (She almost always did.) But she bought it and ran it in the March, 1991 Playboy. Every now and then I get a movie nibble on it; and the nibbles will come harder and faster now, I suspect, with the controversy over cloning rapidly moving out of science fiction and into the real-world political arena.

——————

The airport was very new. It had a bright, shiny, major-world-capital feel, and for a moment, Mondschein thought the plane had landed in Rio or Buenos Aires by mistake. But then he noticed the subtle signs of deception, the tackiness around the edges, the spongy junk behind the gleaming façades, and knew that he must indeed be in Tierra Alvarado.

“Señor Mondschein?” a deep male voice said while he was still marching down the corridors that led to the immigration lounge. He turned and saw a short, wide-shouldered man in a beribboned green-and-red comic-opera uniform that, he remembered after a moment, was that of the Guardia de la Patria, the Maximum Leader’s elite security corps. “I am Colonel Aristegui,” he said. “You may come with me, please. It was a good journey? You are not overly fatigued?”

Aristegui didn’t bother with passport formalities. He led Mondschein through a steel doorway marked SEGURIDAD, INGRESO PROHIBIDO that admitted them to a series of bewildering passageways and catwalks and spiral staircases. There was no veneer back here: Everything was severely functional—gun-metal-gray walls, exposed rivets and struts, harsh unshielded light fixtures that looked a century old. Here it comes, Mondschein thought: This man will take me to some deserted corner of the airstrip and touch his laser pistol to my temple and they will bury me in an unmarked grave, and that will be that, five minutes back in the country and I am out of the way forever.

The final visa approval had come through only the day before, the fifth of June, and just hours later, Mondschein had boarded the Aero Alvarado flight that would take him in a single soaring supersonic arc nonstop from Zurich to his long-lost homeland on the west coast of South America. Mondschein hadn’t set foot there in 25 years, not since the Maximum Leader had expelled him for life as a sort of upside-down reward for his extraordinary technological achievements: For it was Mondschein, at the turn of the century, who had turned his impoverished little country into the world leader in human cloning.

In those days, it was called the Republic of the Central Andes. The Maximum Leader had put it together out of parts of the shattered nations that in an earlier time had been known as Peru, Chile and Bolivia. But now the name of the country was Tierra Alvarado and its airline was Aero Alvarado and its capital was Ciudad Alvarado. This was a fine old South American tradition. You expected a Maximum Leader to clap his name on everything, to hang his portrait everywhere, to glorify himself in every imaginable way.

Alvarado had carried things a little further than most, though, by having two dozen living replicas of himself created, the better to serve his people. That had been Mondschein’s final task as a citizen of the republic, the supreme accomplishment of his art: to produce two dozen AAA Class clones of the Maximum Leader, which could function as doubles for Alvarado at the dreary meetings of the Popular Assembly, stand in for him at the interminable National Day of Liberation parades, and keep would-be assassins in a constant state of befuddlement. They were masterpieces, those two dozen Alvarados—all but indistinguishable from the original, the only AAA Class clones ever made. With their aid the Maximum Leader was able to maintain unblinking vigilance over the citizens of Tierra Alvarado 24 hours a day.

But Mondschein didn’t care how many Alvarados he might be coming home to. Twenty, 50, 100, what did that matter? Alvarado still held the entire country in his pocket, as he had for the past generation. That was the essential situation. To Mondschein, the clones made no real difference at all.

In fact, there was very little that did make a difference to Mondschein. He was getting old and slept badly most of the time. He wanted to speak his native language again—Spanish as it had been spoken in Peru and not the furry Spanish of Spain—and he wanted to breathe the sharp air of the high mountains and eat papas a la huancaina and anticuchos and a proper ceviche and maybe see the ancient walls of Cuzco once more and the clear dark water of Lake Titicaca. It didn’t seem likely to him that Alvarado had granted him a pardon after all this time simply for the sake of luring him back to face a firing squad. The safe conduct, which Mondschein hadn’t in any way solicited but had been overjoyed to receive, was probably sincere: a sign that the old tyrant had mellowed at last. And if not, well, at least he would die on his native soil, which somehow seemed better than dying in Bern, Toulon, Madrid, Stockholm, Prague, wherever—any of the innumerable cities in which he had lived during his long years of exile.

They emerged from the building into a bleak, deserted rear yard, where empty baggage carts were strewn around like the fossil carcasses of ancient beasts, a perfect place for a quiet execution. The dry cool wind of early winter was sweeping a dark line of dust across the bare pavement. But to Mondschein’s astonishment, an immense sleek black limousine materialized from somewhere almost at once and two more Guardia men hopped out, saluting madly. Aristegui beckoned him into the rear of the vast car. “Your villa has been prepared for you, Dr. Mondschein. You are the guest of the nation. When you are refreshed, the Minister of Scientific Development requests your attendance at the Palace of Government, perhaps this afternoon.” He flicked a finger and a mahogany panel swung open, revealing a well-stocked bar. “You will have a cognac? It is the rare old. Or champagne, perhaps? A whiskey? Everything imported, the best quality.”

“I don’t drink,” said Mondschein.

“Ah,” said Aristegui uncertainly, as though that were a fact that should have been on his prep sheet and unaccountably hadn’t been. Or perhaps he had simply been looking forward to nipping into the rare old himself, which now would be inappropriate. “Well, then. You are comfortable? Not too warm, not too cool?” Mondschein nodded and peered out the window. They were on an imposing-looking highway now, with a city of pastel-hued high-rise buildings visible off to the side. He didn’t recognize a thing. Alvarado had built this city from scratch in the empty highland plains midway between the coast and the lake and it had been only a few years old when Mondschein had last seen it, a place of raw gouged hillsides and open culverts and half-paved avenues with stacks of girders and sewer pipes and cable reels piled up everywhere. From a distance, at least, it looked quite splendid now. But as they left the beautifully landscaped road that had carried them from the airport to the city and turned off into the urban residential district, he saw that the splendor was, unsurprisingly, a fraud: The avenues had been paved, all right, but they were reverting to nature, cracking and upheaving as the swelling roots of the bombacho trees and the candelero palms that had been planted down the central dividers ripped them apart. The grand houses of pink and green and azure stucco were weather-stained and crumbling, and Mondschein observed ugly random outcroppings of tin-roofed squatter shacks sprouting like mushrooms in the open fields behind them, where elegant gardens briefly had been. He thought of his comfortable little apartment in Bern and felt a pang.

But then the car swung off onto a different road, into the hills to the east, which even in the city’s earliest days had been the magnificently appointed enclave of the privileged and powerful. Here there was no sign of decay. The gardens were impeccable, the villas spacious and well kept. Mondschein remembered this district well. He had lived in it himself before Alvarado had found it expedient to give him a one-way ticket abroad. Names he hadn’t thought of in decades came to the surface of his mind: This was the Avenida de las Flores, this was Calle del Sol, this was Camino de los Toros, this was Calle de los Indios, and this—this—

He gasped. The handsome two-story building with the white façade and the red-tile roof in front of which the limousine had halted was, in fact, his villa, the actual and much-beloved villa he had lived in long ago, until the night when the swarthy little frog-faced officer of the Guardia had come to him to tell him that he was expelled from the country. He had had to leave everything behind then—his books, his collection of ancient scientific instruments, his pre-Columbian ceramics, his rack of Italian-made suits and fine vicuña coats, his pipes, his cello, his family albums, his greenhouse full of orchids, even his dogs. One small suitcase was all they had let him take with him on the morning flight to Madrid, and from that day on, he had never permitted himself to acquire possessions but had lived in a simple way, staying easily within the very modest allowance that the Maximum Leader in his great kindness sent him each month wherever he might be. And now they had given him back his villa. Mondschein wondered who had been evicted, on how much notice and for what trumped-up cause, to make this building available after all this time. For the first time, he wondered whether his impulsive decision to accept Alvarado’s astonishing invitation to return had been a mistake.

“You recognize this house?” Aristegui asked. “You are surprised, are you not? You are amazed with joy?”

They had made no attempt to restore his lost possessions or to undo the changes that had come to the house since he had lived there. The villa now was furnished in standard upper-class Peruvian-style comfort of the early years of the century, everything very safe, very unexceptionable, very familiar, very dull. He was provided with a staff of four—a housekeeper, a cook, a driver, a gardener. Wandering through the airy, rambling house, he felt less pain than he had anticipated. His spirit was long gone from it; it was just a house. There were caged parrots in the garden and a white-and-gray cat was slinking about outside as if it belonged there; perhaps it was the cat of the former resident and had found its way back in the night.

He bathed and rested and had a light lunch. In the afternoon the driver came to him and said, “May I take you to the Palace of Government now, Señor Dr. Mondschein? The Minister is eager.” The driver must be a Guardia man also, Mondschein realized. But that was all right. All of it was all right, whatever they did now.

The Palace of Government hadn’t been finished in Mondschein’s time. It was a huge sprawling thing made of blocks of black stone, fitted together dry-wall fashion to give it a massive pseudo-Inca look, and it was big enough to have housed the entire bureaucracy of the Roman Empire at its peak. Relays of functionaries, some in Guardia uniform, some not, led him through gloomy high-vaulted corridors, across walled courtyards and up grand and ponderous stone staircases, until at last an officious florid-faced aide-de-camp conducted him into the wing that was the domain of the Ministry of Scientific Development. Here he passed through a procession of outer offices and finally was admitted to a brightly lit reception hall lined with somber portraits in oils. He recognized Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci and guessed that the others were Aristotle, Darwin, Galileo, perhaps Isaac Newton. And in the place of honor, of course, a grand representation of the Maximum Leader himself, looking down with brooding intensity.

“His Excellency, the minister,” said the aide-de-camp, waving him into an office paneled with dark exotic woods at the far end of the reception hall. A tall man in an ornately brocaded costume worthy of a bullfighter rose from a glistening desk to greet him. And unexpectedly, Mondschein found himself staring yet again at the unforgettable face of Diego Alvarado. One of the clones, Mondschein thought. It had to be.

All the same, it felt like being clubbed in the teeth. The Minister of Scientific Development had Alvarado’s hard, icy blue eyes, his thin lips, his broad brow, his jutting cleft chin. His smile was Alvarado’s cold smile, his teeth were Alvarado’s perfect, glistening teeth. He had the coarse curling bangs—graying now—that gave the Maximum Leader the look of a youthful, indomitable Caesar. His lanky body was lean and gaunt, a dancer’s body, and his movements were a dancer’s movements, graceful and precise. Seeing him awoke long-forgotten terrors in Mondschein.

“President Alvarado asks me to convey his warmest greetings,” the clone said. It was Alvarado’s voice, cool and dry. “He will welcome you personally when his schedule permits, but he wishes you to know that he is honored by your decision to accept his hospitality.”

The aging had worked very well, Mondschein thought. Alvarado would be about 70 now, still vigorous, still in his prime. There were lines on this man’s face in the right places, changes in the lines of his cheekbones and jaw, exactly as should have happened in 25 years.

“It wasn’t any decision at all,” Mondschein said. He tried to sound casual. “I was ready and eager to come back. Your homeland, your native soil, the place where your ancestors lived and died for three hundred years—as you get older, you realize nothing can take its place.”

“I quite understand,” said the clone.

Do you? Mondschein wondered. Your only ancestor is a scrap of cellular material. You were born in a tissue-culture vat. And yet you quite understand.

He said, “Of course, the invitation to return came as an immense surprise.”

“Yes. No doubt it did. But the Maximum Leader is a man of great compassion. He felt you had suffered in exile long enough. One day he said, ‘We have done a great injustice to that man, and now it must be remedied. As long as Rafael Mondschein y Gonzalez dwells in foreign lands, our soul can never rest.’”

“Only a man of true greatness could have done such a thing,” said Mondschein.

“Indeed. Indeed.”

Mondschein’s crime had been one of overachievement. He had built Alvarado’s cloning laboratories to such a level of technical skill that they were the envy of all the world; and when eventually the anticloning zealots in North America and Europe had grown so strident that there was talk of trade sanctions and the laboratories had to be shut down, Mondschein had become the scapegoat. In return for a waiver of trial, he accepted exile for life. Of course, the laboratories had reopened, this time secretly and illicitly, and before long, ten or 11 other countries had started to turn out A and even AA Class clones also and the industry had become too important to the world economy to allow zealotry to interfere with it any longer; but Mondschein remained overseas, rotting in oblivion, purposelessly wandering like a wraith from Madrid to Prague, from Prague to Stockholm, from Stockholm to Marseilles. Now, at last, the Maximum Leader in his great compassion had relented.

The Minister said, “You know we have made vast strides in the biological sciences since you last were here. Once you have had some time to settle in, we will want you to visit our laboratories, which, as you may be aware, are once again in legal operation.”

Mondschein was aware of that, yes. Throughout the world, Tierra Alvarado was known informally as the Clone Zone, the place where anyone could go to have a reasonable facsimile manufactured at a reasonable price. But that was no longer any concern of his.

“I’m afraid that I have very little interest in cloning technology these days,” he said.

The Minister’s chilly Alvarado eyes blazed with sudden heat. “A visit to our laboratories may serve to reawaken that interest, Dr. Mondschein.”

“I doubt that very much.”

The Minister looked unhappy. “We had hoped quite strongly that you would be willing to share the benefits of your scientific wisdom with us, Doctor. Your response greatly disappoints us.”

Ah. It was all very clear now, and very obvious. Strange that he hadn’t foreseen it.

“I have no scientific wisdom, really,” said Mondschein evenly. “None that would be of any use. I haven’t kept up with the state of the art.”

“There are those who would be pleased to refresh your—”

“I’d much prefer to remain in retirement. I’m too old to make any worthwhile contributions.”

Now the thin lips were quirking. “The national interest is in jeopardy, Dr. Mondschein. For the first time, we are challenged by competition from other countries. Genetic technology, you understand, is our primary source of hard currency. We are not a prosperous land, Doctor. Our cloning industry is our one great asset, which you created for us virtually singlehandedly. Now that it faces these new threats, surely we may speak to your sense of patriotism, if not your onetime passion for scientific achievement, in asking you—” The Minister broke off abruptly, as though seeing his answer in Mondschein’s expression. In a different tone, he said, “No doubt you are tired after your long journey, Doctor. I should have allowed you more time to rest. We’ll continue these discussions at a later date, perhaps.”

He turned away. The aide-de-camp appeared as though from the air and showed Mondschein out. His driver was waiting in the courtyard.

Mondschein spent most of the night trying to sleep. His mind was still on Swiss time, and what was the night in Tierra Alvarado was in Switzerland the beginning of a new day. His thoughts went ticking, hour after hour. Sleep finally took him toward dawn, like a curtain falling, like the blade of a guillotine.

Colonel Aristegui of the Guardia de la Patria came to him, phoning first for an appointment, saying the matter was urgent. Mondschein assumed that this would be the next attempt to put pressure on him to take charge of the cloning labs, but that did not appear to be what was on Aristegui’s mind. The wide-shouldered little man looked remarkably ill at ease; he paced, he fidgeted, he mopped his sweating forehead with a lace handkerchief. Then he said, as if forcing the words out, “This is extremely delicate.”

“Is it?”

Aristegui studied him with care. “You control yourself extremely well, Doctor. In particular, I mark your restraint in regard to the president. You speak of your gratitude to him for allowing you to return. But inwardly, you must hate him very much.”

“No,” Mondschein said. “It’s all ancient history. I’m an old man now. What does any of it matter any more?”

“He took away the scientific work that was your life. He forced you to leave the land of your birth.”

“If you think you’re going to get me to launch into an attack on him, you’re totally mistaken. What’s past is past and I’m happy to be home again and that’s all there is to it.”

Aristegui stared at his brilliantly gleaming patent-leather shoes. Then he sighed and raised his head like a diver coming up to the surface and said, “The country is dying, doctor.”

“Is it?”

“Of the Latin-American disease. The strong man comes, he sees the evils and injustices and remedies them, and then he stays and stays and stays until he is the evils and the injustices. President Alvarado has ruled here for thirty-five years. He drains the treasury for his palaces; he ignores what must be done to preserve and sustain. He is our great burden, our great curse. It is time for him to step aside. Or be thrust aside.”

Mondschein’s eyes widened. “You’re trying to draw me into some sort of conspiracy? You must be out of your mind.”

“I risk my life telling you this.”

“Yes. You do. And I risk my life listening.”

“You are essential to our success. Essential. You must help us.”

“Look,” said Mondschein, “if Alvarado simply wants to do away with me, he doesn’t have to bother with anything as elaborate as this. Nobody in the world cares whether I live or die. It isn’t necessary to inveigle me into a fantastic plot on his life. He can just have me shot. All right? All right?”

“This is not a trap. As God is my witness, I am not here as part of a scheme to ensnare you. I beg for your assistance. If you wish, report me to the authorities. I will be tortured and the truth will come out and I will be executed, and then you will know I was honest with you.”

Wearily Mondschein said, “What is all this about?”

“You possess the ability to distinguish between the brothers of Alvarado and Alvarado himself.”

“The brothers?”

“The clones. There is a secret method, known only to you, that allows you to tell the true Alvarado from the false.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“It is so. You need not pretend. I have access to very high sources.”

Mondschein shrugged. “For the sake of argument, say that it’s so. What then?”

“When we aim our blow at Alvarado, we want to be certain we are assassinating the real one.”

“Yes. Of course you do.”

“You can guide our hand. He often appears in public, but no one knows whether it is really he or one of his brothers. And if we strike down one of the brothers, thinking we have killed the true Alvarado—”

“Yes,” Mondschein said. “I see the problem. But assuming that I’m able to tell the difference, and I’m not conceding that I can, what makes you think I’d want to get mixed up in your plot? If you’re not sure whether you’re killing the right one, kill them all. Kill them one by one until there are none at all left.”

“I could kill you,” Aristegui said. “Right now. I should. After what I have told you, you own my life.”

Again Mondschein shrugged. “Then kill me. For whatever good it’ll do you. I’m not going to inform on you.”

“Nor cooperate with me.”

“Neither one nor the other.”

“All you want is to live in peace,” said Aristegui savagely. “But how do you know you will? Alvarado has asked you to work for him again, and you have refused.” He held up a hand. “Yes, yes, I know that. I will not kill you, though I should. But he might. Think about that, Señor Doctor.”

He rose and glared at Mondschein a moment and left without another word.

Mondschein’s body clock had caught up with Tierra Alvarado time by then. But that night, once again, he lay until dawn in lucid wakefulness before exhaustion at last brought him some rest. It was as though sleep were a concept he had never quite managed to understand.

The next summons came from Alvarado himself.

The Presidential Palace, which Mondschein remembered as a compact, somewhat austere building in vaguely Roman style, had expanded in the course of a quarter of a century into an incomprehensible mazelike edifice that seemed consciously intended to rival Versailles in ostentatious grandeur. The Hall of Audience was a good 60 meters long, with rich burgundy draperies along the walls and thick blood-red carpeting. There was a marble dais at the far end, where the Maximum Leader sat enthroned like an emperor. Dazzling sunlight flooded down on him through a dome of shimmering glass set in the ceiling. Mondschein wondered if he was supposed to offer a genuflection. There were no guards in the room, only the two of them. But security screens in the floor created an invisible air wall around the dais. Mondschein found himself forced to halt by subtle pressure when he was still 15 meters short of the throne. Alvarado came stiffly to his feet and they stood facing each other in silence for a long moment.

It seemed anticlimactic, this confrontation at last. Mondschein felt none of the teeth-on-edge uneasiness that the man had always been able to engender in him. Perhaps having seen the clone Alvarado earlier had taken the edge off the impact.

Alvarado said, “You have found all the arrangements satisfactory so far, I hope, Doctor?”

“In the old days, you called me Rafael.”

“Rafael, yes. It was so long ago. How good it is to see you again, Rafael. You look well.”

“As do you.”

“Yes. Thank you. Your villa is satisfactory, Rafael?”

“Quite satisfactory,” said Mondschein. “I look forward to a few last years of quiet retirement in my native country.”

“So I am told,” Alvarado said.

He seemed overly formal, weirdly remote, hardly even human. In the huge hall, his crisp, cool voice had a buzzing androidal undertone that Mondschein found unfamiliar. Possibly that was an atmospheric diffraction effect caused by the security screens. But then it occurred to Mondschein that this, too, might be one of the clones. He stared hard, trying to tell, trying to call on the intuitive sense that once had made it possible for him to tell, even without running the alpha-wave test. The AAA Class clones had been intended to be indistinguishable from the original to nine decimal places, but nevertheless, when you collapsed the first 20 or 30 years of a man’s life into the three-year accelerated-development period of the cloning process, you inevitably lost something, and Mondschein had always been able to detect the difference purely subjectively, at a single glance. Now, though, he wasn’t sure.

He said, “The Minister explained to me that the national genetic laboratories are facing new competition from abroad, that you want me to step in and pull things together. But I can’t do it. My technical knowledge is hopelessly out of date. I’m not familiar with current work in the field. If I had known that the reason you had decided to let me come home was that you wanted me to go back into the labs, I never would have—”

“Forget about the labs,” Alvarado said. “That isn’t why I invited you to return.”

“But the Minister of Scientific Development said—”

“Let the Minister of Scientific Development say anything he wishes. The minister has his agenda and I have mine, Doctor.” He had dropped the first-name talk, Mondschein noticed. “Is it true that there is a method of determining whether a given individual is an authentic human or merely a highly accurate clone?”

Mondschein hesitated. Something was definitely wrong here.

“Yes,” he said finally. “There is. You know that there is.”

“You are too certain of what I know and what I do not know. Tell me about this method, Doctor.”

He was more and more certain that he was talking to a clone. Alvarado must be staging one of his elaborate charades.

“It involves matching brain rhythms. When I created the AAA Class Alvarado clones, I built a recognition key into them that would enable me, using a simple E.E.G. hookup, to distinguish their brain-wave patterns from yours. I did this at your request, so that in the case of a possible coup d’état attempt by one of the clones, you’d be able to unmask the pretender. The method uses my own brain waves as the base line. If you jack my E.E.G. output into a comparator circuit and overlay it with yours, the two patterns will conflict, the way any two patterns from different human beings will. But if my E.E.G. gets matched against one of your clones, the pattern will drop immediately into alpha rhythms, as if we’re both under deep hypnosis. It amazes me that you’ve forgotten this.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you’re not Alvarado at all but simply one of his—what’s the word?—one of his brothers.”

“Very good, Doctor.”

“Am I right?”

“Come closer and see for yourself.”

“I can’t. The security screens—”

“I have switched them off.”

Mondschein approached. There was no air resistance. When he was five meters away, he felt the unmistakable click of recognition.

“Yes, I am right. Even without an E.E.G. test. You’re a clone, aren’t you?”

“That is so.”

“Is the real Alvarado too busy for me today, or is it that he doesn’t have the courage to look me in the eye?”

“I will tell you something very strange, which is a great secret,” said the clone. “The real Alvarado is no longer in command here. For the past several months, I have run the government of Tierra Alvarado. No one here is aware of this, no one at all. No one except you, now.”

For a moment, Mondschein was unable to speak.

“You seriously expect me to believe that?” he said at last.

The clone managed a glacial smile. “During the years of your absence, there have been several internal upheavals in Tierra Alvarado. On three occasions, assassination plots resulted in the deaths of Alvarado clones who were playing the role of the Maximum Leader at public ceremonies. Each time, the death of the clone was successfully covered up. The conspirators were apprehended and things continued as if nothing had occurred. On the fourth such occasion, an implosion grenade was thrown toward the Maximum Leader’s car while he was en route to Iquique for a ceremony of rededication. I happened to be accompanying him on that journey so that I could double for him in the riskier parts of the ceremony, when the general public would be present. The impact of the grenade was tremendous. In the confusion afterward, I was mistaken for the true Maximum Leader. I quickly understood the situation and began to act accordingly. And so it has been ever since.”

Mondschein realized that he was trembling.

“So Alvarado’s dead?”

The clone looked smug. “His reign is over. His time is finished.”

What a strange concept that was. Alvarado dead! His old enemy was really dead! Mondschein felt a flash of satisfaction and surprise—and then a curious sense of loss.

“Why are you telling me all this?” he asked after a moment. “Assuming that it’s true, and not just some game that your master is playing with me, why do you want to take chances this way? What if I tried to expose you and bring the whole crazy system down?”

“You would not do that,” said the clone.

“Why not?”

“You have said it yourself: You want only to live out your remaining years in peaceful retirement. If you denounced me, who would believe you? And even if you were believed, would things be better in Tierra Alvarado in the wake of my overthrow? No, doctor, the status quo is your only hope. I am the status quo.”

Mondschein nodded. “Even so, why confide in me at all?”

“So that you may protect me.”

“How could I do that?”

“You hold the key to identification, this alpha-rhythm thing. Your possession of it gives you great power here. If there were a challenge to my legitimacy, you would be the only arbiter of the truth, do you see?”

“Yes,” said Mondschein. “Yes, I do.”

“There are twenty-one other surviving clones. One of them might take it into his head to overthrow me, thinking that he could rule the country at least as well. It is quite a comfortable existence, being a clone of the Maximum Leader, but it is not always pleasant to serve as his double, exposed to all the risks of public appearances. It is a much better life, believe me, to be Maximum Leader and have others double for you than to be a double yourself, never knowing when the bullet will come. Besides which, there is the wielding of authority for its own sake. That is a highly desirable thing, if you are of the sort who desires such things, and we are. After all, we are all of us Alvarados to the core, as you know better than anyone else.”

“So you think that if one of your vat brothers suddenly tried to say that he was the real Alvarado, not you, then I’d be willing to come forward and test him and expose him as a clone for you?”

“So I hope and trust.”

“Why would I want to take the side of one clone against another? It’s of no importance to me which one of you calls himself president here.”

“But I am the one who calls himself president just now. I might kill you if you didn’t cooperate.”

“And if I don’t care whether I live or die?”

“You probably care how you die,” the Alvarado clone said. “You would not die in an easy or a gentle way, that I could promise you. On the other hand, if you pledge that you will aid me, when and if the need arises, I will see to it that you live out the remaining years of your life in the most complete happiness that I can make available. It seems to me a very reasonable offer.”

“It is,” Mondschein said. “I see that it is.”

“You protect me, and I will protect you. Do we have a deal?”

“If I say no, what are my chances of leaving this building alive today?”

The clone smiled. It was the pure Alvarado smile. “They would be quite poor.”

“Then we have a deal,” Mondschein said.

The weeks went by. June gave way to July and the year descended toward its winter depths. Often there was fog; some nights there was frost; always the dry harsh wind blew from the west. Mondschein slept poorly. He heard nothing from the Maximum Leader or any of his minions. Evidently, all was tranquil in the ruling circles.

He rarely left the villa. His meals were prepared for him according to his wishes, which were uncomplicated. He had a few books. No one came to see him. Sometimes, during the day, he went out with his driver to explore the city. It was larger than he expected, spreading long, thin tentacles of slum toward the north and south—as in any impoverished country, everyone from the villages was moving to the capital, God only knew what for—and shoddy everywhere except in its grand governmental district.

On two of these excursions Mondschein was granted a glimpse of the supposed President Alvarado. The first time, his car was halted at a police roadblock and he waited for half an hour in an immense tie-up until at last the president passed by in a motorcade coming from the airport, with the Director-General of the Republic of the Orinoco, here on a state visit, riding beside him in the armored bubble-roof car, while the spectators who lined the boulevard offered sullen acclaim. On the second occasion, far in the outskirts, Mondschein stumbled upon the ceremonial dedication of what he was told was the Grand Sanitation Facility of the Northeast, and there was the familiar figure of the Maximum Leader on high in the reviewing stand, surrounded by fierce-eyed, heavily armed bodyguards and orating bravely into the biting wind.

At other times while traversing the city, Mondschein caught sight of various of the clones going about some business of their own. It was not at all unusual to encounter one. Doubtless, the populace was quite used to it. Wherever you looked, you could find one or two of the Maximum Leader’s brothers. Five or six of them headed government ministries—a meeting of the cabinet must have been like a hall of mirrors—and the others, apparently, simply stood by to serve as presidential doubles when needed, living as private citizens the rest of the time. The real Alvarado, if there still was one, could probably have passed in the streets without causing a stir, with everyone assuming he was just a clone. It was a fine kind of shell game.

Colonel Aristegui came to the villa again, eventually.

“We are ready to make a move, Doctor.”

“Move, then. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Aristegui looked tense, grim, right at the breaking point. “We need very little from you. Station yourself in the crowd, and when our man asks you, ‘Is this one the real one?’ simply nod or shake your head. We want no more from you than that. Later, we’ll ask you to examine the body and confirm that it is the body of the dictator and not one of the imitations. A small service, and you will live forever in the hearts of your countrymen.”

“There’s no way I can give you the kind of information you want just by looking at him from a distance.”

“It can be done, and you are the one who can do it. This much I know.”

“No,” Mondschein said. “What you think you know is wrong. I can’t help you. And, in any case, I don’t want to. I told you that before, Colonel. I’m not interested in joining your conspiracy. It isn’t any affair of mine.”

“It is an affair of every loyal citizen of this country.”

Mondschein looked at him sadly. He could at least warn Aristegui, he thought, that there was no real Alvarado there to shoot, that they were all clones. But would the Colonel believe him? In any case, what Aristegui was trying to do was fundamentally futile. Kill one Alvarado, another would move into his place and announce that he was the authentic article. Aristegui couldn’t get them all. This country was going to be ruled by Alvarados for a long time.

“They took my citizenship away twenty-five years ago,” Mondschein said, after a pause. “I’m here now purely as a guest of the nation, remember? Good guests don’t conspire against their hosts. Please go away, Colonel. I haven’t heard a thing you’ve said to me today. I’m beginning to forget even that you were here.”

Aristegui glowered at him in a way that seemed to mingle anguish and fury. For a moment, Mondschein thought the man was going to strike him. But then, with a visible effort, the colonel brought himself under control.

“I thank you for your continued silence, at least,” said Aristegui bitterly. “Good day, Señor Dr. Mondschein.”

Late that afternoon, Mondschein heard voices from below, shouts and outcries in the servants’ quarters. He rang up on the housekeeper’s intercom and said, “What’s going on?”

“There has been an attack on the president, Señor Doctor. At the Palace of Government. We have just seen it on the television.”

So Aristegui had been telling the truth, it seemed, when he said that they were ready to make their move. Or else they had decided it was too risky to wait any longer, now that Mondschein had been told that an assassination attempt was impending.

“And?” Mondschein said.

“By the mercy of the Virgin, he is safe, señor. Order has been restored and the criminals have been captured. One of the others was slain, one of the brothers, but the president was not harmed.”

He thanked her and switched on his television set.

They were in the midst of showing a replay of it now. The president arriving at the Palace of Government for the regular midweek meeting of the ministers; the adoring populace obediently waiting behind the barricades to hail him as he emerged from his car; the sudden scuffle in the crowd, evidently a deliberate distraction, and then the shot, the screams, the slim, long-legged figure beginning to sag into the arms of his bodyguards, the policemen rushing forward.

And then a cut to the Hall of Audience, the grim-faced Maximum Leader addressing the nation from his throne in broken phrases, in a voice choked with emotion: “This despicable act…the bestial attempt to overrule the will of the people as expressed through their chosen president…We must root out the forces of chaos that are loose among us…We proclaim a week of national mourning for our fallen brother…”

Followed by an explanation from an unruffled-looking official spokesman. The Guardia de la Patria, he said, had received word of a possible plot. One of the president’s brothers had courageously agreed to bear the risk of entering the Palace of Government in the usual way; the Maximum Leader himself had gone into the building through a secret entrance. The identities of the main conspirators were known; arrests had already been made; others would follow. Return to your homes, remain calm, all is well.

All is well.

The executions took place a few weeks later. They were shown on huge television screens set up before great throngs of spectators in the main plazas of the city and relayed to home viewers everywhere. Mondschein, despite earlier resolutions to the contrary, watched along with everyone else in a kind of horrified fascination as Colonel Aristegui and five other officers of the elite guard, along with three other men and four women, all of them members of the Popular Assembly, were led to the wall one by one, faces expressionless, bodies rigid. They were not offered the opportunity to utter last words, even of carefully rehearsed contrition. Each name was spoken and the prisoner was blindfolded and shot, and the body taken away, and the next conspirator brought forth.

Mondschein felt an obscure sense of guilt, as though he had been the one who had informed on them. But, of course, he had said nothing to anyone. The country was full of governmental agents and spies and provocateurs; the Maximum Leader had not needed Mondschein’s help in protecting himself against Colonel Aristegui.

The days went by. The season brightened toward spring. Mondschein’s driver took him up the mountain roads to see Lake Titicaca, and north from there to Cuzco and its grand old Inca relics, and up beyond that to the splendors of Machu Picchu. On another journey, he went down to the fog-swept coast, to Nazca, where it never rains, where in a landscape as barren as the moon’s he inspected the huge drawings of monkeys and birds and geometrical figures that prehistoric artists had inscribed in the bone-dry soil of the plateaus.

On a brilliant September day that felt like midsummer a car bearing the insignia of the Guardia came to his villa and a brisk young officer with thick hair that was like spun gold told him that he was requested to go at once to the Palace of Justice.

“Have I done something wrong?” Mondschein asked mildly.

“It is by order of the president,” said the blond young officer, and that was all the explanation he gave.

Mondschein had been in the Palace of Justice only once before, during the weeks just prior to his exile. Like most of the other governmental buildings, it was a massive, brutal-looking stone structure, two long parallel wings with a smaller one set between them at their heads, so that it crouched on its plaza like a ponderous sphinx. There were courtrooms in the upper levels of the two large wings, prison cells below; the small central wing was the headquarters of the Supreme Court, whose chief justice, Mondschein had recently discovered, was another of the clones.

His Guardia escort led him into the building on the lower level, and they descended even below that, to the dreaded high-security area in the basement. Was he to be interrogated, then? For what?

The Maximum Leader, in full uniform and decorations, was waiting for him in a cold, clammy interrogation cell, under a single bare incandescent bulb of a kind that Mondschein thought had been obsolete for 100 years. He offered Mondschein a smile as benign as that sharp-edged face was capable of showing.

“Our second meeting is in rather less grand surroundings than the first, eh, Doctor?”

Mondschein peered closely. This seemed to be the same clone who had spoken with him in the Hall of Audience. He felt quite sure of that. Only intuition, of course. But he trusted it.

“You remember the agreement we reached that day?” the clone asked.

“Of course.”

“Today I need to invoke it. Your special expertise is now essential to the stability of the nation.”

The clone gestured to an aide-de-camp, who signaled to a figure in the shadows behind him that Mondschein had not noticed before. A door opened at the rear of the cell and a gurney bearing electronic equipment was wheeled in. Mondschein recognized the familiar intricacies of an electroencephalograph.

“This is the proper machinery for your brain-wave test, is it not?” the Alvarado clone asked.

Mondschein nodded.

“Good,” the clone said. “Bring in the prisoner.”

The door opened again and two guards dragged in the ragged, disheveled-looking figure of an Alvarado. His hands were shackled behind his back. His face was bruised and sweaty and smeared with dirt. His clothes, rough peasant clothes, were torn. His eyes were blazing with fury of astonishing intensity. Mondschein felt a tremor of the old fear at the sight of him.

The prisoner shot a fiery look at the Alvarado clone and said, “You bastard, let me out of here right now. You know who I am. You know who you are, too. What you are.”

Mondschein turned to the clone. “But you told me he was dead!” he said.

“Dead? Who? What do you mean?” the Alvarado clone said calmly. “This clone was gravely injured in an attempt on my life and has hovered close to death for many weeks, despite the finest care we could give him. Now that he has begun to recover, he is exhibiting delusional behavior. He insists that he is the true Maximum Leader and I am nothing but a genetic duplicate. I ask you to test the authenticity of his claim, Señor Doctor.”

“Mondschein! Rafael Mondschein!” the ragged Alvarado cried. A convulsive quiver of amazement ran through his shoulders and chest. “You here? They’ve brought you back?”

Mondschein said nothing. He stared at the ragged man.

The prisoner’s eyes gleamed. “All right, go on! Test me, Rafael. Do your mumbo jumbo and tell this fraud who I am! Then we’ll see if he dares keep up the masquerade. Go on, Rafael! Plug in your damned machine! Stick the electrodes on me!”

“Go ahead, Señor Doctor,” the Alvarado clone said.

Mondschein stepped forward and began the preparations for the test, wondering whether he would remember the procedure after so many years.

The prisoner looked toward the Alvarado clone and said, “He’ll prove that I am who I say I am. And you won’t have the guts to carry the pretense any further, will you, you test-tube fraud? Because half the staff in the hospital knows the real story already, and somehow the truth will get out. And it’ll bring you down. Once the country finds out that you’re a fake, that you simply seized power when the motorcade bomb went off. Once word gets around that I didn’t die, that you’ve had me hidden away in the hospital all this time with people thinking I was you and you were me, what do you think will happen to your regime? Will anyone take orders from a clone?”

“You mustn’t speak now,” Mondschein told him. “It’ll distort the test results.”

“All right. Yes. Listen, Rafael, no matter what you tell him, he’ll say that you identified me as a clone, but you know that it’s a lie. When you get back outside, you tell people the true story. You hear me? And afterward, I’ll see to it that you get whatever you want. Anything. Money, women, country estates, your own laboratory, whatever.”

“Please,” Mondschein said. “I ask you not to speak.”

He attached the electrodes to himself. He touched the dials.

He remembered, now. The entire technique. He had written these personality-organization algorithms himself. He closed his eyes and felt the data come flooding in. The prisoner’s brain waves met his own—collided, clashed, clashed violently—

To the Alvarado clone, Mondschein said, “The alpha match is perfect, Señor President. What we have here is a clone.”

“No, Rafael!” the prisoner roared. “You filthy lying bastard, no! You know it isn’t so!”

“Take him away,” the Alvarado clone said.

“No. You won’t do anything to me. I’m the only legitimate president of Tierra Alvarado.”

“You are nothing,” the clone told him. “You are a mere creature. We have scientific proof that you are simply one of the artificial brothers. Dr. Mondschein has just demonstrated that.”

“Balls,” the prisoner said. “Listen, Mondschein, I know he has you intimidated. But when you get out of here, spread the word. Tell everyone what your real reading was. That there’s a usurper in the Presidential Palace, that he must be overthrown. You’ll be a national hero, you’ll be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams—”

Mondschein smiled. “Ah, but I already have everything that I want,” he said.

He looked toward the Alvarado clone. “I’ll prepare a formal report and sign it, Señor President. And I will be willing to attest to it at the public trial.”

“This has been the trial, Doctor,” the clone said smoothly, indicating the ceiling of the cell, where Mondschein now saw an opening through which the snout of a television camera protruded. “All the information that we need has been recorded. But I am grateful for your offer. You have been extremely helpful. Extremely helpful, Señor Doctor.”

That night, in the safety and comfort of his beloved villa, Mondschein slept soundly for the first time since his return to Tierra Alvarado—more soundly than he had slept in years.

HUNTERS IN THE FOREST

One pleasant aspect of being a writer who dabbles in editing is that every once in a while you get to sell a story to yourself. Of course, I have to sell every story I write to myself before I can sell it to anyone else—if I don’t think much of it, after all, how can I offer it to someone for publication with a straight face?—but when I’m simultaneously both writer and editor I don’t have to worry, at least, about all those silly little editorial quibbles that other editors often insist on inflicting on me before they’ll publish something of mine.

In this case, the well-known book packager Byron Preiss was assembling a majestic coffee-table volume called The Ultimate Dinosaur, a large-size volume offering a mixture of scientific essays, short stories, and color plates, and I was serving as fiction editor for the book. I assembled a team of top-level science-fictionists (Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Gregory Benford, etc.) to write the stories, each of whom was matched in theme to one of the essays. And I grabbed the theme of “Dinosaur Predators” for myself and illustrated it with this nasty little item, in which, as often happens in my fiction, the most dangerous beast turns out to be something other than the obvious one.

I wrote the story in November, 1990. Omni published it in magazine form in its October, 1991 issue and The Ultimate Dinosaur appeared the following year.

——————

Twenty minutes into the voyage nothing more startling than a dragonfly the size of a hawk has come into view, fluttering for an eye-blink moment in front of the timemobile window and darting away, and Mallory decides it’s time to exercise Option Two: Abandon the secure cozy comforts of the timemobile capsule, take his chances on foot out there in the steamy mists, a futuristic pygmy roaming virtually unprotected among the dinosaurs of this fragrant Late Cretaceous forest. That has been his plan all along—to offer himself up to the available dangers of this place, to experience the thrill of the hunt without ever quite being sure whether he was the hunter or the hunted.

Option One is to sit tight inside the timemobile capsule for the full duration of the trip—he has signed up for twelve hours—and watch the passing show, if any, through the invulnerable window. Very safe, yes. But self-defeating, also, if you have come here for the sake of tasting a little excitement for once in your life. Option Three, the one nobody ever talks about except in whispers and which perhaps despite all rumors to the contrary no one has actually ever elected, is self-defeating in a different way: simply walk off into the forest and never look back. After a prearranged period, usually twelve hours, never more than twenty-four, the capsule will return to its starting point in the twenty-third century whether or not you’re aboard. But Mallory isn’t out to do himself in, not really. All he wants is a little endocrine action, a hit of adrenaline to rev things up, the unfamiliar sensation of honest fear contracting his auricles and chilling his bowels: all that good old chancy stuff, damned well unattainable down the line in the modern era where risk is just about extinct. Back here in the Mesozoic, risk aplenty is available enough for those who can put up the price of admission. All he has to do is go outside and look for it. And so it’s Option Two for him, then, a lively little walkabout, and back to the capsule in plenty of time for the return trip.

With him he carries a laser rifle, a backpack medical kit, and lunch. He jacks a thinko into his waistband and clips a drinko to his shoulder. But no helmet, no potted air supply. He’ll boldly expose his naked nostrils to the Cretaceous atmosphere. Nor does he avail himself of the one-size-fits-all body armor that the capsule is willing to provide. That’s the true spirit of Option Two, all right: Go forth unshielded into the Mesozoic dawn.

Open the hatch, now. Down the steps, hop skip jump. Booted feet bouncing on the spongy primordial forest floor. There’s a hovering dankness but a surprisingly pleasant breeze is blowing. Things feel tropical but not uncomfortably torrid. The air has an unusual smell. The mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide is different from what he’s accustomed to, he suspects, and certainly none of the impurities that six centuries of industrial development have poured into the atmosphere are present. There’s something else, too, a strange subtext of an odor that seems both sweet and pungent: It must be the aroma of dinosaur farts, Mallory decides. Uncountable hordes of stupendous beasts simultaneously releasing vast roaring boomers for a hundred million years surely will have filled the prehistoric air with complex hydrocarbons that won’t break down until the Oligocene at the earliest.

Scaly tree trunks thick as the columns of the Parthenon shoot heavenward all around him. At their summits, far overhead, whorls of stiff long leaves jut tensely outward. Smaller trees that look like palms but probably aren’t fill in the spaces between them, and at ground level there are dense growths of awkward angular bushes. Some of them are in bloom, small furry pale-yellowish blossoms, very diffident looking, as though they were so newly evolved that they were embarrassed to find themselves on display like this. All the vegetation, big and little, has a battered, shopworn look, trunks leaning this way and that, huge leafstalks bent and dangling, gnawed boughs hanging like broken arms. It is as though an army of enormous tanks passes through this forest every few days. In fact that isn’t far from the truth, Mallory realizes.

But where are they? Twenty-five minutes gone already and he still hasn’t seen a single dinosaur, and he’s ready for some.

“All right,” Mallory calls out. “Where are you, you big dopes?”

As though on cue the forest hurls a symphony of sounds back at him: strident honks and rumbling snorts and a myriad blatting snuffling wheezing skreeing noises. It’s like a chorus of crocodiles getting warmed up for Handel’s Messiah.

Mallory laughs. “Yes, I hear you, I hear you!”

He cocks his laser rifle. Steps forward, looking eagerly to right and left. This period is supposed to be the golden age of dinosaurs, the grand tumultuous climactic epoch just before the end, when bizarre new species popped out constantly with glorious evolutionary profligacy, and all manner of grotesque Goliaths roamed the earth. The thinko has shown him pictures of them, spectacularly decadent in size and appearance, long-snouted duck-billed monsters as big as a house and huge lumbering ceratopsians with frilly baroque bony crests and toothy things with knobby horns on their elongated skulls and others with rows of bristling spikes along their high-ridged backs. He aches to see them. He wants them to scare him practically to death. Let them loom; let them glower; let their great jaws yawn. Through all his untroubled days in the orderly and carefully regulated world of the twenty-third century, Mallory has never shivered with fear as much as once, never known a moment of terror or even real uneasiness, is not even sure he understands the concept; and he has paid a small fortune for the privilege of experiencing it now.

Forward. Forward.

Come on, you oversized bastards, get your asses out of the swamp and show yourselves!

There. Oh, yes, yes, there!

He sees the little spheroid of a head first, rising above the treetops like a grinning football attached to a long thick hose. Behind it is an enormous humped back, unthinkably high. He hears the pile driver sound of the behemoth’s footfall and the crackle of huge tree trunks breaking as it smashes its way serenely toward him.

He doesn’t need the murmured prompting of his thinko to know that this is a giant sauropod making its majestic passage through the forest—“One of the titanosaurs or perhaps an ultrasaur,” the quiet voice says, admitting with just a hint of chagrin in its tone that it can’t identify the particular species—but Mallory isn’t really concerned with detail on that level. He is after the thrill of size. And he’s getting size, all right. The thing is implausibly colossal. It emerges into the clearing where he stands and he is given the full view, and gasps. He can’t even guess how big it is. Twenty meters high? Thirty? Its ponderous corrugated legs are thick as sequoias. Giraffes on tiptoe could go skittering between them without grazing the underside of its massive belly. Elephants would look like housecats beside it. Its tail, held out stiffly to the rear, decapitates sturdy trees with its slow steady lashing. A hundred million years of saurian evolution have produced this thing, Darwinism gone crazy, excess building remorselessly on excess, irrepressible chromosomes gleefully reprogramming themselves through the millennia to engender thicker bones, longer legs, ever bulkier bodies, and the end result is this walking mountain, this absurdly overstated monument to reptilian hyperbole.

“Hey!” Mallory cries. “Look here! Can you see this far down? There’s a human down here. Homo sapiens. I’m a mammal. Do you know what a mammal is? Do you know what my ancestors are going to do to your descendants?” He is practically alongside it, no more than a hundred meters away. Its musky stink makes him choke and cough. Its ancient leathery brown hide, as rigid as cast iron, is pocked with parasitic growths, scarlet and yellow and ultramarine, and crisscrossed with the gullies and ravines of century-old wounds deep enough for him to hide in. With each step it takes, Mallory feels an earthquake. He is nothing next to it, a flea, a gnat. It could crush him with a casual stride and never even know.

And yet he feels no fear. The sauropod is so big he can’t make sense out of it, let alone be threatened by it.

Can you fear the Amazon River? The planet Jupiter? The pyramid of Cheops?

No, what he feels is anger, not terror. The sheer preposterous bulk of the monster infuriates him. The pointless superabundance of it inspires him with wrath.

“My name is Mallory,” he yells. “I’ve come from the twenty-third century to bring you your doom, you great stupid mass of meat. I’m personally going to make you extinct, do you hear me?”

He raises the laser rifle and centers its sight on the distant tiny head. The rifle hums its computations and modifications and the rainbow beam jumps skyward. For an instant the sauropod’s head is engulfed in a dazzling fluorescent nimbus. Then the light dies away, and the animal moves on as though nothing has happened.

No brain up there? Mallory wonders.

Too dumb to die?

He moves up closer and fires again, carving a bright track along one hypertrophied haunch. Again, no effect. The sauropod moves along untroubled, munching on treetops as it goes. A third shot, too hasty, goes astray and cuts off the crown of a tree in the forest canopy. A fourth zings into the sauropod’s gut but the dinosaur doesn’t seem to care. Mallory is furious now at the unkillability of the thing. His thinko quietly reminds him that these giants supposedly had had their main nerve-centers at the base of their spines. Mallory runs around behind the creature and stares up at the galactic expanse of its rump, wondering where best to place his shot. Just then the great tail swings upward and to the left and a torrent of immense steaming green turds as big as boulders comes cascading down, striking the ground all around Mallory with thunderous impact. He leaps out of the way barely in time to keep from being entombed, and goes scrambling frantically away to avoid the choking fetor that rises from the sauropod’s vast mound of excreta. In his haste he stumbles over a vine, loses his footing in the slippery mud, falls to hands and knees. Something that looks like a small blue dog with a scaly skin and a ring of sharp spines around its neck jumps up out of the muck, bouncing up and down and hissing and screeching and snapping at him. Its teeth are deadly-looking yellow fangs. There isn’t room to fire the laser rifle. Mallory desperately rolls to one side and bashes the thing with the butt instead, hard, and it runs away growling. When he has a chance finally to catch his breath and look up again, he sees the great sauropod vanishing in the distance.

He gets up and takes a few limping steps further away from the reeking pile of ordure.

He has learned at last what it’s like to have a brush with death. Two brushes, in fact, within the span of ten seconds. But where’s the vaunted thrill of danger narrowly averted, the hot satisfaction of the frisson? He feels no pleasure, none of the hoped-for rush of keen endocrine delight.

Of course not. A pile of falling turds, a yapping little lizard with big teeth: what humiliating perils! During the frantic moments when he was defending himself against them he was too busy to notice what he was feeling, and now, muddy all over, his knee aching, his dignity dented, he is left merely with a residue of annoyance, frustration, and perhaps a little ironic self-deprecation, when what he had wanted was the white ecstasy of genuine terror followed by the postorgasmic delight of successful escape recollected in tranquility.

Well, he still has plenty of time. He goes onward, deeper into the forest.

Now he is no longer able to see the timemobile capsule. That feels good, that sudden new sense of being cut off from the one zone of safety he has in this fierce environment. He tries to divert himself with fantasies of jeopardy. It isn’t easy. His mind doesn’t work that way; nobody’s does, really, in the nice, tidy, menace-free society he lives in. But he works at it. Suppose, he thinks, I lose my way in the forest and can’t get back to—no, no hope of that, the capsule sends out constant directional pulses that his thinko picks up by microwave transmission. What if the thinko breaks down, then? But they never do. If I take it off and toss it into a swamp? That’s Option Three, though, self-damaging behavior designed to maroon him here. He doesn’t do such things. He can barely even fantasize them.

Well, then, the sauropod comes back and steps on the capsule, crushing it beyond use…

Impossible. The capsule is strong enough to withstand submersion to thirty-atmosphere pressures.

The sauropod pushes it into quicksand, and it sinks out of sight?

Mallory is pleased with himself for coming up with that one. It’s good for a moment or two of interesting uneasiness. He imagines himself standing at the edge of some swamp, staring down forlornly as the final minutes tick away and the timemobile, functional as ever even though it’s fifty fathoms down in gunk, sets out for home without him. But no, no good: The capsule moves just as effectively through space as through time, and it would simply activate its powerful engine and climb up onto terra firma again in plenty of time for his return trip.

What if, he thinks, a band of malevolent intelligent dinosaurs appears on the scene and forcibly prevents me from getting back into the capsule?

That’s more like it. A little shiver that time. Good! Cut off, stranded in the Mesozoic! Living by his wits, eating God knows what, exposing himself to extinct bacteria. Getting sick, blazing with fever, groaning in unfamiliar pain. Yes! Yes! He piles it on. It becomes easier as he gets into the swing of it. He will lead a life of constant menace. He imagines himself taking out his own appendix. Setting a broken leg. And the unending hazards, day and night. Toothy enemies lurking behind every bush. Baleful eyes glowing in the darkness. A life spent forever on the run, never a moment’s ease. Cowering under fern fronds as the giant carnivores go lalloping by. Scorpions, snakes, gigantic venomous toads. Insects that sting. Everything that has been eliminated from life in the civilized world pursuing him here: and he flitting from one transitory hiding place to another, haggard, unshaven, bloodshot, brow shining with sweat, struggling unceasingly to survive, living a gallant life of desperate heroism in this nightmare world…

“Hello,” he says suddenly. “Who the hell are you?”

In the midst of his imaginings a genuine horror has presented itself, emerging suddenly out of a grove of tree ferns. It is a towering bipedal creature with the powerful thighs and small dangling forearms of the familiar tyrannosaurus, but this one has an enormous bony crest like a warrior’s helmet rising from its skull, with five diabolical horns radiating outward behind it and two horrendous incisors as long as tusks jutting from its cavernous mouth, and its huge lashing tail is equipped with a set of great spikes at the tip. Its mottled and furrowed skin is a bilious yellow and the huge crest on its head is fiery scarlet. It is everybody’s bad dream of the reptilian killer-monster of the primeval dawn, the ghastly overspecialized end product of the long saurian reign, shouting its own lethality from every bony excrescence, every razor-keen weapon on its long body.

The thinko scans it and tells him that it is a representative of an unknown species belonging to the saurischian order and it is almost certainly predatory.

“Thank you very much,” Mallory replies.

He is astonished to discover that even now, facing this embodiment of death, he is not at all afraid. Fascinated, yes, by the sheer deadliness of the creature, by its excessive horrificality. Amused, almost, by its grotesqueries of form. And coolly aware that in three bounds and a swipe of its little dangling paw it could end his life, depriving him of the sure century of minimum expectancy that remains to him. Despite that threat he remains calm. If he dies, he dies; but he can’t actually bring himself to believe that he will. He is beginning to see that the capacity for fear, for any sort of significant psychological distress, has been bred out of him. He is simply too stable. It is an unexpected drawback of the perfection of human society.

The saurischian predator of unknown species slavers and roars and glares. Its narrow yellow eyes are like beacons. Mallory unslings his laser rifle and gets into firing position. Perhaps this one will be easier to kill than the colossal sauropod.

Then a woman walks out of the jungle behind it and says, “You aren’t going to try to shoot it, are you?”

Mallory stares at her. She is young, only fifty or so unless she’s on her second or third retread, attractive, smiling. Long sleek legs, a fluffy burst of golden hair. She wears a stylish hunting outfit of black sprayon and carries no rifle, only a tiny laser pistol. A space of no more than a dozen meters separates her from the dinosaur’s spiked tail, but that doesn’t seem to trouble her.

He gestures with the rifle. “Step out of the way, will you?”

She doesn’t move. “Shooting it isn’t a smart idea.”

“We’re here to do a little hunting, aren’t we?”

“Be sensible,” she says. “This one’s a real son of a bitch. You’ll only annoy it if you try anything, and then we’ll both be in a mess.” She walks casually around the monster, which is standing quite still, studying them both in an odd perplexed way as though it actually wonders what they might be. Mallory has aimed the rifle now at the thing’s left eye, but the woman coolly puts her hand to the barrel and pushes it aside.

“Let it be,” she says. “It’s just had its meal and now it’s sleepy. I watched it gobble up something the size of a hippopotamus and then eat half of another one for dessert. You start sticking it with your little laser and you’ll wake it up, and then it’ll get nasty again. Mean-looking bastard, isn’t it?” she says admiringly.

“Who are you?” Mallory asks in wonder. “What are you doing here?”

“Same thing as you, I figure. Cretaceous Tours?”

“Yes. They said I wouldn’t run into any other—”

“They told me that too. Well, it sometimes happens. Jayne Hyland. New Chicago, 2281.”

“Tom Mallory. New Chicago also. And also 2281.”

“Small geological epoch, isn’t it? What month did you leave from?”

“August.”

“I’m September.”

“Imagine that.”

The dinosaur, far above them, utters a soft snorting sound and begins to drift away.

“We’re boring it,” she says.

“And it’s boring us, too. Isn’t that the truth? These enormous terrifying monsters crashing through the forest all around us and we’re as blasé as if we’re home watching the whole thing on the polyvid.” Mallory raises his rifle again. The scarlet-frilled killer is almost out of sight. “I’m tempted to take a shot at it just to get some excitement going.”

“Don’t,” she says. “Unless you’re feeling suicidal. Are you?”

“Not at all.”

“Then don’t annoy it, okay?—I know where there’s a bunch of ankylosaurs wallowing around. That’s one really weird critter, believe me. Are you interested in having a peek?”

“Sure,” says Mallory.

He finds himself very much taken by her brisk no-nonsense manner, her confident air. When we get back to New Chicago, he thinks, maybe I’ll look her up. The September tour, she said. So he’ll have to wait a while after his own return. I’ll give her a call around the end of the month, he tells himself.

She leads the way unhesitatingly, through the tree-fern grove and around a stand of giant horsetails and across a swampy meadow of small plastic-looking plants with ugly little mud-colored daisyish flowers. On the far side they zig around a great pile of bloodied bones and zag around a treacherous bog with a sinisterly quivering surface. A couple of giant dragonflies whiz by, droning like airborne missiles. A crimson frog as big as a rabbit grins at them from a pond. They have been walking for close to an hour now and Mallory no longer has any idea where he is in relation to his timemobile capsule. But the thinko will find the way back for him eventually, he assumes.

“The ankylosaurs are only about a hundred meters further on,” she says, as if reading his mind. She looks back and gives him a bright smile. “I saw a pack of troodons the day before yesterday out this way. You know what they are? Little agile guys, no bigger than you or me, smart as whips. Teeth like saw blades, funny knobs on their heads. I thought for a minute they were going to attack, but I stood my ground and finally they backed off. You want to shoot something, shoot one of those.”

“The day before yesterday?” Mallory asks, after a moment. “How long have you been here?”

“About a week. Maybe two. I’ve lost count, really. Look, there are those ankylosaurs I was telling you about.”

He ignores her pointing hand. “Wait a second. The longest available time tour lasts only—”

“I’m Option Three,” she says.

He gapes at her as though she has just sprouted a scarlet bony crust with five spikes behind it.

“Are you serious?” he asks.

“As serious as anybody you ever met in the middle of the Cretaceous forest. I’m here for keeps, friend. I stood right next to my capsule when the twelve hours were up and watched it go sailing off into the ineffable future. And I’ve been having the time of my life ever since.”

A tingle of awe spreads through him. It is the strongest emotion he has ever felt, he realizes.

She is actually living that gallant life of desperate heroism that he had fantasized. Avoiding the myriad menaces of this incomprehensible place for a whole week or possibly even two, managing to stay fed and healthy, in fact looking as trim and elegant as if she had just stepped out of her capsule a couple of hours ago. And never to go back to the nice safe orderly world of 2281. Never. Never. She will remain here until she dies—a month from now, a year, five years, whenever. Must remain. Must. By her own choice. An incredible adventure.

Her face is very close to his. Her breath is sweet and warm. Her eyes are bright, penetrating, ferocious. “I was sick of it all,” she tells him. “Weren’t you? The perfection of everything. The absolute predictability. You can’t even stub your toe because there’s some clever sensor watching out for you. The biomonitors. The automedics. The guides and proctors. I hated it.”

“Yes. Of course.”

Her intensity is frightening. For one foolish moment, Mallory realizes, he was actually thinking of offering to rescue her from the consequences of her rashness. Inviting her to come back with him in his own capsule when his twelve hours are up. They could probably both fit inside, if they stand very close to each other. A reprieve from Option Three, a new lease on life for her. But that isn’t really possible, he knows. The mass has to balance in both directions of the trip within a very narrow tolerance; they are warned not to bring back even a twig, even a pebble, nothing aboard the capsule that wasn’t aboard it before. And in any case being rescued is surely the last thing she wants. She’ll simply laugh at him. Nothing could make her go back. She loves it here. She feels truly alive for the first time in her life. In a universe of security-craving dullards she’s a woman running wild. And her wildness is contagious. Mallory trembles with sudden new excitement at the sheer proximity of her.

She sees it, too. Her glowing eyes flash with invitation.

“Stay here with me!” she says. “Let your capsule go home without you, the way I did.”

“But the dangers—” he hears himself blurting inanely.

“Don’t worry about them. I’m doing all right so far, aren’t I? We can manage. We’ll build a cabin. Plant fruits and vegetables. Catch lizards in traps. Hunt the dinos. They’re so dumb they just stand there and let you shoot them. The laser charges won’t ever run out. You and me, me and you, all alone in the Mesozoic! Like Adam and Eve, we’ll be. The Adam and Eve of the Late Cretaceous. And they can all go to hell back there in 2281.”

His fingers are tingling. His throat is dry. His cheeks blaze with savage adrenal fires. His breath is coming in ragged gasps. He has never felt anything like this before in his life.

He moistens his lips.

“Well—”

She smiles gently. The pressure eases. “It’s a big decision, I know. Think about it,” she says. Her voice is soft now. The wild zeal of a moment before is gone from it. “How soon before your capsule leaves?”

He glances at his wrist. “Eight, nine more hours.”

“Plenty of time to make up your mind.”

“Yes. Yes.”

Relief washes over him. She has dizzied him with the overpowering force of her revelation and the passionate frenzy of her invitation to join her in her escape from the world they have left behind. He isn’t used to such things. He needs time now, time to absorb, to digest, to ponder. To decide. That he would even consider such a thing astonishes him. He has known her how long—an hour, an hour and a half?—and here he is thinking of giving up everything for her. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Shakily he turns away from her and stares at the ankylosaurs wallowing in the mud hole just in front of them.

Strange, strange, strange. Gigantic low-slung tubby things, squat as tanks, covered everywhere by armor. Vaguely triangular, expanding vastly toward the rear, terminating in armored tails with massive bony excrescences at the tips, like deadly clubs. Slowly snuffling forward in the muck, tiny heads down, busily grubbing away at soft green weeds. Jayne jumps down among them and dances across their armored backs, leaping from one to another. They don’t even seem to notice. She laughs and calls to him. “Come on,” she says, prancing like a she-devil.

They dance among the ankylosaurs until the game grows stale. Then she takes him by the hand and they run onward, through a field of scarlet mosses, down to a small clear lake fed by a swift-flowing stream. They strip and plunge in, heedless of risk. Afterward they embrace on the grassy bank. Some vast creature passes by, momentarily darkening the sky. Mallory doesn’t bother even to look up.

Then it is on, on to spy on something with a long neck and a comic knobby head, and then to watch a pair of angry ceratopsians butting heads in slow motion, and then to applaud the elegant migration of a herd of towering duckbills across the horizon. There are dinosaurs everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, an astounding zoo of them. And the time ticks away.

It’s fantastic beyond all comprehension. But even so—

Give up everything for this? he wonders.

The chalet in Gstaad, the weekend retreat aboard the L-5 satellite, the hunting lodge in the veld? The island home in the Seychelles, the plantation in New Caledonia, the pied-à-terre in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower?

For this? For a forest full of nightmare monsters, and a life of daily peril?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

He glances toward her. She knows what’s on his mind, and she gives him a sizzling look. Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

A beeper goes off on his wrist and his thinko says, “It is time to return to the capsule. Shall I guide you?”

And suddenly it all collapses into a pile of ashes, the whole shimmering fantasy perishing in an instant.

“Where are you going?” she calls.

“Back,” he says. He whispers the word hoarsely—croaks it, in fact.

“Tom!”

“Please. Please.”

He can’t bear to look at her. His defeat is total; his shame is cosmic. But he isn’t going to stay here. He isn’t. He isn’t. He simply isn’t. He slinks away, feeling her burning contemptuous glare drilling holes in his shoulder blades. The quiet voice of the thinko steadily instructs him, leading him around pitfalls and obstacles. After a time he looks back and can no longer see her.

On the way back to the capsule he passes a pair of sauropods mating, a tyrannosaur in full slather, another thing with talons like scythes, and half a dozen others. The thinko obligingly provides him with their names, but Mallory doesn’t even give them a glance. The brutal fact of his own inescapable cowardice is the only thing that occupies his mind. She has had the courage to turn her back on the stagnant overperfect world where they live, regardless of all danger, whereas he—he—

“There is the capsule, sir,” the thinko says triumphantly.

Last chance, Mallory.

No. No. No. He can’t do it.

He climbs in. Waits.

Something ghastly appears outside, all teeth and claws, and peers balefully at him through the window. Mallory peers back at it, nose to nose, hardly caring what happens to him now. The creature takes an experimental nibble at the capsule. The impervious metal resists. The dinosaur shrugs and waddles away.

A chime goes off. The Late Cretaceous turns blurry and disappears.

In mid-October, seven weeks after his return, he is telling the somewhat edited version of his adventure at a party for the fifteenth time that month when a woman to his left says, “There’s someone in the other room who’s just came back from the dinosaur tour too.”

“Really,” says Mallory, without enthusiasm.

“You and she would love to compare notes, I’ll bet. Wait and I’ll get her. Jayne! Jayne, come in here for a moment!”

Mallory gasps. Color floods his face. His mind swirls in bewilderment and chagrin. Her eyes are as sparkling and alert as ever, her hair is a golden cloud.

“But you told me—”

“Yes,” she says. “I did, didn’t I?”

“Your capsule—you said it had gone back—”

“It was just on the far side of the ankylosaurs, behind the horsetails. I got to the Cretaceous about eight hours before you did. I had signed up for a twenty-four-hour tour.”

“And you let me believe—”

“Yes. So I did.” She grins at him and says softly, “It was a lovely fantasy, don’t you think?”

He comes close to her and gives her a cold, hard stare. “What would you have done if I had let my capsule go back and stranded myself there for the sake of your lovely fantasy?”

“I don’t know,” she tells him. “I just don’t know.” And she laughs.

A LONG NIGHT’S VIGIL AT THE TEMPLE

The rainy season in California, where I live, usually begins in late October and runs to March or early April, and since it would take me five or six months to write a novel and I generally wrote one every year, it was my custom, in the years when I was an active producer of novels, to write my annual novel during our annual spate of wet months. But in 1990, as it happened, the novel that I began at the usual autumn date was the collaboration with Isaac Asimov that is known as Child of Time in England and The Ugly Little Boy in the United States, and—with Isaac’s existing novella already in hand to give me a tremendous boost into the story—the job took me about half the usual time. I was done with the book before the rains had fairly begun to fall, which left me with an entire winter free. I could spend it standing at the window watching the raindrops fall, or I could write a bunch of short stories; and it was the latter course that I chose.

It was just at that time that the formidably productive anthologist Martin H. Greenberg, with whom I enjoyed a congenial friendship and a close professional relationship for more than thirty years, invited me to do a story for a book he was compiling to mark the hundredth birthday of the great fantasist J.R.R. Tolkien. I confessed that I would be under a certain handicap here: although I had read Tolkien’s children’s book The Hobbit somewhere in the vicinity of my eighth birthday, and some of his philological essays at a rather more recent date, I have never managed to read his celebrated trilogy. I did, I told Marty Greenberg, have a fair idea of what the thing was about, as who could not, after enduring thirty years of Tolkien imitations. I knew it involved a bunch of furry folk going off on a quest for some ring or wand or sword or other maguffin that would save the world from Utter Evil. I knew approximately who Gandalf was, and Gollum, and Frodo, and even Aragorn. But I had never quite brought myself to embark on the first of the three fat volumes and was not in any way a member of the Fellowship of the Ring. Marty urged me to give the story a try anyway. And so I did, in December of 1990, drawing not on my tenuous knowledge of The Lord of the Rings but on my awareness that Tolkien’s intellectual interests had been focused on such things as the origin of religion, the nature of medieval society, and the uses of archaeology in interpreting the past. And thus I came up with what may very well be the only science-fiction story ever written as an homage to J.R.R. Tolkien, and certainly the only one written by someone who has no first-hand knowledge of the famous trilogy. It made its first appearance in print in the Greenberg-edited anthology After the King in January, 1992.

——————

The moment of total darkness was about to arrive. The Warder Diriente stepped forward onto the portico of the temple, as he had done every night for the past thirty years, to perform the evening invocation. He was wearing, as always, his bright crimson warder’s cassock and the tall double-peaked hat of his office, which had seemed so comical to him when he had first seen his father wearing it long ago, but which he now regarded, when he thought of it at all, as simply an article of clothing. There was a bronze thurible in his left hand and in the right he held a tapering, narrow-necked green vessel, sleek and satisfying to the touch, the fine celadon ware that only the craftsmen of Murrha Island were capable of producing.

The night was clear and mild, a gentle summer evening, with the high, sharp sound of tree-frogs in the air and the occasional bright flash of golden light from the lantern of a glitterfly. Far below, in the valley where the sprawling imperial city of Citherione lay, the myriad lights of the far-off residential districts were starting to come on, and they looked like glitterfly gleams also, wavering and winking, an illusion born of great distance.

It was half an hour’s journey by groundwagon from the closest districts of the city to the temple. The Warder had not been down there in months. Once he had gone there more frequently, but now that he was old the city had become an alien place to him, dirty, strange-smelling, discordant. The big stone temple, massive and solid in its niche on the hillside, with the great tawny mountain wall rising steeply behind it, was all that he needed these days: the daily round of prayer and observance and study, the company of good friends, a little work in the garden, a decent bottle of wine with dinner, perhaps some quiet music late at night. A comfortable, amiably reclusive life, untroubled by anguished questions of philosophy or urgent challenges of professional struggle.

His profession had been decided for him before his birth: the post of temple warder was hereditary. It had been in his family for twelve generations. He was the eldest son; his elevation to the wardership was a certainty throughout all his childhood, and Diriente had prepared himself unquestioningly for the post from the first. Of course, somewhere along the way he had lost whatever faith he might once have had in the tenets of the creed he served, and that had been a problem for him for a time, but he had come to terms with that a long while back.

The temple portico was a broad marble slab running the entire length of the building along its western face, the face that looked toward the city. Below the portico’s high rim, extending outward from it like a fan, was a sloping lawn thick as green velvet—a hundred centuries of dedicated gardeners had tended it with love—bordered by groves of ornamental flowering shrubs. Along the north side of the temple garden was a stream that sprang from some point high up on the mountain and flowed swiftly downward into the far-off valley. There were service areas just alongside and behind the temple—a garbage dump, a little cemetery, cottages for the temple staff—and back of those lay a tangle of wilderness forming a transitional zone between the open sloping flank of the mountain on which the temple had been constructed and the high wall of rock that rose to the rear of the site.

Warders were supposed to be in some semblance of a state of grace, that receptivity to the infinite which irreverent novices speak of as “cosmic connection,” when they performed the evening invocation. Diriente doubted that he really did achieve the full degree of rapport, or even that such rapport was possible; but he did manage a certain degree of concentration that seemed acceptable enough to him. His technique for attaining it was to focus his attention on the ancient scarred face of the moon, if it was a night when the moon was visible, and otherwise to look toward the Pole Star. Moon or stars, either would do: the essential thing was to turn his spirit outward toward the realm where the great powers of the Upper World resided. It usually took him only a moment or two to attune himself properly for the rite. He had had plenty of practice, after all.

This night as he looked starward—there was no moon—and began to feel the familiar, faintly prickly sensation of contact awakening in him, the giddy feeling that he was climbing his own spinal column and gliding through his forehead into space, he was startled by an unusual interruption. A husky figure came jogging up out of the garden toward the temple and planted itself right below him at the portico’s edge.

“Diriente?” he called. “Listen, Diriente, you have to come and look at something that I’ve found.”

It was Mericalis, the temple custodian. The Warder, his concentration shattered, felt a sharp jolt of anger and surprise. Mericalis should have had more sense than that.

Testily the Warder indicated the thurible and the celadon vessel.

“Oh,” Mericalis said, sounding unrepentant. “You aren’t finished yet, then?”

“No, I’m not. I was only just starting, as a matter of fact. And you shouldn’t be bothering me just this minute.”

“Yes, yes, I know that. But this is important. Look, I’m sorry I broke in on you, but I had a damned good reason for it. Get your ceremony done with quickly, will you, Diriente? And then I want you to come with me. Right away.”

Mericalis offered no other explanation. The Warder demanded none. It would only be a further distraction, and he was distracted enough as it was.

He attempted with no more than partial success to regain some measure of calmness.

“I’ll finish as soon as you let me,” he told the custodian irritably.

“Yes. Do. I’ll wait for you down here.”

The Warder nodded brusquely. Mericalis disappeared back into the shadows below the portico.

So. Then. Starting over from the beginning. The Warder drew his breath in deeply and closed his eyes a moment and waited until the effects of the intrusion had begun to ebb. After a time the jangling in his mind eased. Then once more he turned his attention to his task, looking up, finding the Pole Star with practiced ease and fixing his eyes upon it. From that direction, ten thousand years ago, the three Visitants had come to Earth to rescue mankind from great peril; or so the Scriptures maintained. Perhaps it actually had happened. There was no reason to think that it hadn’t and some to think that it had.

He focused the entire intensity of his being on the Upper World, casting his soul skyward into the dark terrible gulfs between the galaxies. It was a willed feat of the imagination for him: with conscious effort he pictured himself roving the stars, a disembodied attenuated intelligence gliding like a bright needle through the black airless infinities.

The Warder often felt as though there once had been a time when making that leap had not required an effort of will: that in the days when he was new to his priestly office he had simply stepped forth and looked upward, and everything else had followed as a matter of course. The light of the Pole Star had penetrated his soul and he had gone out easily, effortlessly, on a direct course toward the star of the Three. Was it so? He couldn’t remember. He had been Warder so long. He had performed the evening invocation some ten thousand times at least. Everything was formula and rote by now. It was difficult now to believe that his mind had ever been capable of ascending in one joyous bound into those blazing depths of endless night, or that he had ever seriously thought that looking at the stars and dumping good wine into a stone channel might have some real and undeniable redemptive power. The best he could hope for these days was some flicker—some quivering little stab—of the old ecstasy, while he stood each night beneath the heavens in all their glory. And even that flicker, that tiny stab, was suspect, a probable counterfeit, an act of willful self-delusion.

The stars were beautiful, at any rate. He was grateful for that one blessing. His faith in the literal existence of the Visitants and their one-time presence on the Earth might be gone, but not his awareness of the immensity of the universe, the smallness of Man, the majesty of the great vault of night.

Standing poised and steady, head thrust back, face turned toward the heavens, he began to swing the thurible, sending a cloud of pungent incense swirling into the sky. He elevated the sleek green porcelain vessel, offering it to the three cardinal points, east and west and zenith. The reflexes of his professionalism had hold of him now: he was fully into the ceremony, as deeply as his skepticism would allow him ever to get. In the grasp of the moment he would let no doubts intrude. They would come back to him quickly enough, just afterward.

Solemnly now he spoke the Holy Names:

“Oberith…Aulimiath…Vonubius.”

He allowed himself to believe that he had made contact.

He summoned up the image of the Three before him, the angular alien figures shimmering with spectral light. He told them, as he had told them so many times before, how grateful the world was for all that they had done for the people of Earth long ago, and how eager Earth was for their swift return from their present sojourn in the distant heavens.

For the moment the Warder’s mind actually did seem free of all questions of belief and unbelief. Had the Three in fact existed? Had they truly come to Earth in its time of need? Did they rise up to the stars again in a fiery chariot when their work was done, vowing to return someday and gather up all the peoples of the world in their great benevolence? The Warder had no idea. When he was young he believed every word of the Scriptures, like everyone else; then, he was not sure exactly when, he stopped believing. But that made no conspicuous difference to the daily conduct of his life. He was the Warder of the high temple; he had certain functions to perform; he was a servant of the people. That was all that mattered.

The ritual was the same every evening. According to generally accepted belief it hadn’t changed in thousands of years, going back to the very night of the Visitants’ departure from Earth, though the Warder was privately skeptical of that, as he was of so many other matters. Things change with time; distortions enter any system of belief; of that he was certain. Even so, he outwardly maintained the fiction that there had been no alterations in any aspect of the liturgy, because he was aware that the people preferred to think that that was the case. The people were profoundly conservative in their ways; and he was here to serve the people. That was the family tradition: We are Warders, and that means we serve.

The invocation was at its climax, the moment of the offering. Softly the Warder spoke the prayer of the Second Advent, the point of the entire exercise, expressing the hope that the Three would not long delay their return to the world. The words rolled from him quickly, perfunctorily, as though they were syllables in some lost language, holding no meaning for him. Then he called the Names a second time, with the same theatrical solemnity as before. He lifted the porcelain vessel high, inverted it, and allowed the golden wine that it contained to pour into the stone channel that ran down the hill toward the temple pond. That was the last of it, the finale of the rite. Behind him, at that moment, the temple’s hydraulus-player, a thin hatchet-faced man sitting patiently in the darkness beside the stream, struck from his instrument the three great thunderous chords that concluded the service.

At this point any worshippers who had happened to have remained at the temple this late would have fallen to their knees and cried out in joy and hope while making the sign of the Second Advent. But there were no worshippers on hand this evening, only a few members of the temple staff, who, like the Warder, were going about the business of shutting the place down for the night. In the moment of the breaking of the contact the Warder stood by himself, very much conscious of the solitude of his spirit and the futility of his profession as he felt the crashing wave of his unbelief come sweeping back in upon him. The pain lasted only an instant; and then he was himself again.

Out of the shadows then came Mericalis once more, broad-shouldered, insistent, rising before the Warder like a specter he had conjured up himself.

“You’re done? Ready to go?”

The Warder glared at him. “Why are you in such a hurry? Do you mind if I put the sacred implements away first?”

“Go right ahead,” the custodian said, shrugging. “Take all the time you want, Diriente.” There was an unfamiliar edge on his voice.

The Warder chose to ignore it. He re-entered the temple and placed the thurible and the porcelain wine-vessel in their niche just within the door. He closed the wrought-iron grillwork cover of the niche and locked it, and quickly muttered the prayer that ended his day’s duties. He put aside his tall hat and hung his cassock on its peg. Underneath it he wore a simple linen surplice, belted with a worn strip of leather.

He stepped back outside. The members of the temple staff were drifting off into the night, heading down by torchlight to their cottages along the temple’s northern side. Their laughter rose on the soft air. The Warder envied them their youth, their gaiety, their assurance that the world was as they thought it was.

Mericalis, still waiting for him beside a flowering bayerno bush just below the thick marble rim of the portico, beckoned to him.

“Where are we going?” the Warder asked, as they set out briskly together across the lawn.

“You’ll see.”

“You’re being very damned mysterious.”

“Yes. I suppose I am.”

Mericalis was leading him around the temple’s northwestern corner to the back of the building, where the rough road began that by a series of steep switchbacks ascended the face of the hill against which the temple had been built. He carried a small automatic torch, a mere wand of amber light. On this moonless evening the torch seemed more powerful than it really was.

As they went past the garbage dump Mericalis said, “I really am sorry I broke in on you just as you were about to do the invocation. I did actually think you were done with it already.”

“That doesn’t make any difference now.”

“I felt bad, though. I know how important that rite is to you.”

“Do you?” the Warder said, not knowing what to make of the custodian’s remark.

The Warder had never discussed his loss of faith with anyone, not even Mericalis, who over the years had become perhaps his closest friend, closer to him than any of the temple’s priests. But he doubted that it was much of a secret. Faith shines in a man’s face like the full moon breaking through the mists on a winter night. The Warder was able to see it in others, that special glow. He suspected that they were unable to see it in him.

The custodian was a purely secular man. His task was to maintain the structural integrity of the temple, which, after all, had been in constant service for ten thousand years and by now was perpetually in precarious condition, massive and sturdy though it was. Mericalis knew all the weak places in the wall, the subtle flaws in the buttresses, the shifting slabs in the floor, the defects of the drains. He was something of an archaeologist as well, and could discourse learnedly on the various stages of the ancient building’s complex history, the details of the different reconstructions, the stratigraphic boundaries marking one configuration of the temple off from another, showing how it had been built and rebuilt over the centuries. Of religious feeling Mericalis seemed to have none at all: it was the temple that he loved, not the creed that it served.

They were well beyond the garbage dump now, moving along the narrow unpaved road that ran up toward the summit of the mountain. The Warder found his breath coming short as the grade grew more steep.

He had rarely had occasion to use this road. There were old altars higher up on the mountain, remnants of a primitive fire-rite that had become obsolete many hundreds of years before, during the Samtharid Interregnum. But they held no interest for him. Mericalis, pursuing his antiquarian studies, probably went up there frequently, the Warder supposed, and now he must have made some startling discovery amidst the charred ancient stones, something bizarre and troublesome enough to justify breaking in on him during the invocation. A scene of human sacrifice? The tomb of some prehistoric king? This mountain had been holy land a long time, going back, so it was said, even into the days before the old civilization of machines and miracles had collapsed. What strangeness had Mericalis found?

But their goal didn’t seem to lie above them on the mountain. Instead of continuing to ascend, the custodian turned abruptly off the road when they were still only a fairly short distance behind the temple and began pushing his way vigorously into a tangle of underbrush. The Warder, frowning, followed. By this time he knew better than to waste his breath asking questions. He stumbled onward, devoting all his energy to the job of maintaining his footing. In the deep darkness of the night, with Mericalis’ little torch the only illumination, he was hard pressed to keep from tripping over hidden roots or vines.

After about twenty paces of tough going they came to a place where a second road—a crude little path, really—unexpectedly presented itself. This one, to the Warder’s surprise, curved back down the slope in the direction of the temple, but instead of returning them to the service area on the northern side it carried them around toward the opposite end of the building, into a zone which the Warder long had thought was inaccessible because of the thickness of the vegetation. They were behind the temple’s southeastern corner now, perhaps a hundred paces from the rear wall of the building itself. In all his years here the Warder had never seen the temple from this angle. Its great oblong bulk reared up against the sky, black on black, a zone of intense starless darkness against a star-speckled black backdrop.

There was a clearing here in the scrub. A roughly circular pit lay in the center of it, about as wide across as the length of a man’s arm. It seemed recently dug, from the fresh look of the mound of tailings behind it.

Mericalis walked over to the opening and poked the head of his torch into it. The Warder, coming up alongside him, stared downward. Despite the inadequacy of the light he was able to see that the pit was actually the mouth of a subterranean passageway which sloped off at a sharp angle, heading toward the temple.

“What’s all this?” the Warder asked.

“An unauthorized excavation. Some treasure-hunters have been at work back here.”

The Warder’s eyes opened wide. “Trying to tunnel into the temple, you mean?”

“Apparently so,” said Mericalis. “Looking for a back way into the vaults.” He stepped down a little way into the pit, paused, and looked back, beckoning impatiently to the Warder. “Come on, Diriente. You need to see what’s here.”

The Warder stayed where he was.

“You seriously want me to go down there? The two of us crawling around in an underground tunnel in the dark?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I’m an old man, Mericalis.”

“Not all that old. And it’s a very capably built little passageway. You can manage it.”

Still the Warder held back. “And what if the men who dug it come back and find us while we’re in there?”

“They won’t,” said Mericalis. “I promise you that.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Trust me, Diriente.”

“I’d feel better if we had a couple of the younger priests with us, all the same.”

The custodian shook his head. “Once you’ve seen what I’m going to show you, you’ll be glad that there’s no one here but you and me to see it. Come on, now. Are you going to follow me or aren’t you?”

Uneasily the Warder entered the opening. The newly broken ground was soft and moist beneath his sandaled feet. The smell of the earth rose to his nostrils, rich, loamy, powerful. Mericalis was five or six paces ahead of him and moving quickly along without glancing back. The Warder found that he had to crouch and shuffle to keep from hitting his head on the narrow tunnel’s low roof. And yet the tunnel was well made, just as the custodian had said. It descended at a sharp angle until it was perhaps twice the height of a man below the ground, and then leveled out. It was nicely squared off at the sides and bolstered every ten paces by timbers. Months of painstaking work must have been required for all this. The Warder felt a sickly sense of violation. To think that thieves had managed to work back here undisturbed all this time! And had they reached the vaults? The temple wasn’t actually a single building, but many, of different eras, each built upon the foundation of its predecessor. Layer beneath layer of inaccessible chambers, some of them thousands of years old, were believed to occupy the area underneath the main ceremonial hall of the present-day temple. The temple possessed considerable treasure, precious stones, ingots of rare metals, works of art: gifts of forgotten monarchs, hidden away down there in those old vaults long ago and scarcely if ever looked at since. It was believed that there were tombs in the building’s depths, too, the burial places of ancient kings, priests, heroes. But no one ever tried to explore the deeper vaults. The stairs leading down to them were hopelessly blocked with debris, so that not even Mericalis could distinguish between what might once have been a staircase and what was part of the building’s foundation. Getting down to the lower strata would be impossible without ripping up the present-day floors and driving broad shafts through the upper basements, and no one dared to try that: such excavation might weaken the entire structure and bring the building crashing down. As for tunneling into the deep levels from outside—well, no one in the Warder’s memory had ever proposed doing that, either, and he doubted that the Grand Assize of the Temple would permit such a project to be carried out even if application were made. There was no imaginable spiritual benefit to be gained from rooting about in the foundations of the holy building, and not much scientific value in it either, considering how many other relics of Earth’s former civilizations, still unexcavated after all this time, were on hand everywhere to keep the archaeologists busy.

But if the diggers had been thieves, not archaeologists—

No wonder Mericalis had come running up to him in the midst of the invocation!

“How did you find this?” the Warder asked, as they moved farther in. The air here was dank and close, and the going was very slow.

“It was one of the priests that found it, actually. One of the younger ones, and no, I won’t tell you his name, Diriente. He came around back here a few days ago with a certain young priestess to enjoy a little moment or two of privacy and they practically fell right into it. They explored it to a point about as far as we are now and realized it was something highly suspicious, and they came and told me about it.”

“But you didn’t tell me.”

“No,” Mericalis said. “I didn’t. It seemed purely a custodial affair then. There was no need to get you involved in it. Someone had been digging around behind the temple, yes. Very likely for quite some time. Coming in by night, maybe, working very, very patiently, hauling away the tailings and dumping them in the woods, pushing closer and closer to the wall of the building, no doubt with the intent of smashing through into one of the deep chambers and carrying off the vast wealth that’s supposedly stored down there. My plan was to investigate the tunnel myself, find out just what had been going on here, and then to bring the city police in to deal with it. You would have been notified at that point, of course.”

“So you haven’t taken it to the police yet, then?”

“No,” said Mericalis. “I haven’t.”

“But why not?”

“I don’t think there’s anyone for them to arrest, that’s why. Look here, Diriente.”

He took the Warder by the arm and tugged him forward so that the Warder was standing in front of him. Then he reached his arm under the Warder’s and flashed the torch into the passageway just ahead of them.

The Warder gasped.

Two men in rough work clothes were sprawled on the tunnel floor, half buried beneath debris that had fallen from overhead. The Warder could see shovels and picks jutting out from the mound of fallen earth beside them. A third man—no, this one was a woman—lay a short distance away. A sickening odor of decay rose from the scene.

“Are they dead?” the Warder asked quietly.

“Do you need to ask?”

“Killed by a rockfall, you think?”

“That’s how it looks, doesn’t it? These two were the diggers. The girl was their lookout, I suspect, posted at the mouth of the tunnel. She’s armed: you see? Two guns and a dagger. They must have called her in here to see something unusual, and just then the roof fell in on them all.” Mericalis stepped over the slender body and picked his way through the rubble beyond it, going a few paces deeper into the passageway. “Come over here and I’ll show you what I think happened.”

“What if the roof collapses again?”

“I don’t think it will,” Mericalis said.

“If it can collapse once, it can collapse again,” said the Warder, shivering a little now despite the muggy warmth of the tunnel. “Right on our heads. Shouldn’t we get out of here while we can?”

The custodian ignored him. “Look here, now: what do you make of this?” He aimed the torch to one side, holding it at a ninety-degree angle to the direction of the tunnel. The Warder squinted into the darkness. He saw what looked like a thick stone lintel which had fallen from the tunnel vault and was lying tipped up on end. There were archaic-looking inscriptions carved in it, runes of some sort. Behind it was an opening, a gaping oval of darkness in the darkness, that appeared to be the mouth of a second tunnel running crosswise to the one they were in. Mericalis leaned over the fallen lintel and flashed his beam beyond it. A tunnel, yes. But constructed in a manner very different from that of the one they had been following. The walls were of narrow stone blocks, carefully laid edge to edge; the roof of the tunnel was a long stone vault, supported by pointed arches. The craftsmanship was very fine. The joints had an archaic look.

“How old is this?” the Warder asked.

“Old. Do you recognize those runes on the lintel? They’re proterohistoric stuff. This tunnel’s as ancient as the temple itself, most likely. Part of the original sacred complex. The thieves couldn’t have known it was here. As they were digging their way toward the temple they intersected it by accident. They yelled for the girl to come in and look—or maybe they wanted her to help them pull the lintel loose. Which they proceeded to do, and the weak place where the two tunnels met gave way, and the roof of their own tunnel came crashing down on them. For which I for one feel no great sorrow, I have to admit.”

“Do you have any idea where this other tunnel goes?”

“To the temple,” said Mericalis. “Or under it, rather, into the earliest foundation. It leads straight toward the deepest vaults.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve been inside already. Come.”

There was no question now of retreating. The Warder, following close along behind Mericalis, stared at the finely crafted masonry of the tunnel in awe. Now and again he saw runic inscriptions, unreadable, mysterious, carved in the stone floor. When they had gone about twenty paces yet another stone-vaulted passageway presented itself, forking off to the left. The custodian went past it without a glance. “There are all sorts of tunnels down here,” Mericalis said. “But this is the one we want. So far as I’ve been able to determine at this point, it’s the only one that enters the temple.” The Warder saw that Mericalis had left a marker that glowed by the reflected light of his torch, high up on the wall of the passage they were following, and he supposed that there were other markers farther on to serve as guides for them. “We’re in a processional hypogeum,” the custodian explained. “Probably it was just about at ground level, ten thousand years ago, but over the centuries it was buried by construction debris from the later temples, and other trash of various sorts. There was a whole maze of other stone-walled processional chambers around it, leading originally to sacrificial sites and open-air altars. The tunnel we just passed was one of them. It’s blocked a little way onward. I spent two days in here going down one false trail after another. Until I came through this way, and—behold, Diriente!”

Mericalis waved his torch grandly about. By the pale splash of light that came from its tip the Warder saw that the sides of the tunnel expanded outward here, spreading to the right and the left to form a great looming wall of superbly dressed stone, with one small dark aperture down at the lower left side. They had reached the rear face of the temple. The Warder trembled. He had an oppressive sense of the thickness of the soil above him, the vast weight pressing down, the temple itself rising in all its intricacy of strata above him. He was at the foundation of foundations. Once all this had been in the open: ten thousand years ago, when the Visitants still walked the Earth.

“You’ve been inside?” the Warder asked hoarsely.

“Of course,” said Mericalis. “You have to crawl the first part of the way. Take care to breathe shallowly: there’s plenty of dust.”

The air here was hot and musty and dry, ancient air, lifeless air. The Warder choked and gagged on it. On hands and knees, head down, he crept along behind Mericalis. Several times, overcome by he knew not what, he closed his eyes and waited until a spasm of dizziness had passed.

“You can stand now,” the custodian told him.

They were in a large square stone chamber. The walls were rough-hewn and totally without ornament. The room was empty except for three long, narrow coffers of unpolished white marble side by side at the far end.

“Steady yourself, old friend,” Mericalis said. “And then come and see who we have here.”

They crossed the room. The coffers were covered with a thick sheet of some transparent yellowish material that looked much like glass, but in fact was some other substance that the Warder could not identify.

An icy shiver ran through the Warder as he peered through the coverings.

There was a skeleton in each coffer, lying face upward: the glistening fleshless bones of some strange long-shanked creature, manlike in size and general outline, but different in every detail. Their heads bore curving bony crests; their shoulders were crested also; their knees were double ones; they had spikelike protrusions at their ankles. Ribs, pelvises, fingers, toes—everything strange, everything unfamiliar. These were the bodies of alien beings.

Mericalis said, “My guess is that the very tall one in the center is Vonubius. That’s probably Aulimiath on the right and the other one has to be Oberith, then.”

The Warder looked up at him sharply. “What are you saying?”

“This is obviously a sepulcher. Those are sarcophagi. These are three skeletons of aliens that we’re looking at here. They’ve been very carefully preserved and buried in a large and obviously significant chamber on the deepest and therefore oldest level of the Temple of the Visitants, in a room that once was reached by a grand processional passageway. Who else do you think they would be?”

“The Visitants went up into the heavens when their work on Earth was done,” said the Warder hollowly. “They ascended on a ship of fire and returned to their star.”

“You believe that?” Mericalis asked, chuckling.

“It says so in the Scriptures.”

“I know that it does. Do you believe it, though?”

“What does it matter what I believe?” The Warder stared again at the three elongated alien skeletons. “The historical outlines aren’t questioned by anybody. The world was in a crisis—in collapse. There was war everywhere. In the midst of it all, three ambassadors from another solar system arrived and saw what was going on, and they used their superior abilities to put things to rights. Once a stable new world order had emerged, they took off for the stars again. The story turns up in approximately the same form in every society’s myths and folk-tales, all over the Earth. There’s got to be some truth to it.”

“I don’t doubt that there is,” said Mericalis. “And there they are, the three wise men from afar. The Scriptures have the story a little garbled, apparently. Instead of going back to their native star, promising to return and redeem us at some new time of trouble, they died while still on Earth and were buried underneath the temple of the cult that sprang up around them. So there isn’t going to be any Second Advent, I’d tend to think. And if there ever is, it may not be a friendly one. They didn’t die natural deaths, you’ll notice. If you’ll take a careful look you’ll see that the heads of all three were severed violently from their trunks.”

“What?”

“Look closely,” Mericalis said.

“There’s a break in the vertebrae, yes. But that could have been—”

“It’s the same sort of break in all three. I’ve seen the skeletons of executed men before, Diriente. We’ve dug up dozens of them around the old gibbet down the hill. These three were decapitated. Believe me.”

“No.”

“They were martyrs. They were put to death by their loving admirers and devoted worshippers, the citizens of Earth.”

“No. No. No. No.”

“Why are you so stunned, Diriente? Does it shock you, that such a dreadful thing could have happened on our lovely green planet? Have you been squirreled up in your nest on this hillside so long that you’ve forgotten everything you once knew about human nature? Or is it the unfortunate evidence that the Scriptural story is wrong that bothers you? You don’t believe in the Second Advent anyway, do you?”

“How do you know I don’t?”

“Please, Diriente.”

The Warder was silent. His mind was aswirl with confusions.

After a time he said, “These could be any three aliens at all.”

“Yes. I suppose they could. But we know of only three beings from space that ever came to this planet: the ones who we call the Visitants. This is the temple of the faith that sprang up around them. Somebody went to great trouble to bury these three underneath it. I have difficulty believing that these would be three different alien beings.”

Stubbornly the Warder said, “How do you know that these things are genuine skeletons? They might be idols of some sort.”

“Idols in the form of skeletons? Decapitated skeletons, at that?” Mericalis laughed. “I suppose we could test them chemically to see if they’re real, if you like. But they look real enough to me.”

“The Visitants were like gods. They were gods, compared with us. Certainly they were regarded as divine—or at least as the ministers and ambassadors of the Divine Being—when they were here. Why would they have been killed? Who would have dared to lay a hand on them?”

“Who can say? Maybe they didn’t seem as divine as all that in the days when they walked among us,” Mericalis suggested.

“But the Scriptures say—”

“The Scriptures, yes. Written how long after the fact? The Visitants may not have been so readily recognized as holy beings originally. They might simply have seemed threatening, maybe—dangerous—tyrannical. A menace to free will, to man’s innate right to make trouble for himself. It was a time of anarchy, remember. Maybe there were those who didn’t want order restored. I don’t know. Even if they were seen as godly, Diriente: remember that there’s an ancient tradition on this planet of killing one’s gods. It goes back a long, long way. Study your prehistoric cults. You dig down deep enough, you find a murdered god somewhere at the bottom of almost all of them.”

The Warder fell into silence again. He was unable to take his eyes from those bony-crested skulls, those strange-angled empty eye sockets.

“Well,” Mericalis said, “there you have them, at any rate: three skeletons of what appear to be beings from another world that somebody just happened to bury underneath your temple a very long time ago. I thought you ought to know about them.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“You have to decide what to do about them, now.”

“Yes,” the Warder said. “I know that.”

“We could always seal the passageway up again, I suppose, and not say a word about this to anyone. Which would avoid all sorts of uncomfortable complications, wouldn’t it? It strikes me as a real crime against knowledge, doing something like that, but if you thought that we should—”

“Who knows about this so far?”

“You. Me. No one else.”

“What about the priest and priestess who found the excavation pit?”

“They came right to me and told me about it. They hadn’t gone very far inside, no more than five or six paces. Why should they have gone any farther?”

“They might have,” the Warder said.

“They didn’t. They had no torch and they had their minds on other things. All they did was look a little way in, just far enough to see that something unusual was going on. They hadn’t even gone far enough to find the thieves. But they didn’t say a thing about dead bodies in the tunnel. They’d certainly have told me about them, if they had come upon them. And they’d have looked a whole lot shakier, too.”

“The thieves didn’t come in here either?”

“It doesn’t seem that way to me. I don’t think they got any farther than the place where they pulled that lintel out of the passage wall. They’re dead, in any case.”

“But what if they did get this far? And what if there was someone else with them, someone who managed to escape when the tunnel caved in? Someone who might be out there right now telling all his friends what he saw in this room?”

Mericalis shook his head. “There’s no reason to think that. And I could see, when I first came down this passage and into the sepulchral chamber, that nobody had been through here in more years than we can imagine. There’d have been tracks in the dust, and there weren’t any. This place has gone undisturbed a very long time. Long enough for the whole story of how the Visitants died to be forgotten and covered over with a nice pretty myth about their ascent into the heavens on a pillar of fire.”

The Warder considered that for a moment.

“All right,” he said finally. “Go back outside, Mericalis.”

“And leave you here alone?”

“Leave me here alone, yes.”

Uneasily Mericalis said, “What are you up to, Diriente?”

“I want to sit here all by myself and think and pray, that’s all.”

“Do I have to believe that?”

“Yes. You do.”

“If you go wandering around down here you’ll end up trapped in some unknown passageway and most likely we’ll never be able to find you again.”

“I’m not going to wander around anywhere. I told you what I’m going to do. I’m going to sit right here, in this very room. You’ve brought me face to face with the dead bodies of the murdered gods of the religion that I’m supposed to serve, and I need to think about what that means. That’s all. Go away, Mericalis. This is something I have to do all by myself. You’ll only be a distraction. Come back for me at dawn and I promise you that you’ll find me sitting exactly where I am now.”

“There’s only one torch. I’ll need it if I’m going to be able to find my way out of the tunnel. And that means I have to leave you in the dark.”

“I realize that, Mericalis.”

“But—”

“Go,” the Warder said. “Don’t worry about me. I can stand a few hours of darkness. I’m not a child. Go,” he said again. “Just go, will you? Now.”

He couldn’t deny that he was frightened. He was well along in years; by temperament he was a sedentary man; it was totally against his nature to be spending a night in a place like this, far beneath the ground, where the air managed to seem both dusty-dry and sticky-moist at the same time, and the sharp, pungent odor of immense antiquity jabbed painfully at his nostrils. How different it was from his pleasant little room, surrounded by his books, his jug of wine, his familiar furnishings! In the total darkness he was free to imagine the presence of all manner of disagreeable creatures of the depths creeping about him, white eyeless toads and fleshless chittering lizards and slow, contemplative spiders lowering themselves silently on thick silken cords from invisible recesses of the stone ceiling. He stood in the center of the room and it seemed to him that he saw a sleek fat serpent, pallid and gleaming, with blind blue eyes bright as sapphires, issue from a pit in the floor and rise up before him, hissing and bobbing and swaying as it made ready to strike. But the Warder knew that it was only a trick of the darkness. There was no pit; there was no serpent.

He perspired freely. His light robe was drenched and clung to him like a shroud. With every breath it seemed to him that he was pulling clusters of cobwebs into his lungs. The darkness was so intense it hammered at his fixed, rigidly staring eyes until he was forced to shut them. He heard inexplicable sounds coming from the walls, a grinding hum and a steady unhurried ticking and a trickling sound, as of sand tumbling through hidden inner spaces. There were menacing vibrations and tremors, and strange twanging hums, making him fear that the temple itself, angered by this intrusion into its bowels, was preparing to bring itself down upon him. What I hear is only the echoes of Mericalis’ footfalls, the Warder told himself. The sounds that he makes as he retraces his way down the tunnel toward the exit.

After a time he arose and felt his way across the room toward the coffers in the corner, clinging to the rough stones of the wall to guide himself. Somehow he missed his direction, for the corner was empty when he reached it, and as he continued past it his inquiring fingers found themselves pressing into what surely was the opening that led to the tunnel. He stood quietly for a moment in the utter darkness, trying to remember the layout of the funeral chamber, certain that the coffers must have been in the corner he had gone to and unable to understand why he had not found them. He thought of doubling back his path and looking again. But perhaps he was disoriented; perhaps he had gone in precisely the opposite direction from the one he supposed he had taken. He kept going, past the opening, along the wall on the other side. To the other corner. No coffers here. He turned right, still clinging to the wall. A step at a time, imagining yawning pits opening beneath his feet. His knee bumped into something. He had reached the coffers, yes.

He knelt. Grasped the rim of the nearest one, leaned forward, looked down into it.

To his surprise he was able to see a little now, to make out the harsh, angular lines of the skeleton it contained. How was that possible? Perhaps his eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness. No, that wasn’t it. A nimbus of light seemed to surround the coffer. A faint reddish glow had begun to rise from it and with the aid of that unexpected illumination he could actually see the outlines of the elongated shape within.

An illusion? Probably. Hallucination, even. This was the strangest moment of his life, and anything was to be expected, anything at all. There is magic here, the Warder found himself thinking, and then he caught himself up in amazement and wonder that he should have so quickly tumbled into the abyss of the irrational. He was a prosaic man. He had no belief in magic. And yet—and yet—

The glow grew more intense. The skeleton blazed in the darkness. With eerie clarity he saw the alien crests and spines, the gnarled alien vertebrae, everything sending up a strange crimson fire to make its aspect plain to him. The empty eye sockets seemed alive with fierce intelligence.

“Who are you?” the Warder asked, almost belligerently. “Where did you come from? Why did you ever poke your noses into our affairs? Did you even have noses?” He felt strangely giddy. The closeness of the air, perhaps. Not enough oxygen. He laughed, too loudly, too long. “Oberith, is that who you are? Aulimiath? And that’s Vonubius in the center box, yes? The tallest one, the leader of the mission.”

His body shook with sudden anguish. Waves of fear and bewilderment swept over him. His own crude joking had frightened him. He began to sob.

The thought that he might be in the presence of the actual remains of the actual Three filled him with confusion and dismay. He had come over the years to think of the tale of the Advent as no more than a myth—the gods who came from the stars—and now he was stunned by this evidence that they had been real, that they once were tangible creatures who had walked and eaten and breathed and made water—and had been capable of dying, of being killed. He had reached a point long ago of not believing that. This discovery required him to reevaluate everything. Did it trivialize the religion he served into mere history? No—no, he thought; the existence here in this room of these bones elevated history into miracle, into myth. They truly had come. And had served, and had departed: not to the stars, but to the realm of death. From which they would return in the due course of time, and in their resurrection would bring the redemption that had been promised, the forgiveness for the crime that had been committed against them.

Was that it? Was that the proper way to interpret the things this room held?

He didn’t know. He realized that he knew nothing at all.

The Warder shivered and trembled. He wrapped his arms around himself and held himself tight.

He fought to regain some measure of control over himself.

“No,” he said sternly. “It can’t be. You aren’t them. I don’t believe that those are your names.”

From the coffers no answer came.

“You could be any three aliens at all,” the Warder told them fiercely. “Who just happened to come to Earth, just dropped in one afternoon to see what might be here. And lived to regret it. Am I right?”

Still silence. The Warder, crouching down against the nearest coffer with his cheek pressed against the dry cold stone, shivered and trembled.

“Speak to me,” he begged. “What do I have to do to get you to speak to me? Do you want me to pray? All right, then, I’ll pray, if that’s what you want.”

In the special voice that he used for the evening invocation he intoned the three Holy Names:

“Oberith…Aulimiath…Vonubius.”

There was no reply.

Bitterly he said, “You don’t know your names, do you? Or are you just too stubborn to answer to them?”

He glowered into the darkness.

“Why are you here?” he asked them, furious now. “Why did Mericalis have to discover you? Oh, damn him, why did he ever have to tell me about you?”

Again there was no answer; but now he felt a strange thing beginning to occur. Serpentine columns of light were rising from the three coffers. They flickered and danced like tongues of cold fire before him, commanding him to be still and pay heed. The Warder pressed his hands against his forehead and bowed his head and let everything drain from his mind, so that he was no more than an empty shell crouching in the darkness of the room. And as he knelt there things began to change around him, the walls of the chamber melted and dropped away, and he found himself transported upward and outward until he was standing outside, in the clear sweet air, under the golden warmth of the sun.

The day was bright, warm, springlike, a splendid day, a day to cherish. But there were ugly dissonances. The Warder heard shouts to his right, to his left—harsh voices everywhere, angry outcries.

“There they are! Get them! Get them!”

Three slender grotesque figures came into view, half again as tall as a man, big-eyed, long-limbed, strange of shape, moving swiftly but with somber dignity, as though they were floating rather than striding, keeping just ahead of their pursuers. The Warder understood that these were the Three in their final moments, that they have been harried and hunted all this lovely day across the sweet meadows of this lush green valley. Now there was nowhere further for them to go, they are trapped in a cul-de-sac against the flank of the mountain, the army of their enemies is closing in and all hope of escape is impossible.

Now the Warder heard savage triumphant screams. Saw reddened, swollen, wrathful faces. Weapons bristling in the air, clubs, truncheons, pitchforks, hatchets. Wild eyes, distended lips, clenched fists furiously shaken. And on a little mound facing their attackers are the Three, standing close together, offering no resistance, seemingly at peace. They appear perplexed by what is happening, perhaps, or perhaps not—how can he tell? What do their alien expressions mean? But almost certainly they are not angry. Anger is not an emotion that can pertain to them in any way. They have a look about them that seems to indicate that they had expected this. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. A moment of hesitation: the mob suddenly uneasy at the last, frightened, even, uncertain of the risks in what they are doing. Then the hesitation was overcome, the people surging forward like a single berserk creature, the flash of steel in the sunlight—

The vision abruptly ended. He was within the stone chamber again. The light was gone. The air about him was dry and stale, not sweet and mild. The tomb was dark and empty.

The Warder felt stunned by what he had seen, and shamed. A sense of almost suicidal guilt overwhelmed him. Blindly he rushed back and forth across the dark room, frenzied, manic, buffeting himself against the unseen walls. Then, exhausted, he paused for a moment to gasp for breath and stared into the darkness at the place where he thought the coffers were situated. He would break through those transparent coverings, he told himself, and snatch up the three strange skulls and carry them out into the bright light of day, and he would call the people together and show them what he had brought forth from the depths of the Earth, brandishing the skulls in their faces, and he would cry out to them, “Here are your gods. This is what you did to them. All your beliefs were founded on a lie.” And then he would hurl himself from the mountain.

No.

He will not. How can he crush their hopes that way? And having done it, what good would his death achieve?

And yet—to allow the lie to endure and persist—

“What am I going to do about you?” the Warder asked the skeletons in their coffers. “What am I going to tell the people?” His voice rose to a wild screech. It echoed and reechoed from the stone walls of the room, reverberating in his throbbing skull. “The people! The people! The people!”

“Speak to me!” the Warder cried. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do!”

Silence. Silence. Silence. They would give him no answers.

He laughed at his own helplessness. Then he wept for a time, until his eyes were raw and his throat ached from his sobbing. He fell to his knees once more beside one of the coffers. “Who are you?” he asked, in nothing more than a whisper. “Can you really be Vonubius?”

And this time imagines that he hears a mocking answer: I am who I am. Go in peace, my son.

Peace? Where? How?

At last, a long while later, he began to grow calm once more, and thought that this time he might be able to remain that way. He saw that he was being ridiculous—the old Warder, running to and fro in a stone chamber underground, crying out like a lunatic, praying to gods in whom he didn’t believe, holding conversations with skeletons. Gradually his churning soul moved away from the desperate turbulence into which it had fallen, the manic frenzy, the childish anger. There was no reddish glow, no. His overwrought mind had conjured up some tormented fantasy for him. Darkness still prevailed in the chamber. He was unable to see a thing. Before him, he knew, were three ancient stone boxes containing age-old dry bones, the earthly remains of unearthly creatures long dead.

He was calm, yes. But there seemed no way even now to hide from his despair. These relics, he knew, called his whole life into question. The whole ugly truth of it stood unanswerably revealed. He had served a false creed, knowingly offering people the empty hope that they would be redeemed by benevolent gods. Night after night standing up there on the portico, invoking the Three, praying for their swift return to this troubled planet. Whereas in truth they had never left Earth at all. Had perished, in fact, at the hands of the very people they had come here—so he supposed—to redeem.

What now? the Warder asked himself. Reveal the truth? Display the bodies of the Three to the dismayed, astounded faithful, as he had imagined himself doing just a short time ago? Would he do any such thing? Could he? Your beliefs were founded on a lie, he pictured himself telling them. How could he do that? But it was the truth. Small wonder that I lost my own faith long ago, he thought. He had known the truth before he ever knew he knew it. It was the truth that he had sworn to serve, first and always. Was that not so? But there was so much that he did not understand—could not understand, perhaps.

He looked in the direction of the skeletons, and a host of new questions formed in his mind.

“Why did you want to come to us?” he asked, not angrily now, but in a curious tranquility of spirit. “Why did you choose to serve us as you did? Why did you allow us to destroy you, since surely it was in your power to prevent it?”

Powerful questions. The Warder had no answers to them. But yet who knew what miracles might grow from the asking of them. Yes. Yes. Miracles! True faiths can arise from the ruined fragments of false ones, was that not so?

He was so very tired. It had been such a long night.

Gradually he slipped downward until he was lying completely prone, face pillowed in his arms. It seemed to him that the gentle light of morning was entering the chamber, that the long vigil was over at last. How could that be, light reaching him underground? He chose not to pursue the question. He lay quietly, waiting. And then he heard footsteps. Mericalis was returning. The night was over indeed.

“Diriente? Diriente, are you all right?”

“Help me up,” the Warder says. “I’m not accustomed to spending my nights lying on stone floors.”

The custodian flashes his torch around the room as if he expects it to have changed in some fashion since he last saw it.

“Well?” he says, finally.

“Let’s get out of here, shall we?”

“You’re all right?”

“Yes, yes, I’m all right!”

“I was very worried. I know you said you wanted to be alone, but I couldn’t help thinking—”

“Thinking can be very dangerous,” says the Warder coolly. “I don’t recommend it.”

“I want to tell you, Diriente, that I’ve decided that what I suggested last night is the best idea. The evidence in this room could blow the Church to pieces. We ought to seal the place up and forget we ever were in here.”

“No,” says the Warder.

“We aren’t required to reveal what we’ve found to anybody. My job is simply to keep the temple building from falling down. Yours is to perform the rituals of the faith.”

“And if the faith is a false one, Mericalis?”

“We don’t know that it is.”

“We have our suspicions, don’t we?”

“To say that the Three never returned safely to the stars is heresy, isn’t it, Diriente? Do you want to be responsible for spreading heresy?”

“My responsibility is to promote the truth,” says the Warder. “It always has been.”

“Poor Diriente. What have I done to you?”

“Don’t waste your pity on me, Mericalis. I don’t need it. Just help me find my way out of here, all right? All right?”

“Yes,” the custodian says. “Whatever you say.”

The passageway is much shorter and less intricate on the way out than it seemed to be when they entered. Neither of them speaks a word as they traverse it. Mericalis trudges quickly forward, never once looking back. The Warder, following briskly along behind, moves with a vigor he hasn’t felt in years. His mind is hard at work: he occupies himself with what he will say later in the day, first to the temple staff, then to the worshippers who come that day, and then, perhaps, to the emperor and all his court, down in the great city below the mountain. His words will fall upon their ears like the crack of thunder at the mountaintop; and then let whatever happen that may. Brothers and sisters, I announce unto you a great joy, is how he intends to begin. The Second Advent is upon us. For behold, I can show you the Three themselves. They are with us now, nor have they ever left us—

THEBES OF THE HUNDRED GATES

I had always wanted to visit Egypt and see the Pyramids and the other monuments of the Pharaohs, even as a small boy, and when I began writing books on archaeological subjects (Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, Empires in the Dust, and many others, starting in 1961) that desire grew even stronger. But not until 1990, after having traveled far and wide throughout the world, did I finally do anything about going there.

Our plan was to make the trip in conjunction with Brian and Margaret Aldiss, who had been there before and who had offered much good advice on how to cope with the mysteries of that ancient land. At the last moment the Aldisses had to cancel, I forget why; but, thanks to Brian’s useful suggestion, we had engaged the services of an excellent tour company, Kuoni Tours, which put together an Egyptian adventure for us which, for the most part, took us from place to place in a private car with a guide, and so we saw everything we wanted to see without having to sign up for the sort of group tour that I have always tried to avoid.

We landed in Cairo, found ourselves almost immediately staring up at the Great Pyramid of Khufu—far more massive than I had ever imagined, and I hadn’t imagined that the Great Pyramid was a tiny thing—and the Sphinx nearby. After a couple of days wandering in chaotic Cairo we embarked on a dazzling ten-day journey by car and plane that took us south as far as Aswan and the awesome cliffside statues of Rameses II, and then came back to Luxor, Sakkara, Memphis, and nearly all the other memorable sights along the way before we returned to Cairo and a return visit to the Pyramids. (We stayed, our final night, at the Mena Hotel, with the Pyramids virtually within reach just outside our window.) Egypt was everything I had expected it to be and then some, and I spent the next few months steeping myself in archaeological texts and translations of the sacred scriptures of the Pharaonic era.

There was at that time a vigorous small-press publishing company based in Seattle, Pulphouse Press, that was doing a series of books of stand-alone novellas under the direction of Kristine Kathryn Rusch. My regular trade publisher in that period was Bantam Books, then under the command of the brilliant and ambitious Lou Aronica. Lou just then had the idea of publishing a series of stand-alone novellas also, and had no objections to co-publishing with Pulphouse, and, since the novella is my favorite length for fiction (cf. “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Secret Sharer,” “Hawksbill Station,” “Born with the Dead,” and five or six more of mine) I leaped at the opportunity to write an Egyptian novella for them. The opening lines of “Thebes of the Hundred Gates,” which I wrote in January, 1991, very precisely capture the emotions I felt myself at the outset of my own Egyptian trip:

The sensory impact pressed in on him from all sides at once in the first dazzling moment of his arrival: a fierce bombardment of smells, sights, sounds, everything alien, everything much too intense, animated by a strange inner life.

Exactly so. I wrote the 30,000-word story with furious intensity, working at a pace I hadn’t been able to sustain for years, and finished in about a month. Pulphouse published it in November, 1991 in several limited-edition formats, and Bantam followed with a paperback edition in July, 1992.

——————

Heaven is opened, the company of gods shines forth!

Amon-Re, Lord of Karnak, is exalted upon the great seat!

The Great Nine are exalted upon their seats!

Thy beauties are thine, O Amon-Re, Lord of Karnak!

—The Liturgy of Amon

——————

Flame which came forth backwards, I have not stolen the god’s-offerings.

O Bone-breaker who came forth from Heracleopolis, I have not told lies.

O Eater of entrails who came forth from the House of Thirty, I have not committed perjury.

O You of the darkness who came forth from the darkness, I have not been quarrelsome.

O Nefertum who came forth from Memphis, I have done no wrong, I have seen no evil.

—The Negative Confession

ONE

The sensory impact pressed in on him from all sides at once in the first dazzling moment of his arrival: a fierce bombardment of smells, sights, sounds, everything alien, everything much too intense, animated by a strange inner life. Luminous visions assailed him. He wandered for some indeterminate span of astounded time in shimmering dream-forests. Even the air had texture, contradictory and confusing, a softness and a roughness, a heaviness and a giddy lightness. Egypt coursed through him like an uncheckable river, sparking and fizzing, stunning him with its immensity, with its stupefying aliveness.

He was inhaling magic, and he was choking on it. Breathing was a struggle—he was so stunned that he had to remind himself how it was done—but the real problem was the disorientation. There was too much information and he was having trouble processing. It was like sticking not just your fingertip but your whole head into the light-socket. He was a dozen different sizes and he was experiencing every moment of his life, including moments he hadn’t yet lived, in a single simultaneous flash.

He had prepared for this moment for months—for nearly all his life, you might almost say—and yet nothing could really prepare anyone for this, not really. He had made three training jumps, two hundred years, then four hundred, then six hundred, and he thought he knew what to expect, that sickening sense of breathlessness, of dizziness, of having crashed into the side of a mountain at full tilt; but everyone had warned him that even the impact of a six-C jump was nothing at all compared with the zap of a really big one, and everyone had been right. This one was thirty-five C’s, and it was a killer. Just hold on and try to catch your breath, that’s what the old hands had told him, Charlie Farhad who had made the Babylon jump and Nick Efthimiou who had seen the dancers leaping over bulls at the court of King Minos and Amiel Gordon who had attended a royal bar mitzvah at the temple of Solomon when the paint was still fresh. It’s a parachute jump without the parachute, Efthimiou had said. The trick is to roll with the punch and not try to offer any resistance. If you live through the first five minutes you’ll be okay. You built up a charge of temporal potential as you went, and the farther back in time you went, the stiffer the charge, in more ways than one.

Gradually the world stopped spinning wildly around him. Gradually the dizziness ebbed.

The actual extent of what he could see was quite limited. They did their best to drop you off someplace where your arrival wouldn’t be noticed. He was in an unpaved alleyway maybe six feet wide, flanked by high walls of dirty whitewashed mud-brick that blocked his view to either side. The last bright traces of the golden aura of the jump field were still visible as a series of concentric rings with him at its center, a glittering spiderweb of light, but they were dwindling fast. Two donkeys stood just in front of him, chewing on straw, studying him with no great curiosity. A dozen yards or so behind him was some sort of rubble-heap, filling the alley almost completely. His sandal-clad left foot was inches from a row of warm green turds that one of the donkeys must have laid down not very long before. To his right flowed a thin runnel of brownish water so foul that it seemed to him he could make out the movements of giant microorganisms in it, huge amoebas and paramecia, grim predatory rotifers swimming angrily against the tide. Of the city that lay beyond the nasty, scruffy little slot where he had materialized, nothing was visible except a single tall, skinny palm tree, rising like an arrow against the blank blue sky above the alley wall. He could have been anywhere in any of a hundred Asian or African or Latin American countries. But when he glanced a second time at the wall to his left he caught sight of a scrawled graffito, a scribbled line of faded words hastily applied; and the script was the vaguely Arabic-looking squiggles and dots and boxes of Eighteenth Dynasty hieratic and his well-trained mind instantly provided a translation: May the serpent Amakhu devourer of spirits swallow the soul of Ipuky the wine-merchant, may he fall into the Lake of Fire, may he be trapped in the Room of Monsters, may he die for a million years, may his ka perish eternally, may his tomb be full of scorpions, for he is a cheat and a teller of falsehoods. In that moment the totality of the world which he had just entered, the inescapable bizarre reality of it, came sweeping in on him in tidal surges of sensation, Thoth and Amon, Isis and Osiris, temples and tombs, obelisks and pyramids, hawkfaced gods, black earth, beetles that talked, snakes with legs, baboon-gods, vulture-gods, winking sphinxes, incense fumes drifting upward, the smell of sweet beer, sacks of barley and beans, half-mummified bodies lying in tubs of natron, birds with the heads of women, women with the heads of birds, processions of masked priests moving through forests of fat-bellied stone columns, water-wheels turning slowly at the river’s edge, oxen and jackals, cattle and dogs, alabaster vessels and breastplates of gold, plump Pharaoh on his throne sweating beneath the weight of his two-toned crown, and above all else the sun, the sun, the sun, the inescapable implacable sun, reaching down with insinuating fingers to caress everything that lived or did not live in this land of the living and the dead. The whole of it was coming through to him in one great shot. His head was expanding like a balloon. He was drowning in data.

He wanted to cry. He was so dazed, so weakened by the impact of his leap through time, so overwhelmed. There was so much he needed to defend himself against, and he had so few resources with which to do it. He was frightened. He was eight years old again, suddenly promoted to a higher grade in school because of his quick mind and his restless spirit, and abruptly confronted with the mysteries of subjects that for once were too difficult for him instead of too easy—long division, geography—and a classroom full of unfamiliar new classmates, older than he was, dumber, bigger, hostile.

His cheeks blazed with the shame of it. Failure wasn’t a permissible mode.

Maybe it was time to start moving out of this alleyway, he decided. The worst of the somatics seemed to be past, now, pulse more or less normal, vision unblurred—if you live through the first five minutes you’ll be okay—and he felt steady enough on his feet. Warily he made his way around the two donkeys. There was barely enough clearance between the beasts and the wall. One of the donkeys rubbed his shoulder with its bristly nose. He was bare to the waist, wearing a white linen kilt, sandals of red leather, a woven skullcap to protect his head. He didn’t for a moment think he looked convincingly Egyptian, but he didn’t have to; here in the great age of the New Empire the place was full of foreigners—Hittites, Cretans, Assyrians, Babylonians, maybe even a Chinaman or two or some sleek little Dravidian voyager from far-off India—tell them you’re a Hebrew, Amiel had advised, tell them you’re Moses’ great-grandfather and they’d better not fuck around with you or you’ll hit them with the twelve plagues a hundred years ahead of schedule. All he had to do was find some short-term way of fitting in, keep himself fed somehow until he had completed his mission, sign on for work of any sort where he could simulate a skill—a scribe, a butler, a maker of pots, a fashioner of bricks. Anything. He only had to cope for thirty days.

The alley took a sharp bend twenty feet beyond the donkeys. He paused there for a long careful look, fixing the details in his mind: the graffito, the rubble-heap, the angle of the bend, the height and declination of the palm tree. He was going to have to find his way back here, of course, on the thirtieth day. They would be trawling through time for him, and that was like fishing with a bent pin: he had to give them all the help he could. For a moment his heart sank. Probably there were fifty thousand alleys just like this one in Thebes. But he was supposed to be an intelligent life-form, he reminded himself. He’d make note of the landmarks; he’d file away all the specifics. His life depended on it.

Now at last he was at the end of the alley.

He peered out into the street and had his first glimpse of Thebes of the Hundred Gates.

The city hit him in the face with a blast of sensation so heavy that he felt almost as shaken as he had in the first instant of the time-jump. Everything was noise, bustle, heat, dust. The smell of dung and rotting fruit was so ripe he had to fight to keep from gagging. There were people everywhere, huge throngs of them, moving with startling purposefulness, jostling past him, bumping him, pushing him aside as though he were invisible to them as he stood slackjawed in the midst of all this frenzy; this could be New York’s Fifth Avenue on a spring afternoon, except that many of them were naked or nearly so in the astonishing furnace-like heat, and huge herds of goats and sheep and oxen and asses and weird long-horned hump-backed cattle were moving serenely among them. Pigs snorted and snuffled at his feet. He had emerged into a sort of plaza, with tangled clusters of little mud-walled shops and taverns and, very likely, brothels, all around him. The river was on his right just a few dozen steps away, very low but flowing fast, a swift green monster cluttered with hundreds of ships with curving prows and towering masts, and right in front of him, no more than a hundred yards distant, was a vast walled structure which, from the double row of giant papyrus-bud stone columns and the hint of intricate antechambers beyond, he supposed was the building that in modern times was known as Luxor Temple. At least it was in the proper north-south alignment along the Nile. But what he saw now was very different from the temple he had explored just two weeks ago—Two weeks? Thirty-five hundred years!—on his orientation trip to contemporary Egypt. The Avenue of the Sphinxes was missing, and so were the obelisks and the colossi that stood before the great flaring wings of the north pylon. The pylon didn’t seem to be there either. Of course. The Luxor Temple sphinxes were Thirtieth Dynasty work, still a dozen centuries in the future. The obelisks and the colossi were the doing of Rameses II, whose reign lay five or six kingships from now, and so too was the north pylon itself. In their place was an unfamiliar covered colonnade that looked almost dainty by Egyptian architectural standards, and two small square shrines of pink granite, with a low, slender pylon of a clearly archaic style behind them, bedecked with bright fluttering pennants. He felt a small scholarly thrill at the sight of them: these were Twelfth Dynasty structures, perhaps, ancient even in this era, which Rameses’ inexorable builders had no doubt swept away to make room for their own more grandiose contributions. But what was more bewildering than the differences in floor plan was the contrast between this temple and the bare, brown, skeletal ruin that he had seen in latter-day Luxor. The white limestone blocks of the façades and columns were almost unbearably brilliant under the sun’s unblinking gaze. And they were covered everywhere by gaudy reliefs painted in mercilessly bright colors, red, yellow, blue, green. From every cornice and joist glittered inlays of precious metal: silver, gold, rare alloys. The temple pulsed with reflected sunlight. It was like a second sun itself, radiating shattering jolts of energy into the frantic plaza.

Too much, he thought, beginning to sway. Too much. He was overloading. His head throbbed. His stomach lurched. He was having trouble focusing his eyes. He felt chills even in the midst of all this heat. Because of it, most likely. He imagined that he was turning green with nausea.

“You are ill? Yes, I can see that you are ill, very ill.” A sudden deep voice, virile and harsh. A hand closing tight around his wrist. A man’s face thrust practically up against his, thin lips, hawk nose, shaven scalp. Dark brooding eyes bright with concern. “You look very bad. You will be an Osiris soon, I think.”

“I—I—”

“To die like a pig in the street—that is not good, not good at all, my friend.”

It was astonishing that anyone had spoken to him and even more astonishing—despite all his training—that he could understand. Of course they had filled his brain with Egypt, pumped him to the brim, language, art, history, customs, everything. And he had learned a good deal on his own before that. But still he was surprised to find that he had comprehended the other man’s words so easily. His tutors hadn’t guessed quite right on the pronunciation, but they had been close enough. The vowels were wrong, everything shifted into the back of the throat, “e” turning into “i,” “o” turning into “u,” but he was able quickly enough to adjust for that. His benefactor was holding him upright with that vise-like grip; otherwise he would fall. He tried to think of something to say, but no words would come. His fluency failed him when it was his moment to speak. He couldn’t frame a single sentence. You will be an Osiris soon. Was he dying, then? How strange, putting it that way. He must be starting to look like Osiris already, the dead god, green-faced, mummified.

The stranger was drawing him out of the sun, into the sparse shade of a five-branched palm at the edge of the plaza.

“I am very ill, yes—” he managed finally. “The heat—my head—”

“Yes. Yes. It is so sad. But look, my friend, the god is coming now.”

He thought at first that some apparition was descending, that Horus or Thoth had come to carry him off to the Land of the Dead. But no, no, that wasn’t what the stranger meant at all. A stupefying roar had gone up from the crowd, a bursting swell of incredible noise. The man pointed. He managed to follow the outstretched arm. His vision was blurring again, but he could make out a commotion near the front of the temple, brawny men wearing nothing but strips of blue and gold cloth advancing, wielding whips, people falling back, and then a chariot appearing from somewhere, everything gilded, blindingly bright, falcons on the yoke-pole, a great solar disk above them, winged goddesses on the sides, horned creatures behind; and out of the temple and into the chariot, then, there came a slow portly figure, ornately robed in the stifling heat—the blue crown on his head, the khepresh, and the two scepters in his hands, the crook and the flail, and the stiff little false beard strapped to his chin—

The king, it was—it must be—the Pharaoh, getting into the chariot—he has been at some ceremony in the temple, and now he will return to his palace across the river—

Drums and trumpets, and the sound of high-pitched things something like oboes. An immense roar. “Horus!” the crowd was crying now. Ten thousand voices at once, a single throat. “Horus! Neb-Maat-Re! Life! Health! Strength!”

Neb-Maat-Re. The Pharaoh Amenhotep III, that was what that meant. His coronation name. It was the king himself, yes. Standing there, smiling, acknowledging the crowd, before his very eyes.

“Lord of the Two Lands!” they were shouting. “Son of Re! Living image of Amon! Mighty one! Benefactor of Egypt! Life! Health! Strength!”

Too much, too much, too much. He was totally overwhelmed by it all. He was thirty-five centuries out of his proper time, a displacement that he had been confident he would be able to comprehend until the moment he found himself actually experiencing it. Now his entire body convulsed in a tremor born of fatigue and confusion and panic. He tottered and desperately grasped the palm tree’s rough scaly trunk. The last of his little strength was fleeing under the impact of all this staggering unthinkable reality. Thebes as a living city—Amenhotep III himself, wearing the blue crown—the masked priests, hawk-faced, ibis-faced, dog-faced—the dark mysterious figure of a woman coming out now, surely the queen, taking her place beside the Pharaoh—the chariot beginning to move—

“Life! Health! Strength!”

For the king, maybe. Not for him. How had he ever managed to pass the psychological tests for this mission? He was flunking now. He had been able to fake his way successfully among tougher people all his life, but the truth was coming out at last. His legs were turning to water. His eyes were rolling in his head. They had sent the wrong man for the job: he saw that clearly now. Indeed it was the only thing he could see clearly. He was too complicated, too—delicate. They should have sent some stolid unimaginative jock, some prosaic astronaut type, invulnerable to emotion, to the hot dark unreasoning side of life, poetry-free, magic-free, someone who would not become overwhelmed like this by the sight of a fat middle-aged man in a silly costume getting into a Hollywood chariot.

Was it that? Or simply the heat, and the lingering shock of the thirty-five-C jump itself?

“Ah, my friend, my friend,” the dark-eyed stranger was saying. “I fear you are becoming an Osiris this very minute. It is so sad for you. I will do what I can to help you. I will use my skills. But you must pray, my dear friend. Ask the king to spare your life. Ask the Lady Isis. Ask the mercy of Thoth the Healer, my friend, or you will die as surely as—”

It was the last thing he heard as he pitched forward and crumpled to the ground at the palm tree’s base.

TWO

The stranger rested quietly on a bed in the House of Life in the Precinct of Mut that lay just to the south of Ipet-sut, the great temple of Amon, in the baffling jumble of holy buildings that future ages would call Karnak. The pavilion he was in was open to the sky, a simple colonnade; its slim pillars, rising like stems to the swollen lotus-buds at the top, were painted a soothing pink and blue and white. The stranger’s eyes were closed and peaceful and his breath was coming slowly and easily, but there was the gleam of fever on his face and his lips were drawn back in an odd grimace, an ugly lopsided smile. Now and again a powerful shudder rippled through his body.

“He will die very soon, I think,” the physician said. His name was Hapu-seneb and he was the one who had been with the stranger when he collapsed outside the Temple of the Southern Harem of Amon.

“No,” said the priestess. “I think he will live. I am quite sure that he will live.”

The physician made a soft smothered sound of scorn.

But the priestess paid no heed to that. She moved closer to the bed, which stood high off the floor of the room and sloped noticeably from head to foot. The stranger lay naked on a mattress of cord matting, tightly stretched and covered with cushions, and his head rested on a curving block of wood. He was slender and light-boned, almost feminine in his delicacy, though his lean body was muscular and covered with a thick mat of dark curling hair.

Her hand lightly touched his forehead.

“Very warm,” she said.

“A demon is in him,” said Hapu-seneb. “There is little hope. He will be an Osiris soon. I think the crocodile of the West has him, or perhaps the rerek-snake is at his heart.”

Now it was the priestess’ turn to utter a little skeptical snort.

She was a priestess in the service of Isis, although this was the Precinct of Mut and the entire temple complex was dedicated to Amon; but there was nothing unusual about that. Things overlapped; boundaries were fluid; one god turned easily into another. Isis must be served, even in Amon’s temple. The priestess was tall for a woman, and her skin was very pale. She wore a light linen shift that was no more substantial than a mist: her breasts showed through, and the dark triangle at her loins. A heavy black wig of natural hair, intricately interwoven in hundreds of tight plaits, covered her shaven scalp.

The stranger was muttering now in his sleep, making harsh congested sounds, a babble of alien words.

“He speaks demon-language,” Hapu-seneb said.

“Shh! I’m trying to hear!”

“You understand the language of demons, do you?”

“Shh!”

She put her ear close by his mouth. Little spurts and freshets of words came from him: babble, delirium, then a pause, then more feverish muttering. Her eyes widened a little as she listened. Her forehead grew furrowed; she tucked her lower lip in, and nibbled it lightly.

“What is he saying, then?” asked Hapu-seneb.

“Words in a foreign language.”

“But you understand them. After all, you’re foreign yourself. Is he a countryman of yours?”

“Please,” said the priestess, growing irritated. “What good are these questions?”

“No good at all,” the physician said. “Well, I will do what I can to save him, I suppose. Your countryman. If that is what he is.” He had brought his equipment with him, his wooden chest of medicines, his pouch of amulets. He gave some thought to selecting an amulet, picking one finally that showed the figure of Amon with four rams’ heads, trampling on a crocodile while eight gods adored him in the background. He whispered a spell over it and fastened it to a knotted cord, which he tied to the stranger’s kilt. He placed the amulet over the stranger’s heart and made magical passes, and said in a deep, impressive tone, “I am this Osiris here in the West. Osiris knows his day, and if he does not exist in it, then I will not exist in it. I am Re who is with the gods and I will not perish; stand up, Horus, that I may number you among the gods.”

The priestess watched, smiling a little.

The physician said, “There are other spells I can use.” He closed his eyes a moment and breathed deeply. “Behind me, crocodile, son of Set!” he intoned. “Float not with thy tail. Seize not with thy two arms. Open not thy mouth. May the water become a sheet of fire before thee! The charm of thirty-seven gods is in thine eye. Thou art bound to the four bronze pillars of the south, in front of the barge of Re. Stop, crocodile, son of Set! Protect this man, Amon, husband of thy mother!”

“That must be a good spell,” said the priestess. “See, he’s stirring a little. And I think his forehead grows cool.”

“It is one of the most effective spells, yes. But medicines are important too.” The physician began to rummage through the wooden chest, drawing forth little jars, some containing crushed insects, some containing live ones, some holding the powdered dung of powerful animals.

The priestess laid her hand lightly on Hapu-seneb’s arm.

“No,” she said. “No medicines.”

“He needs—”

“What he needs is to rest. I think you should go now.”

“But the powder of the scorpion—”

“Another time, Hapu-seneb.”

“Lady, I am the physician, not you.”

“Yes,” she said gently. “And a very fine physician you are. And your spells have been very fine also. But I feel Isis in my veins, and the goddess tells me that what will heal this man is sleep, nothing other than sleep.”

“Without medicine he will die, lady. And then Isis will have her Osiris.”

“Go, Hapu-seneb.”

“The oil of serpent, at least—”

“Go.”

The physician scowled and began to say something; but then he converted his anger deftly into a shrug and started to pack up his medical equipment. The priestess was a favorite of the young Prince Amenhotep; everyone knew that. It was perhaps not a good idea to disagree with her too strongly. And if she thought she knew what sort of care this stranger needed better than he did, well—

When Hapu-Seneb was gone, the priestess threw some grains of incense on the brazier in the corner of the pavilion and stood for a time staring out into the deepening darkness, breathing deeply and trying to calm herself, for she was not at all calm just now, however she may have seemed to the physician. In the distance she heard chanting. A darkening blue was descending from the sky and changing the river’s color. The first stars were appearing overhead. A few fireflies flickered past the tops of the columns. From far away came the mournful sound of the night-trumpet, floating across the water from the royal palace on the west bank.

Well then, she thought.

She considered what had to be done now.

She clapped her hands twice, and two slave-girls came running. To the older and more intelligent one she said, “Go to the House of Stars which is behind the shrine of Men-Kheper-Re, Eyaseyab, and tell Senmut-Ptah the astronomer to come to me right away. He will tell you that he has important work to do. Say to him that I know that, and want him to come all the same, that it’s absolutely essential, an emergency.” The priestess sent the other slave off to fetch cloths steeped in cool water, so that she could bathe the stranger’s forehead.

The stranger was still unconscious, but he had stopped babbling now. His face was no longer so rigidly set and the sheen of fever was nearly gone. Perhaps he was simply asleep. The priestess stood above him, frowning.

She leaned close to him and said, “Can you hear me?”

He shifted about a bit, but his eyes remained closed.

“I am Isis,” she said softly. “You are Osiris. You are my Osiris. You are the lost Osiris who was cut asunder and restored to life in my care.”

He said something now, indistinctly, muttering in his own language again.

“I am Isis,” she said a second time.

She rested her hand on his shoulder and let it travel down his body, pausing over his heart to feel the steady beating, then lower, and lower still. His loins were cool and soft, but she felt a quickening in them as her fingers lingered. The priestess smiled. Turning away, she picked up the cool cloth that the young slave-girl had brought and lightly mopped his forehead with it. His eyes fluttered open. Had the cool cloth awakened him, she wondered? Or had it been the touch of her hand at the base of his belly a moment before?

He was staring at her.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“A little better.” He spoke very softly, so that she had to strain to hear him.

He glanced down at his nakedness. She saw the movement of his eyes and draped a strip of cloth that she had not yet moistened across his middle.

“Where am I?”

“The House of Life in the Precinct of Mut. The physician Hapu-seneb found you in the street outside the southern temple and brought you here. I am Nefret. Isis is the one I serve.”

“Am I dying, Nefret?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The man who found me said I was. He told me I was about to become Osiris. That means I’m dying, doesn’t it?”

“It can mean that. It can mean other things. Hapu-seneb is a very fine physician, but he’s not always right. You aren’t dying. I think the heat was too much for you, that’s all. That and perhaps the strain of your voyage.” She studied him thoughtfully. “You came a long way?”

He hesitated before replying. “You can tell, can you?”

“A child could tell. Where are you from?”

Another little pause. A moistening of the lips. “It’s a place called America.”

“That must be very far away.”

“Very.”

“Farther than Syria? Farther than Crete?”

“Farther, yes. Much farther.”

“And your name?” the priestess asked.

“Edward Davis.”

“Ed-ward Da-vis.”

“You pronounce it very well.”

“Edward Davis,” she said again, less awkwardly. “Is that better?”

“You did it well enough the first time.”

“What language do they speak in the place called America?” she asked.

“English.”

“Not American?”

“Not American, no. English.”

“You were speaking in your English while you were asleep, I think.”

He looked at her. “Was I?”

“I suppose,” she said. “How would I know? I heard foreign words, that’s all I can tell you. But you speak our language very well, for someone who comes from so far away.”

“Thank you.”

“Very well indeed. You arrived just today, did you?”

“Yes.”

“By the ship that sailed in from Crete?”

“Yes,” he said. “No. No, not that one. It was a different ship, the one that came from—” He paused again. “It was the ship from Canada.”

“Canada. Is that near America?”

“Very near, yes.”

“And ships from Canada come here often?”

“Not really. Not very often.”

“Ah,” she said. “But one came today.”

“Or yesterday. Everything’s so confused for me—since I became sick—”

“I understand,” the priestess said. She swabbed his forehead with the cool cloth again. “Are you hungry?”

“No, not at all.” Then he frowned. Messages seemed to be traveling around inside his body. “Well, a little.”

“We have some cold roast goose, and some bread. And a little beer. Can you handle that?”

“I could try,” he said.

“We’ll bring you some, then.”

The slave-girl who had gone to fetch the astronomer had returned. She was standing just outside the perimeter of the pavilion, waiting. The priestess glanced at her.

“The priest Senmut-Ptah is here, Lady. Shall I bring him to you?”

“No. No, I’ll go to him. This is Edward-Davis. He was ill, but I think he’s recovering. He’d like to have some food, and something to drink.”

“Yes, Lady.”

The priestess turned to the stranger again. He was sitting up on the bed now, looking off toward the west, toward the river. Night had fully arrived by this time and the torches had been lit along the west bank promenade, and in the hills where the kings’ tombs were. He appeared to be caught up in some enchantment.

“The city is very beautiful at night, yes,” she said.

“I can hardly believe I’m really here.”

“There’s no city like it in all the land. How fortunate you are to see it at its greatest.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

His eyes were shining. He turned to stare at her, and she knew that he was staring at her body through her filmy gown, back-lit by the torches behind her. She felt exposed and curiously vulnerable, and found herself wishing she was wearing something less revealing. It was a long time since she had last cared about that.

The priestess wondered how old he was. Twenty-five, perhaps? Perhaps even less. Younger than she by a good many years, that much was certain.

She said, “This is Eyaseyab. She’ll bring you food. If you want anything else, just ask her.”

“Are you going?”

“There’s someone I have to speak with,” the priestess said.

“And then you’ll come back?”

“Later.”

“Not too much later, I hope.”

“Eat. Rest. That’s what’s important now. Eyaseyab will take care of you.” She smiled and turned away. She could feel his eyes on her as she left the pavilion.

THREE

Senmut-Ptah was waiting for her outside, by the great sphinx that bore the inscription of Tuthmosis III. He was wearing a kilt of scarlet cloth into which golden ibises had been woven, and a tall priestly crown with three long feathers set in it. His shoulders and chest were bare. He was a long-limbed, bony man, very broad through the shoulders, and his features were sharp and powerful, giving him a falcon-face, a Horus-hawk face. Just now he looked angry and impatient.

“You know you’ve made me miss the rising of the Bull’s Thigh,” he said at once, when she appeared. “The North Star will be past the meridian by the time I—”

“Shh,” she said. “The North Star won’t go anywhere unusual tonight, and the Bull’s Thigh will look just the same tomorrow. Walk with me. We have to talk.”

“What about?”

“Walk,” she said. “We can’t talk here. Let’s go down toward the Sacred Lake.”

“I don’t understand why we can’t—”

“Because we can’t,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Come on. Walk with me. The astronomer and the priestess of Isis, out for a little stroll by starlight.”

“I have important observations that absolutely have to be made this evening, and—”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

She loathed the all-enveloping obsessive concern with his astronomical duties that had taken possession of him in recent years. He was like a machine, now. Or like an insect of some sort, clicking along busily in his preprogrammed routines. Day and night preoccupied with his viewing apertures and his transits, his reflecting bowls, his azimuths and meridians and ascensions, his sundials and his water-clocks. Once, when the two of them were new here and first struggling with the terrible challenge of building lives for themselves in Egypt, he had been aflame with wonder and eager curiosity and a kind of burning dauntlessness, but that was all gone now. Nothing seemed to matter to him any longer except his observations of the stars. Somewhere along the way a vast leaden indifference had come to engulf all the rest of him. Why was it so important to him, that absurd compilation of astronomical data, probably inaccurate and in any case useless? And where had he misplaced the warmth and passion that had carried the two of them through all the difficulties they had had to face in this strange land in earlier days?

He glared at her now as though he would send her to the Lake of Fire with a single flash of his eyes, if he could. By the chilly light of the stars his eyes seemed cruel and cold to her, and his face, sculpted to harshness by the years, had some of the nightmare look of the gods whose images were engraved on every wall of every temple. She had once thought he was handsome, even romantic, but time had made his face and body gaunt just as it had turned his soul to stone. He was as ugly as Thoth now, she thought. And as horrid as Set.

But he was the closest thing to an ally that she had in this eternally strange land, unless she counted the prince; and the prince was dangerously unstable, and an Egyptian besides. However much the man who stood before her had changed since he and she had first come to Thebes, he was nevertheless someone of her own kind. She needed him. She couldn’t let herself ever forget that.

She slipped her arm into his and tugged him along, through the colonnade that surrounded the Precinct of Mut, down the new avenue that Pharaoh had built, lined by a double row of cobras, and across the field toward the Sacred Lake. When they had gone far enough from the House of Life so that there was no chance the breeze might carry her voice upward to the sick man in the pavilion she said, speaking suddenly in English, “Someone from downtime showed up in Thebes today, Roger. From Home Era.”

The shift to English was like the throwing of a switch. It was years since she had spoken it, and the effect was immediate and emphatic for her. She felt her former identity, so long suppressed, come leaping forth now from its entombment. Her heart pounded; her breasts rose and fell quickly.

The man who called himself Senmut-Ptah seemed shaken as though by an earthquake. He made a choking sound and pulled himself free of her. Then his icy self-control reasserted itself.

“You can’t be serious. And why are you speaking English?”

“Because Egyptian doesn’t have the words I need in order to tell you what I have to tell you. And because I wouldn’t want anyone who might overhear us to understand.”

“I hate speaking it.”

“I know you do. Speak it anyway.”

“All right. English, then.”

“And I am serious.”

“Someone else from downtime is here? Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

The corner of his mouth made a little quirking motion. He was trying to comprehend her news and obviously having a difficult time of it. She had finally broken through that indifference of his. But it had taken something like this to do it.

“His name’s Edward Davis. He’s very young, very innocent in a charming way. He was staggering around outside Luxor Temple this afternoon right about the time the king was leaving, and he passed out with heatstroke and a bad case of temporal shock practically at Hapu-seneb’s feet. Hapu-seneb brought him to me. I’ve got him in the House of Life this very minute. Eyaseyab’s trying to get a little food into him.”

The astronomer stared. His nostrils flickered tensely. She could see him fighting to maintain his poise.

Sullenly he said, “This is all a fantasy. You’re making it up.”

“I wish. He’s real.”

“Is he? Is he?”

“I could take you to him right now. You can say hello to him in English and hear what he says.”

“No. No, I don’t want to do that.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid of anything. But if you’ve got someone from Home Era up there in your temple, the last thing I would want to do is go to him and give him a big happy handshake. The absolutely last thing.”

“Will you believe me without seeing him, then?”

“If I have to.”

“You have to, yes. Why would I want to invent something like this?”

His lips worked, but for a moment no sound came out.

“Yes, why would you?” he said, finally. And then, after another pause: “When is he from?”

“I don’t know, but it’s got to be a year pretty close to ours. He told me right flat out that he’s from America—what should he care, he must figure the word’s just a meaningless noise to me?—and that he came in today or yesterday on a ship from Canada. He started to say he sailed in from Crete, but maybe it occurred to him that I could check up on that. Or maybe he just enjoys telling whoppers. Did you know an Edward Davis when you were in the Service?”

“I don’t remember any.”

“Neither do I.”

“He must be later than we are.”

“I suppose. But not much. I’m sure of that.”

The astronomer shrugged. “He could come from five hundred years after our time, for all we can tell. Isn’t that so?”

“He could. But I don’t think he does.”

“Intuition?”

“He just doesn’t seem to. Edward Davis. Is that your idea of a Twenty-Seventh Century name?”

“How would I know what a Twenty-Seventh Century name would sound like?” he asked, his voice rising angrily. By the glimmering light of the torches set in the sconces ringing the Sacred Lake she saw agitation returning to his face. Ordinarily he was as expressionless as a granite statue. She had broken through, all right.

He began to pace rapidly along the perimeter of the lake. She was hard pressed to keep up with him.

Then he turned and looked back at her.

Hoarsely he said, “What do you think he wants here, Elaine?”

“What do you think he wants? What else would he be doing here but to study Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt? He speaks the language so well that he must be trained in Egyptology. So he’s come on the usual kind of preliminary exploration mission, the sort of thing we were going to do in Rome. Did you really believe that nobody was ever going to come here? Did you, Roger?”

“I wanted to believe that.”

She laughed. “It had to happen sooner or later.”

“They’ve got five thousand years of Egyptian history to play with. They could have gone to Memphis to watch the pyramids being built. Or to Alexandria to see Antony screwing Cleopatra. Or to the court of Rameses II.”

“They’ve probably been to all those places,” the priestess said. “But they’d want to come here too. Thebes is a fabulous city. And it’s absolutely at its peak right now. It’s an obvious destination.”

The man who called himself Senmut-Ptah nodded glumly. He was silent for a time. He walked even faster. He held his shoulders hunched in an odd way and now and then one of them rose abruptly as though he was being swept by a tic.

At length he said, in a new and oddly flat, unresonant tone, a dead man’s voice, “Well, so someone came at long last. And fell right into your lap on his very first day.”

“Was dumped.”

“Whatever. There he is, up there in your temple, not more than five hundred feet away from us. He could have landed anywhere in Thebes and used up his whole time here without ever laying eyes on either of us or having the slightest notion that we’re here, and instead somehow he finds his way to you in a single day. How neat that is.”

“He doesn’t know anything about me, Roger.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Positive.”

“You didn’t tell him you aren’t Egyptian, did you?”

“I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Do you think he could have guessed?”

“He doesn’t have a clue. He’s still groggy from the jump and he thinks I’m a priestess of Isis.”

“You are a priestess of Isis,” the astronomer said.

“Of course I am. But that’s all he knows about me.”

“Right. You didn’t say a thing. You wouldn’t have.” He came to a halt and stood rigidly with his back toward her, staring off toward the Precinct of Amon. There was another long silence. Then he said, his voice still flat and dead, “Okay. So we’ve got a young man from Home Era on our hands, and you know what he is, but he doesn’t know what you are. Well. Well, well, well. All right: what are we going to do about him, Elaine?”

“Is there any question about that? I have to get rid of him.”

“Get rid? How? What do you mean?”

“Get him out of the temple, is what I mean. Move him along, send him on his way. See to it that he uses up his time in Thebes without finding out anything about us.”

He gave her a long peculiar look. She had no idea what was going on in his mind. He seemed to be cracking apart. He frightened her, reacting to the coming of the visitor as he was, in all these different contradictory ways.

He moistened his lips and said, “So you don’t want to speak to him at all?”

“Speak to him about what?”

The look on his face grew even more strange. She couldn’t remember a time when he had ever seemed so disturbed, not even in the first chaotic days after their arrival. “Anything. The news from Home Era. What’s going on in the world. The Service, our friends. He may know some of them. We haven’t heard a thing in fifteen years. Aren’t you even curious?”

“Of course I am. But the risks—”

“Yes,” he said.

“We’ve talked about this so many times. What we would do if somebody from down there showed up.”

“Yes.”

“And now that someone actually has—”

“That changes everything, having someone from down there actually arrive here.”

“It doesn’t change a thing,” she said coolly. “You only think it does. I’m amazed, Roger. You said only a couple of minutes ago that revealing yourself to him was the last thing you’d want to do. You aren’t seriously suggesting now that we do it, are you?”

He contemplated that.

“Are you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Not seriously. And you don’t want to either.”

“Of course I don’t. I just want to be left alone to live my life.”

“Well, so do I.”

“Then we can’t let him know anything, can we?”

“No.”

“But you’re tempted, all of a sudden. I can see that you are. I didn’t expect this of you, Roger.”

He looked past her, into the night, as though she were not there at all. He seemed once again to be rebuilding some of his old glacial indifference. But she knew now that it was only a pose. He was more confused than she had ever imagined.

“Maybe I am tempted, just a little,” he said grudgingly. “Is that so surprising, that the idea should cross my mind? But of course I don’t mean it.”

“Of course not.”

“Of course.”

“Good. I’ll take care of this, then. I just wanted you to know what was happening. You can go back to your observatory, now. Maybe there’s still time to find the North Star tonight. Or whatever it is that you do.”

She realized that somewhere during the conversation she had gone back to speaking Egyptian, and so had he. She wasn’t sure when that had been.

FOUR

In the morning the slave-girl Eyaseyab came into the pavilion where he was lying on the sloping bed and said, “You are awake? You are better? You are strong today?”

He blinked at her. It must be well along in the morning. The sky was like a blue shield above him and the air was already warming toward the midday scorch. He realized that he was awake and that he felt reasonably strong. During the night the worst effects of the shock of his arrival in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt seemed to have left him. His throat was dry and his stomach felt hollow, but he was probably strong enough to stand.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and cautiously got up. The flimsy cloth that was covering him fell away, leaving him naked. That was a little strange; but Eyaseyab was just about naked too, as naked as any of the girls in the tomb paintings in the Valley of the Kings, just a little beaded belt around her hips and a tiny loincloth covering the pubic area. Little anklets of blue beads jingled as she moved. She was sixteen or seventeen, he supposed, though it was hard to tell, and she seemed cheerful and healthy and reasonably clean. Her eyes were dark and glossy and so was her hair, and her skin was a pleasing olive color with a hint of red in it and a golden underhue.

She had brought a basin of water and a flask of perfumed oil. Carefully she washed him, in a way that was the nearest thing to being intimate, but wasn’t. He suspected that it could be, if he asked. He had never been washed by a woman like this, at least not since he was a child, and it was enticing and unnerving both at once. When she was done washing him she anointed him with the warm, fragrant oil, rubbing it into his chest and back and thighs. That too was new to him, and very strange. She is a slave, he told himself. She’s accustomed to doing this. Now and again she giggled. Once her eyes came up to meet his, and he saw provocation in them; but it seemed unthinkable for him to reach for her now, in this open place, in this temple. To draw her to him, to use her. She is a slave, he told himself. She expects to be used. Which makes it all the more impossible.

She handed him his white kilt and watched without embarrassment as he clambered into it.

“I have brought food,” she said. “You will eat and then we will go.”

“Go where?”

“To the place where you will live.”

“On the temple grounds?”

“In town,” she said. “You will not stay here. The priestess Nefret has said I am to take you to a lodging in the town.”

That was upsetting. He had been hoping to stay here, to be taken into the service of the temple in some fashion. He wanted to speak with that serene, mysterious, aloof priestess again; in this profoundly unfamiliar place she had already begun to seem like an island of security and succor. He had felt a strange kind of rapport with her, some curious sort of kinship, and he would gladly have remained in her domain a little longer. But finding some safe nest to hide in, he knew, would not be a useful way of achieving the goals of his mission here.

Eyaseyab went out and returned shortly with a tray of food for him: a bowl of broth, a piece of grilled fish, some flat bread and a few sweet cakes and a little stone pot of dates. It seemed much too much food. Last night he had only been able to nibble at the meat and beer the girl had brought him. But to his surprise his appetite was enormous today; he emptied the broth bowl in gulps, gobbled the dates, went on to the fish and bread and cakes without hesitating. Vaguely he wondered what sort of microbes he might be ingesting. But of course he had been loaded to the brim with antigens before leaving downtime: one whole division of the Service did nothing but immunological research, and travelers setting out for the past went forth well protected, not just against the great obsolete plagues of yesteryear but against the subtlest of intestinal bugs. He probably had been at greater medical risk during his orientation visit to modern Cairo and Luxor than he was here.

“You want more to eat?” she asked him.

“I don’t think I should.”

“You should eat, if you’re hungry. Here at the temple there’s plenty of food.”

He understood what she was telling him. All well and good; but he couldn’t pack away a month’s worth of eating at a single sitting.

“Come, then,” she said. “I will take you to your lodging-place.”

They left the temple precinct by a side gate. A dusty unpaved path took them quickly to the river promenade, just a short walk away. The temples were much closer to the Nile than they would be thirty-five centuries later. Millennia of sedimentation had changed the river’s course to a startling extent. In this era the Nile flowed where, in modern-day Luxor, there was a broad stretch of land covering several blocks, running from the riverfront promenade to the taxi plaza that served the Karnak ruins, the ticket-booth area, the approach to the avenue of sphinxes at the temple’s first pylon.

She walked swiftly, keeping half a dozen paces in front of him, never looking back. He watched with amusement the rhythmic movements of her buttocks. She was heading south into the bewildering maze that was the city proper.

He could see now why he had been so dazed yesterday. Not only had he had to cope with the shock of temporal displacement far beyond anything he had ever experienced on his training jumps, but the city itself was immense and immediately overpowering. Thebes of the Pharaohs was far bigger than the modern Luxor that occupied its site, and it hit you with all its force the moment you set foot in it. Luxor, its splendid ruins aside, was no more than a small provincial town: a few tourist hotels, a one-room museum, a little airport, a railway station and some shops. Thebes was a metropolis. What was the line from the Iliad? “The world’s great empress on the Egyptian plain, that spreads her conquests o’er a thousand states.” Yes.

The general shape of the place was familiar. Like everything else in Egypt it was strung out along the north-south line of the Nile. The two ends of the city were anchored by the great temples he knew as Luxor and Karnak: Luxor at the southern end, where he had made his appearance yesterday, and the vast complex of Karnak, where he had spent the night, a mile or so to the north. As he faced south now, the river was on his right, cluttered with bright-sailed vessels of every size and design, and beyond it, across the way to the west, were the jagged tawny mountains of the Valley of the Kings, where the great ones of the land had their tombs, with a long row of grand imperial palaces stretching before them in the river plain, Pharaoh’s golden house and the dwellings of his family. When he looked the other way he could see, sharp against the cloudless desert sky, the three lofty hills that marked the eastern boundary, and the massive hundred-gated walls that had still been standing in Homer’s time.

What was so overwhelming about Thebes was not so much its temples and palaces and all its other sectors of monumental grandeur—though they were impressive enough—as it was the feverish multifariousness of the sprawling streets that occupied the spaces between them. They spread out as far as he could see, a zone of habitation limited only by the river on the one side and the inexorable barrenness of the desert on the other. City planning was an unknown concept here. Incomprehensibly twisting lanes of swarming tenements stood cheek by jowl beside the villas of the rich. Here was a street of filthy little ramshackle shops, squat shanties of mud brick, and just beyond rose a huge wall that concealed cool gardened courtyards, blue pools and sparkling fountains, quiet hallways bedecked with colored frescoes; and just on the far side of that nobleman’s grand estate were the tangled alleys of the poor again. The air was so hot that it seemed to be aflame, and a shimmering haze of dust-motes danced constantly in it, however pure the sky might be in the distance. Insects buzzed unceasingly, flies and locusts and beetles making angry, ominous sounds as they whizzed past, and animals browsed casually in the streets as though they owned them. The smoke of a hundred thousand cooking-fires rose high; the smell of meat grilling on spits and fish frying in oil was everywhere. And a steady pounding of traffic was moving in all directions at once through the narrow, congested streets, the nobles in their chariots or litters, ox-carts carrying produce to the markets, nearly naked slaves jogging along beneath huge mounds of neatly wrapped bundles, donkeys staggering under untidier loads half the size of pyramids, children underfoot, vendors of pots and utensils hauling their wagons, everybody yelling, laughing, bickering, singing, hailing friends with loud whoops. He had been in big exotic cities before—Hong Kong, Honolulu, maddening gigantic Cairo itself—but even they, with all their smoke-belching trucks and autos and motorbikes, were no match for the wondrous chaos of Thebes. This was a disorder beyond anything he had ever experienced: indeed, beyond anything he had ever imagined.

They were near the southern temple now. He recognized the plaza where he had collapsed the day before. But abruptly Eyaseyab turned toward the river and led him down a flight of stone steps into a waterfront quarter that had not been visible from above, where squalid taverns and little smoky food-kiosks huddled in a cluster beside a long stone wharf.

A flat barge crowded with people was waiting at the wharf, and a burly man who seemed obviously to be an overseer was waving his arms and crying out something unintelligible in thick, guttural tones.

“It’s going to leave,” Eyaseyab said. “Quick, let’s get on board.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the other side.”

He stared at her blankly. “You said I’d be lodging in town.”

“It is also the town over there. You will be lodging near the place where you will work. The priestess has arranged everything. You are a very lucky man, Edward-Davis.”

“I don’t understand. What sort of work?”

“With the embalmers,” the girl said. “You will be an apprentice in the House of Purification, in the City of the Dead.” She tugged at his wrist. “Come quickly! If we miss the ferry, there won’t be another one going across for an hour.”

Too astonished to protest, he stumbled on board after her. Almost at once, the overseer bellowed a command and slaves along quay-side tugged on the ropes that tied the barge down, pulling them free of the bollards that held them. A huge man wielding an enormous pole pushed the vessel loose and it drifted out into the channel of the Nile. The great red and yellow sails scooped up such breeze as was there for the scooping. The lunatic bustle of Thebes receded swiftly behind them. He stared back at it in dismay.

An embalmer, in the City of the Dead?

A lodging-place on the wrong side of the river?

Some of yesterday’s confusion and panic began to surface in him again. He looked toward the distant western shore. His assignment here was difficult enough as it was; but how was he supposed to carry it out while living over there in the mortuary village? Presumably the two people he had come here to find were living in Thebes proper, if they were here at all. He had expected to circulate in the city, to ask questions and generally sniff about in search of unusual strangers, to pursue whatever clues to their whereabouts he might discover. But the priestess, in her great kindness, had essentially exiled him from the place where he had to be. Now he would have to steal time from his work—whatever that was going to be!—and get himself somehow back to the main part of Thebes every day, or as often as he could arrange it, if he was going to carry out his little Sherlock Holmes operation. It was a complication he hadn’t anticipated.

In the crush of passengers aboard the greatly overcrowded ferry, the slave-girl was jammed right up against him. He found himself enjoying the contact. But he wondered how often one of these boats foundered and sank. He thought of the crocodiles that still inhabited the Nile in this era.

She laughed and said, “It is too many people, yes?”

“Yes. Many too many.”

“It’s always this busy this time. Better to go early, but you were sleeping.”

“Do the ferries run all day?”

“All day, yes, and less often in the night. Everyone uses them. You are still feeling all right, Edward-Davis?”

“Yes,” he said. He let his hands rest on her bare shoulders. “Fine.” For a moment he found himself wondering what he was going to use to pay the ferry fare; and then he remembered that this entire empire managed somehow to function without any sort of cash. All transactions involving goods or services were done by barter, and by a system of exchange that used weights and spirals of copper as units of currency, but only in the abstract: workers were paid in measures of grain or flasks of oil that could be traded for other necessities, and more complex sales and purchases were handled by bookkeeping entries, not by the exchange of actual metal. The ferries, most likely, were free of charge, provided by the government by way of offering some return on the labor-taxes that everyone paid.

The ferry wallowed westward across the green sluggish river. The east bank was no more now than a shadowy line on the horizon, with the lofty walls and columns of the two temple compounds the only discernible individual features. On the rapidly approaching western shore he could see now another many-streeted tangle of low mud-brick buildings, though not nearly as congested as the very much larger one across the way, and a towering row of dusty-leaved palm trees just behind the town as a sort of line of demarcation cutting it off from the emptiness beyond. Further in the distance was the sandy bosom of the western desert, rising gradually toward the bleak bare hills on the horizon.

At the quay-side Eyaseyab spoke briefly with a man in a soiled, ragged kilt, apparently to ask directions. They seemed to know each other; they grinned warmly, exchanged a quick handclasp, traded a quip or two. Davis felt an odd, unexpected pang of jealousy as he watched them. The man turned and pointed toward the left: Davis saw as he swung around that his face was terribly scarred and he had only one eye.

“My brother,” Eyaseyab said, coming back toward him. “He belongs to the ferry-master. We go this way.”

“Was he injured in battle?”

She looked baffled a moment. “His face? Oh, no, he is no soldier. He ran away once, when he was a boy, and slept in the desert one night, and there was an animal. He says a lion, but a jackal, I think. Come, please.”

They plunged into the City of the Dead, Eyaseyab once more going first and leaving him to trudge along behind, keeping his eyes trained on the tapering glossy wedge of her bare back. On every side the industry of death was operating at full throttle. Here was a street of coffin-makers, and here were artisans assembling funerary furniture in open-fronted arcades, and in another street sculptors were at work polishing memorial statues. A showroom displayed gilded mummy-cases in a startling range of sizes, some no bigger than a cat might need, others enormous and ornate. Silent priests with shaven heads moved solemnly through the busy, crowded streets like wraiths. Now and again Davis caught a whiff of some acrid fumes; embalming fluids, he supposed.

The district where the workers lived was only a short distance behind the main commercial area, but the layout of the village was so confusing that Eyaseyab had to ask directions twice more before she delivered him to his new lodging-place. It was a cave-like warren of dark little mud-walled rooms lopsidedly arranged in a U-shaped curve around a sandy courtyard. Misery Motel, Davis thought. A florid, beefy man named Pewero presided over it. The place was almost comically dismal, filthy and dank and reeking of urine, but even so it had its own proud little garden, one dusty acacia tree and one weary and practically leafless sycamore.

“You will take your meals here,” Eyaseyab explained. “They are supplied by the House of Purification. There will be beer if you want it, but no wine. Check your room for scorpions before you go to sleep. On this side of the river they are very common.”

“I’ll remember that,” Davis said.

She stood waiting for a moment at the door to his little cubicle as though expecting something from him. But of course he had nothing to offer her.

Was that what she wanted, though? A gift? Perhaps that look of expectation meant something else.

“Stay with me this afternoon,” he said impulsively.

She smiled almost demurely. “The priestess expects me back. There is much work to do.”

“Tonight, then? Can you come back?”

“I can do that, yes,” she said. There wasn’t much likelihood of it in her tone. She touched his cheek pleasantly. “Edward-Davis. What an odd name that is, Edward-Davis. Does everyone in your country have such odd names?”

“Even worse,” he said.

She nodded. Perhaps that was the limit of her curiosity.

He watched her from his doorway as she went down the dusty path. Her slender back, her bare plump buttocks, suddenly seemed almost infinitely appealing to him. But she turned the corner and was gone. I will never see her again, he thought; and he felt himself plummeting without warning into an abyss of loneliness and something approaching terror as he looked back into the dark little hole of a room that was his new home in this strange land.

You wanted this, he told himself.

You volunteered for this. Going back to find a couple of Service people who hadn’t come back from a mission was only the pretext, the excuse. What you wanted was to experience the real Egypt. Well, kid, here’s the real Egypt, and welcome to it!

He wondered what he was supposed to do next. Report for work? Where? To whom?

Pewero said, “In the morning. Go with them, when they leave.”

“Who?”

But Pewero had already lost interest in him.

He made his way back through the confusion that was the village, staring about him in wonder at the frantic intensity of it all. He had known, of course, that to an Egyptian death was the most important part of life, the beginning of one’s true existence, one’s long residence in eternity: but still it was astonishing to see these hordes of men hard at work, turning out a seemingly endless stream of coffins, scrolls, grave-goods, carvings. It was like a gigantic factory. Death was big business in this country. A dozen guilds were at work here. Only the embalmers were not to be seen, though he suspected their workshops would not be far away; but doubtless they kept to one side, in some quieter quarter, out of respect for the corpses over whom they toiled. The dead here were an active and ever-present part of the population, after all. Their sensibilities had to be considered.

He wandered down toward the river and stood by the quay for a while, looking for crocodiles. There didn’t seem to be any here, only long ugly fish. Unexpectedly he felt calmness settle over him. He was growing accustomed to the heat; he barely heard the noise of the town. The river, even though at low ebb, was strikingly beautiful, a great smooth green ribbon coming out of the inconceivably remote south and vanishing serenely into the unimaginable north, an elemental force cutting through the desert like the will of God. But it stank of decay; he was astounded, standing by it, to see what was unmistakably a dead body go floating by, perhaps a hundred yards out from the bank. No mummifying for that one, no tomb, no eternal life. A beggar, he supposed, an outcast, the merest debris of society: yet what thoughts had gone through his mind at the last moment, knowing as he did that for him death was the end of everything and not the grand beginning?

A trick of the sunlight turned the muddy banks to gold. The corpse drifted past and the river was beautiful again. When Davis returned to the lodging-house, four men were squatting outside, roasting strips of fish over a charcoal fire. They offered him one, asking him no questions, and gave him a little mug of warm rancid beer. He was one of them, the new apprentice. Perhaps they noticed that his features were those of a foreigner and his accent was an odd one, perhaps not. They were incurious, and why not? Their lives were heading nowhere. They understood that he was as unimportant as they were. Important men did not become apprentices in the House of Purification. The priestess Nefret, meaning to do well by the stranger, had buried him in the obscurity of the most menial of labor over here.

It was going to be a long thirty days, he thought. Here in the real Egypt.

To his utter amazement Eyaseyab appeared in his doorway not long after dark as he sat somberly staring at nothing in particular.

“Edward-Davis,” she said, grinning.

“You? But—”

“I said I would be back.”

So at least there would be some consolations.

FIVE

The real Egypt got even realer, much too real, in the days immediately following.

On the first morning he followed the other men of his little mud tenement when they set out for work soon after sunrise. Silently they marched single file through the rapidly awakening City of the Dead, past the residential district and out a short way into the fringe of the desert. The line of demarcation was unmistakable: no transitional zone, but rather two utterly different worlds butting up against each other, fertile humus and green vegetation and the coolness of the river air on one side, and, on the other, arid sand and rock and the blast-furnace heat of the realm of the dead, striking with the force of a punch even this early in the day. The dawn breeze brought him the briny smell of the embalmers’ chemicals, far more pungent than it had been the night before.

And then he saw it, not any kind of house at all but a raggle-taggle pseudo-village, scores of flimsy little booths made of sheets of cloth tacked together in frameworks of wooden struts. It was spread out like a Gypsy encampment over a strip of the desert plain that was probably a thousand yards long and fifty yards or so deep. As he watched, workmen began disassembling a booth not far from him, revealing the workshop within: soiled and wadded cloths, mounds of damp sawdust, rows of phials and flasks and unpainted pottery jars, racks of fearsome-looking tools, a scattering of discarded bandages, and, in the center of the room, a ponderous rectangular table made of four huge wooden butcher’s-blocks. The workmen were carefully packing everything up, sweeping the sawdust into large jars, stuffing the cloths in on top, gathering all the tools and chemicals together and putting them in elegant wooden satchels. He thought he understood. The job was finished here; the dead man had gone to his grave; now the booth where his body had lain for the seventy days of his mummification was being dismantled and every scrap, every bit of cloth, every stray hair, was being taken away lest it fall into the hands of some enemy of his who might use it against him in an enchantment. All these booths were temporary things. Each had been constructed for a specific occupant, and it was taken down when he had been safely seen into the next world.

He looked about in wonder. The great work of preparing the dead for the glorious afterlife was proceeding with awesome alacrity on all sides.

He had studied the process, naturally. He had studied every aspect of Egyptian life while preparing for this mission: they had poured it into him, hypnogogic training day and night, a torrent of facts, an electronic encyclopedia engraved on his mind. He knew how they drew the brain out through the nostrils with an iron hook and squirted chemicals in to dissolve whatever remained. How they made an incision in the left flank through which to remove the entrails for their separate interment in stone jars. The cleansing and scouring of the body, the washing of it in palm-wine; the packing of the interior cavity with myrrh and cassia and other aromatics; the many days of curing in a tub of dry natron to purge the body of all putrefying matter, the thirsty salts devouring every drop of the body’s moisture, leaving it as hard as wood. The coating of the skin with a carapace of resinous paste. And then the bandaging, the body enveloped in its protective layers of cloth, the hundreds of yards of fine linen so carefully wrapped, each finger and toe individually, thimbles covering the nails to keep them in place, the pouring of unguents, the reciting of prayers and the uttering of magic formulas—

But still, to see it all happening right in front of him—to smell it happening—

Someone whacked him on the back.

“Move along, you! Get to work!”

He stumbled and nearly fell.

“Yes—sir—”

Work? Where was he supposed to work? What did they want him to do?

He drifted as though in a dream toward a nearby booth. Its linen door was folded back, half open, and he could see figures moving about within. A naked body lay face down on the great wooden table. Above it stood two figures out of some terrifying dream, men in golden kilts whose heads were concealed by dark Anubis masks—the dog-faced god, the black god of death, tapered narrow ears rising high, dainty pointed muzzles projecting half a foot. These must be the embalmers themselves, members of the secret hereditary guild. A priest stood to one side, droning prayers. There were three other men in the booth, maskless and dressed only in loincloths, handing tools back and forth in response to brief harsh commands. Would an apprentice be useful here? He took a deep breath and went in.

“More oil,” one of the men in loincloths said to him at once, brusquely thrusting a huge sweet-smelling red jar into his arms.

He nodded and backed out of the booth, and looked about in perplexity. An overseer glowered at him. He avoided making eye contact and turned away, trudging up the path as though he knew where he was going. But he hesitated to ask. At any moment, he thought, he would be recognized as an outsider, an impious interloper with no business here. Overseers would take him by the scruff of the neck and carry him to the river—toss him in to provide the crocodiles with breakfast—

Toward him came a boy of thirteen or fourteen, tottering under an immense roll of bandages. The boy, at least, didn’t seem to pose a threat. Davis took up a position in the middle of the path, deliberately blocking it. The boy shot him an angry glance and gestured furiously with his head, wordlessly telling him to move aside.

Davis said, “I need to get some more oil.”

“Then get more oil,” the boy said. “You’re standing in my way.”

“I’m new. I don’t know where to go.”

“Fool,” the boy said in disgust. Then he softened a little. “Cedar oil, is it?”

“Yes,” said Davis, hoping he was right.

“Over there.” The boy nodded toward the side. “Now get out of the path.”

He saw a dispensing station of some sort where an old withered man, as parched as a mummy himself, was dispensing a dark fluid from a clay jar nearly as tall as he was. A line of workmen stood before it. Davis waited his turn and presented the jar, and the old man ladled the new supply in, splashing it about so liberally that Davis’ arms and chest were covered with it.

“You took your time about it,” grunted one of the men in the booth, relieving him of the jar.

“Sorry.”

“Start loading those pipes, will you?”

They were tubes—syringes of a sort—stacked on the floor of the booth. It took a moment for Davis to figure out how they worked; but then he got the knack of it and began filling them with oil and handing them up to the other men, who passed them along to the Anubis-headed embalmers. Who deftly unloaded them into the corpse on the table through the anus.

What was taking place here, he realized, was a bargain-rate mummification. No incisions had been made in this man, no internal organs withdrawn. They were simply pumping him full of a powerful solvent that would leach away the bowels. Then they would sew him up and cover him with natron to dry him out while the oil inside did its work; and when the prescribed number of days had elapsed, they would cut the stitches and let the oil out and send the new Osiris to his final resting-place. There was a cheaper kind of mummification yet, Davis knew, in which they dispensed even with the cedar oil, and simply treated the corpse with natron until it was properly dry. He wondered whether those who were given such skimpy treatment could hope to live forever in the afterlife also, and ride through the heavens with the gods on the boat of the sun. No doubt they did. He began to see why these Egyptians were all so exuberant. So long as they could give their bodies some sort of preparation for the life to come, they were guaranteed virtual immortality, not only the kings but even the humble merchants, the boatmen, the peasants. No reason to be bitter about one’s lot in life: better times were coming, and they would endure forever.

His first day in the necropolis seemed to endure forever also. He drifted from booth to booth, filling in wherever he seemed to be needed, doing whatever they seemed to want him to do. The day was a fever-dream of intestines and stinks, of salts and oils, of dead bodies lying like meat on wooden blocks. It astonished him that death had undone so many this day in Thebes. But then he reminded himself that this wasn’t only one day’s crop; the mummification process lasted a couple of months and there were bodies here in all stages of preparation, ranging from those who had just undergone their preliminary cleaning to those who had attained the requisite level of desiccation and were ready to be carried to their resting places in the hills. Several times during the day new deads arrived at the necropolis, borne on litters with their friends and members of their family grieving by their sides and parties of professional mourners, women with bare breasts and disheveled hair, sobbing along behind. Davis helped to construct the embalmers’ booth for one of these new arrivals; it was the most pleasing thing he had done all day, swift, neat, clean work. In late afternoon just as the sky was beginning to redden behind the jagged hills he witnessed the other end of the process, the departure of a funeral cortege toward the actual place of burial. It must have been someone of note who had died, for the procession was extensive: first servants carrying intricately carved alabaster jars that very likely contained foodstuffs and perfumed oils for the use of the dead man in the next world, and then men bearing heavy, ornately decorated wooden chests that must hold his fine clothing, his prized possessions, all the treasure that he was taking with him to the afterlife; and after them came the four jars of polished stone containing the deceased’s embalmed viscera, carried upon a sled. A priest was alongside, chanting. The mummy itself was next, handsomely encased and resting on a couch beneath a canopy, all mounted upon another sled, this one gilded, with ebony runners. Four more priests accompanied it: and then the family and friends, not grieving now, but looking calm and rather proud of the fine show of which they were a part. In the rear once again were the professional mourners, a dozen of them wailing desperately and beating their breasts, each of them every bit as distraught as though it was her own husband or father who had been taken from her that very morning.

The procession passed through the embalmers’ village and out the far side, heading toward the looming cliffs just to the west. It was grand enough, Davis thought, for a vizier, a judge, a high priest, at the very least. A prince, perhaps.

“Who’s being carried there, do you know?” Davis asked the man by his side.

“Mahu, I think. Overseer of the royal granaries, he was.”

“A rich man?”

“Rich? Mahu? No, not really. Too honest, Mahu was.”

Davis stared at the retreating cortege. How splendid it looked against the light of the setting sun! And this was only a bureaucrat’s funeral. He wondered what a nobleman’s must be like, or a king’s.

He had seen some of the royal tombs during his orientation visit to Luxor, those haunting surreal catacombs endlessly decorated with the bewildering profuse mysteries of the Book of Gates and the Book of the Night and the Book of the Underworld, and he had seen the smaller but jollier tombs of nobles and high officials as well. Had Mahu’s tomb survived to come before the eyes of modern-day archeologists and tourists? He had no idea. Perhaps it had, but no one cared. Mahu had been an honest man; his tomb must not have compared with those of the great lords.

The great ones, Davis already knew, did not undergo their mummifications amidst the vulgar hubbub of the embalmers’ village. For them the booths were set up closer to the tomb sites, well away from the stares of the curious; and they were guarded day and night until they were at last safely packed away underground amidst all their worldly wealth. Which had made no difference in the long run, for all the tombs had been plundered eventually, all but insignificant Tut-ankh-Amon’s, and even his had been broken into a couple of times, though the thieves had left most of the treasure behind. But the mummies themselves, some of them, had survived. In the Cairo Museum Davis had looked upon the actual face of Rameses the Great, stern and fierce, ninety years old and still outraged by the idea of dying: he was one who had meant to stay on the throne forever, to have his afterlife and his first life at the same time. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! And—shivering now—he realized that he had seen Amenhotep III’s mummy in the museum also, the mortal remains of the plump sleek-cheeked man whom he had watched, only two days before, as he came forth from Luxor Temple, a living god, happy and well, becrowned and bejeweled, who had clambered into his royal chariot and driven off while his adoring subjects cheered—Life! Health! Strength!

Davis trembled. He had been with the Service for five years; and it seemed to him that it was only in this moment that the full power of the meaning of being able to travel in time came home to him. The awesome privilege, the utter magnificence of having the gates of the past rolled back for him. For him!

I must not have much of an imagination, he thought.

“You! Standing and watching!”

A whip came out of somewhere and coiled around his bare shoulders like a fiery cobra.

He turned. An overseer was laughing at him.

“Work to do. Who do you think you are?”

Work, yes. Soiled rags to collect. Blood-stained rags, leftover salts, broken pots. He entered one booth where a fat man lay on his back, staring through empty sockets at the darkening sky. A vivid line of stitches crossed his belly, holding in the packing of myrrh and cassia. The fat man’s jaw sagged in the stupefaction of death. All those fine dinners: what did they matter now? Look on my works, ye mighty! On a table in the adjoining booth was a woman, a girl, perhaps fifteen or twenty years old, small-breasted and slender. She had just arrived; the craftsmen of the necropolis had not yet begun their work on her. The elaborate wig of dense midnight-blue hair that she had worn in life sat beside her on the table. Her shaven skull was like porcelain. Her fingernails and toenails were dyed dark red with henna and there was blue-green eye-paint around her sightless eyes. A gold bracelet encircled her lovely arm: maybe she had worn it since a child and it could no longer be removed. Her nakedness was heartbreaking. He felt an impulse to cover it. But he moved on, only remotely aware now of the odor of death and of the chemicals of the embalmers. It was dark now. The Anubis-masked embalmers had gone home. His body ached everywhere from his day’s work, and he knew the pain was just beginning. He was stained with oils and assorted aromatics. His shoulders burned from the sting of the overseer’s whip. The real Egypt, all right. Seen from the underside. Could he leave now, or would he be whipped again? No, no, all the workers were leaving. Night-guards were coming on duty; one of them glanced at him and made a jerking motion with his head, telling him to get out, go back to his village, call it a day.

He had grilled fish for dinner again, and rancid beer.

Later he sat up, staring at the impossibly brilliant stars in the astonishingly clear sky, and wondered whether Eyaseyab would come to him again. But why should she? What was he to her? A comet in the night, a random visitor to whom she had granted a moment of kindness. After a time he went inside his foul little cubicle and lay down on the straw that was his bed.

I must get back across the river, he told himself. I need to find—

And sleep came up in the midst of the thought and took him like a bandit who had thrown a heavy hood over his head.

SIX

Four days went by very much like the first one, in a dreamlike haze of hard work and overmastering strangeness.

He knew he needed to get out of this place, that he had to go back across the river and set about the search for the two missing members of the Service whose trajectories had gone astray and who—so the calculations indicated—were somewhere hereabouts. And, while he was at it, take in as much as he could of mighty Thebes. He had no business settling down like this in the necropolis. He had been sent here in part to rescue the vanished Roger Lehman and Elaine Sandburg, and in part as a scholar of sorts who had been trained to observe and report on one of the most glorious of all ancient cities; and although it might be useful for him to be learning the things that he was concerning the village of the embalmers, it was definitely time to move along. He owed that much to Sandburg, to Lehman, to the Service. Yet a curious trance-like lassitude held him. He sensed that the exhaustion of the day of his arrival had never really lifted from him. He had seemed to recover, he had gone past that frightening stage of dizziness and fainting, he could even cope with the hellish heat, he was able to put in a full working day at manual labor, some of it quite nasty; but in truth he realized that he had drawn back into this awful place as a kind of refuge and he was unable to muster the energy to get out and get on with his real work.

On the fourth night Eyaseyab unexpectedly returned. He had given up all hope of her.

When she appeared, trudging into the compound wearing little more than a shawl over her shoulders, the other men looked enviously at him, with a certain puzzlement and awe in their expressions. A slave-girl of the temple, a young and pretty one at that, coming to see him! Why, the stranger must not be as stupid as he seems. Or else he has some other merit that must not be readily apparent.

He wondered about it himself. And decided that he must seem elegant and exotic to her, courtly, even, a man with manners far beyond those of the class to which he obviously belonged. He was a luxury for her.

As she lay beside him that night she said, “You like it here? You are doing well?”

“Very well.”

“You work hard, you will rise in the House. Perhaps your children will be embalmers, even.”

He brought his hand up her side and cupped her breast.

“Children? What children?”

“Of course you will have children.”

What was she talking about? The children that she would bear for him?

“Even if I did,” he said, “how could they become embalmers? Isn’t the guild hereditary?”

“You could marry an embalmer’s daughter,” she told him. “They would have you. You are very handsome. You are very intelligent. An embalmer’s daughter would do well to be married to a man like you. You could choose the best of the daughters of the House of Purification. And then your wife’s father would bring your children into the guild. How fine that would be for you and all your descendants!”

“Yes,” he said dispiritedly.

The conversation was drifting into strange places. He imagined himself sitting at his dining-room table at the head of his clan, with his sons around him, each one wearing his little Anubis mask, gravely discussing the fine points of embalming with his father-in-law. How fine that would be, yes.

He was struck by the realization that Eyaseyab seemed to expect him to remain in the House of Purification for the rest of his life. A wonderful career opportunity, evidently. And of course she had automatically ruled herself out as a potential mate for him. She was a slave; he was a free man, and handsome and intelligent besides. Not for the likes of her. Perhaps slaves weren’t allowed to marry. He was a divertissement for her, a novelty item who would pass swiftly through her life—like a comet, yes, the image was a good one—and disappear.

To distract himself he stroked the plump pleasant spheroid of her breast. But it had lost all erotic charge for him. It was flesh, only flesh. He had a sudden horrifying vision of good-hearted Eyaseyab lying face-up on a wooden table in one of the booths of the House of Purification. But no, no, they wouldn’t send a slave’s body there. What did they do with them, throw them into the Nile?

Abruptly he said, “In the morning I want to go across the river. I have to see the priestess Nefret again.”

“Oh, no. That would be impossible.”

“You can get me into the temple.”

“The priestess sees no one from the outside.”

“Nevertheless,” he said. “Do it for me. Tell her it’s urgent, tell her that Edward-Davis has important business with her.” He hovered over her in the darkness. His thumb lightly caressed her nipple, which began to grow rigid again. In a low voice he said, “Tell her that Edward-Davis is in truth an ambassador from a foreign land, and needs to speak with her about highly significant matters.”

She began to laugh. She wriggled and slipped her knee between his thighs and began to slide it back and forth.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“Yes. Of course you are. Now stop talking and put it in me the way you do so well.”

“Eyaseyab—”

“Like this.”

“I want you—to talk—to the priestess—”

“Shh.”

“Eyaseyab.”

“Yes. Yes. Good. Oh, you are Amon! You are Min! Oh, yes! Yes, Edward-Davis! Oh—don’t stop—”

Was he supposed to include this in his report? he wondered.

The Service had no vow of chastity. But some things were none of their business.

“You are Amon! You are Min!”

She was slippery with sweat in the heat of the night. He said no more to her about going across the river to see the priestess, and eventually they slept.

But when he heard her up and moving about the room a few hours later, getting her things together, he reached out, hooked his finger into her anklet in the darkness, and whispered, “Wait for me. I’m coming with you.”

“You mustn’t!” She sounded frightened.

“I need to see the priestess.”

She seemed baffled by his insistent need to do what could not be done. But in the end she yielded: she was a slave, after all, accustomed to obeying. As they crossed the Nile on the early-morning ferry she still appeared tense and apprehensive, but he stroked her soft shoulders and she grew calm. The river at sunrise was glorious, a streak of polished turquoise running between the two lion-colored strips of land. Two little elongated puffs of cloud were drifting above the western hills and the early light turned them to pennants of flame. He saw white ibises clustering in the sycamore trees along the shore.

They entered the temple grounds through the side gate by which they had left, nearly a week before. A burly pockmarked guard scowled at him as he passed through, but he kept his head up and moved as though he belonged there. On the steps of the House of Life Eyaseyab paused and said, “You wait here. I will see what can be managed.”

“No, don’t leave me here. Take me inside with—”

Too late. She was gone. He prowled outside the building, uneasily looking around. But no one seemed to care that he was there. He studied a pair of elegant stone cobras, one wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt, the other wearing the white crown of the southern kingdom. He dug about in the sandy soil with the tip of his big toe and unearthed a superb scarab of blue faience that any museum would have been proud to own. He touched his hand wonderingly to the flawlessly executed and brightly painted bas-relief that was carved along the wall: Pharaoh before the gods, Isis to his left, Osiris to the right, Thoth and Horus in the background, the ibis-head and the hawk.

Egypt. Egypt. Egypt.

He had dreamed all his life of coming here. And here he was. Well ahead of normal Service schedule for such a major mission, and all because of Elaine Sandburg and Roger Lehman.

“I’m not so sure I want to find out what they’ve turned into,” Charlie Farhad had told him, explaining why he had refused to take on the assignment. “The past’s a weird place. It can make you pretty weird yourself, if you stay in it long enough.”

“They’ve only been there a year and a half.”

“Not necessarily,” Farhad had said. “Think about it.”

Sandburg and Lehman had been heading for the Rome of Tiberius, a ninety-day reconnaissance. But they had missed their return rendezvous and an analysis of the field spectrum indicated some serious anomalies—i.e., an overshoot. How much of an overshoot had taken almost a year to calculate. A lot of algorithmic massage produced the conclusion that instead of landing in 32 A.D. they had plopped down at least thirteen centuries earlier and a goodly distance to the east: Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt, the calculations indicated. “Poor Roger,” Charlie Farhad said. “He was so damned proud of his Latin, too. Won’t do him a fucking bit of good now, will it?” The algorithm was a murky one; the calculation was only probabilistic. Sandburg and Lehman might have landed right on top of the Nile or they could have turned up in some merciless corner of the Arabian desert. The high-probability line said Thebes. The most likely year was 1390 B.C., but the time range was plus or minus ten years. Not a hope in hell of finding them again, right? Nevertheless an attempt to rescue them had to be made, but none of the veteran time-jockeys wanted to touch it. That was their privilege. They hinted darkly about serious risk and the considerable unlikelihood of success. And in any case they had their own projects to worry about.

Davis heard what they had to say, but in the end he had volunteered anyway. Fools rush in, et cetera. He hadn’t known Sandburg and Lehman at all: the Service was a big operation, and he was pretty far down in junior staff. So he wasn’t doing it out of friendship. He took the job on partly because he was in love with the idea of experiencing Egypt in the prime of its greatness, partly because he was young enough still to see something romantic as well as useful to his career about being a hero, and partly because his own real-time life had taken some nasty turns lately—a collapsed romance, a bitter unexpected parting—and he was willing enough to go ricocheting off thirty-five centuries regardless of the risks. And so he had. And here he was.

Eyaseyab appeared at the head of the stairs and beckoned to him.

“The prince is with her. But he will be leaving soon.”

“The prince?”

“Pharaoh’s son, yes. The young Amenhotep.” A mischievous look came into the slave-girl’s eyes. “He is Nefret’s brother.”

Davis was bewildered by that for a moment. Then he recognized the idiom. This was an incestuous land: Eyaseyab meant that the priestess and the prince were lovers. A tingle of awe traveled quickly along his spine. She was talking about the fourth Amenhotep, the future Pharaoh Akhnaten, he who would in another few years attempt to overthrow the old gods of Egypt and install a new cult of solar worship that had only a single deity. Akhnaten? Could it be? Up there now, just a hundred feet away, at this moment caressing the priestess Nefret? Davis shook his head in wonder. This was like standing in the plaza and watching Pharaoh himself come out of the temple. He had expected to lurk around the periphery of history here, not to be thrust right into the heart of it. That he was seeing these people in the flesh was remarkable, but not entirely pleasing. It cheapened things, in a way, to be running into actual major historical figures; it made it all seem too much like a movie. But at least it was a well-done movie. The producers hadn’t spared any expense.

“Is that him?” Davis asked.

Of course it was. The tingle returned, redoubled. A figure had appeared on the portico of the House of Life. He gaped at it: a very peculiar figure indeed, a slender young man in a loose pleated linen robe with wide sleeves trimmed with blue bows. The upper half of his body seemed frail, but from the waist down he was fleshy, thick-thighed, soft-bellied. A long jutting jaw, a narrow head, full lips: an odd-looking mysterious face. He was instantly recognizable. Only a few weeks before Davis had peered wonder-struck at the four giant statues of him in the Amarna gallery at the far end of the ground floor at the Cairo Museum. Now here was the man himself.

Here and gone. He smiled at Davis in an eerie otherworldly way as if to say, Yes, you know who I am and I know who you are, and went quickly down the back steps of the temple’s podium. A litter must have been waiting for him there. Davis watched as he was borne away.

“Now,” he said to Eyaseyab, forcing himself to snap from his trance. “Did you tell the priestess I’m here?”

“Yes. She says no. She says she will not see you.”

“Go back inside. Ask her again.”

“She seemed angry that you are here. She seemed very annoyed. Very annoyed.”

“Tell her that it’s a matter of life and death.”

“It will do no good.”

“Tell her. Tell her that I’m here and it’s extremely important that I get to see her. Lives are at stake, the lives of good, innocent people. Remind her who I am.”

“She knows who you are.”

“Remind her. Edward-Davis, the man from America.”

“A-meri-ca.”

“America, yes.”

She trotted up the stairs again. Some moments passed, and then a few more. And then Eyaseyab returned, eyes wide with amazement, face ruddy and bright with surprise and chagrin.

“Nefret will see you!”

“I knew she would.”

“You must be very important!”

“Yes,” he said. “I am.”

The priestess was waiting for him in an antechamber. As before, she was wearing a filmy gown, casually revealing in what he was coming to regard as the usual Egyptian way; but she was more splendidly bedecked this time, lips painted a glowing yellow-red, cheeks touched with the same color, the rims of her eyes dark with kohl, the eyelids deep green. A muskiness of perfume clung to her. An intricate golden chain lay on her breast; pendant beads of carnelian and amethyst and lapis-lazuli dangled from it. The presence of her royal lover seemed still to be about her, like an aura. She seemed imperious, magnificent, splendid. For someone her age—she had to be past forty—she was remarkably beautiful, in a chilly, regal way.

And unusual-looking. There was something exotic about her that he hadn’t noticed the other time, when he was too dazzled by the whole sweep of Egypt and in any event too sick to focus closely on anything. He realized now that she probably was not an Egyptian. Her skin was much too white, her eyes had an unEgyptian touch of violet in them. Perhaps she was Hittite, or Syrian, or a native of one of the mysterious lands beyond the Mediterranean. Or Helen of Troy’s great-great-grandmother.

She seemed strangely tense: a coiled spring. Her eyes gleamed with expressions of—what? Uneasiness? Uncertainty? Powerful curiosity? Even a tinge of sexual attraction, maybe. But she appeared to be holding herself under tight control.

She said, “The stranger returns, the man from America. You look healthier now. Hard work must agree with you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it does.”

“Eyaseyab says you are an ambassador.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Ambassadors should present themselves at court, not at the temple of the goddess.”

“I suppose so. But I can’t do that.” His eyes met hers. “I don’t have any credentials that would get me access to the court. In all of Thebes you’re the only person of any importance that I have access to. I’ve come to you today to ask for your help. To beg you for it.”

“Help? What kind of help?”

He moistened his lips.

“Two people from my country are living somewhere in Thebes. I’ve come to Egypt to find them.”

“Two people from America, you say.”

“Yes.”

“Living in Thebes.”

“Yes.”

“Friends of yours?”

“Not exactly. But I need to find them.”

“You need to.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Her eyes drifted away from his. She seemed to be staring past his left cheekbone.

“Who are these people? Why are they here?”

“Well—”

“And why is finding them so important to you?” she asked.

“It’s—a long story.”

“Tell me. I want to know everything.”

He had nothing to lose. But where to begin? He hesitated a moment. Then the words began to flow freely. He poured it all out. My country, he told her, is so far away that you could never comprehend it. There is a Service—a kind of priesthood, think of it as a priesthood—that sends emissaries to distant lands. A little while ago they sent two to a place called Rome, a man and a woman—Rome is very distant, almost as far as my own country—but they went astray in their journey, they traveled much too far, they wandered even as far as the land of the Nile and have not been heard from since—

He listened to himself speaking for what seemed to be an hour. It must all have been the wildest nonsense to her. He watched her watching him with what might have been irritation or incredulity or even shock on her face, but which was probably just bewilderment. At last he ran down and fell silent. Her face had tightened: it was like a mask now.

But to his amazement the mask suddenly cracked. He saw unexpected tears welling in her eyes, flowing, darkening her cheeks with tracks of liquefied kohl.

She was trembling. Holding her arms crossed over her breasts, pacing the stone floor in agitation.

What had he said, what had he done?

She turned and stared straight at him from the far side of the room. Even at that distance he could see restless movements in her cheeks, her lips, her throat. She was trying to say something but would not allow it to emerge.

At last she got it out: “What are the names of the two people you’re looking for.”

“They won’t mean anything to you.”

“Tell me.”

“They’re American names. They wouldn’t be using them here, if they were here.”

“Tell me their names,” she said.

He shrugged. “One is called Elaine Sandburg. The other is Roger Lehman.”

There was a long moment of silence. She moistened her lips, a quick tense serpent-flicker of her tongue. Her throat moved wordlessly once again. She paced furiously. Some powerful emotion seemed to be racking her: but what? What? Why would a couple of strange names have such an effect on her? He waited, wondering what was going on.

“I have to be crazy for telling you this,” she said finally, in a low, husky voice he could scarcely identify as hers. He was stunned to realize that she was speaking in English. “But I can’t go on lying to you any longer. You’ve already found one of the people you’re looking for. I’m Elaine Sandburg.”

“You?”

“Yes. Yes.”

It was the last thing he had expected to hear. Vortices whirled about him. He felt numb with shock, almost dazed.

“But that isn’t possible,” he said inanely. “She’s only thirty-two.” His face flamed. “And you’re at least—”

His voice trailed off in embarrassment.

She said, “I’ve been here almost fifteen years.”

She had to be telling the truth. There was no other possibility. She spoke English; she knew Elaine Sandburg’s name. Who else could she be if not the woman he had come here to find? But it was a struggle for him to believe it. She had had him completely fooled; she seemed completely a woman of her time. He had memorized photos of Elaine Sandburg from every angle; but he would never have recognized this woman as Sandburg, not in a thousand years, not in a million. Her face had changed: considerably sharpened by time, lengthened by her journey into middle age. The tight brown curls of the photographs must have been shaved off long ago, replaced by the traditional black Egyptian wig of an upper-class woman. Her eyebrows had been plucked. And then there was the strange jewelry, the transparent robes. Her lips and cheeks painted in this alien way. Everything about her masked her identity: she had transformed herself fully into an Egyptian. But she was the one. No doubt of it, no doubt at all. This priestess, this devotee of Isis, was Elaine Sandburg. Who had given him cuddly Eyaseyab to play with. And had told Eyaseyab to take him across the river to the City of the Dead and lose him over there.

Sudden searing anger went roaring through him.

“You were simply playing with me, that other time. Pretending you had no idea where I was from. Asking me where America was, whether it was farther from here than Syria.”

“Yes. I was playing with you, I suppose. Do you blame me?”

“You knew I was from Home Era. You could have told me who you were.”

“If I had wanted to, yes.”

He was mystified by that. “Why hide it? You saw right away that I was Service. Why’d you hold back from identifying yourself? And why ship me over to the other side of the river and stash me among the embalmers, for God’s sake?”

“I had my reasons.”

“But I came here to help you!”

“Did you?” she asked.

SEVEN

Lehman said, “Where is he now?”

“In one of the temple storerooms. Under guard.”

“I still can’t understand why you told him. After chewing me out the way you did last week when I was the one talking about doing it. You made a complete hundred-eighty-degree reversal in a single week. Why? Why?”

Sandburg glowered at him. She was furious—with herself, with Lehman, with the hapless boy that the Service had sent. But mainly she was furious with herself. And yet, even in her fury, she realized that she was beginning to forgive herself.

“Originally we thought he was simply here on an independent research mission, remember? But when he told me that in fact he had come here looking for us—that he had come to rescue us—”

“Even so. Especially so. You recall what you said last week? You just want to be left alone to live your life. Your life in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. And therefore we can’t let him know a thing, you said. But then you did, anyway.”

“It was an impulse that I couldn’t overcome,” she said. “Have you ever had an impulse like that, Roger? Have you?”

“Don’t call me Roger. Not here. My name is Senmut-Ptah. And speak Egyptian.”

“Stop being such an asshole, will you?”

“I’m being an Egyptian. That’s what we are now: Egyptians.”

They were in his astronomical chamber, a small domed outbuilding behind the oldest shrine of the main Karnak temple. Cool bright sprinklings of starlight penetrated the openings in the roof and sketched patterns on the brick floor. Across the blue-black vault of the ceiling the fantastically attenuated naked figure of the goddess Nut, the deity of the sky, stretched from one side of the room to the other, great spidery arms and legs yards and yards long spanning the starry cosmos, with the Earth-god Shu supporting her arched nude form from below and complacently smiling figures of ram-headed Khnum standing beside him. Dense rows of hieroglyphs filled every adjacent inch of free space, offering intense assertions of arcane cosmological truths.

Sandburg said, “I was being just as Egyptian as I could be. But there he was solemnly telling me all about the Service, really sweating at it, trying to explain to a priestess of Isis where America was and where Rome was and how two people from this Service of his had overshot their mark and disappeared somewhere in the depths of time—no, wait, he didn’t try to tell me it was time-travel, he just used geographical analogies—and suddenly I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I couldn’t just go on standing there in front of him pretending to be a fucking ancient priestess of Isis, looking lofty and esoteric and mystical, when this kid, this kid who had come three and a half thousand years to find us, who I had sent over to the City of the Dead to work as a pickler of mummy-guts because we wanted to get him out of our hair, was begging for my help so that he could find you and me. Our rescuer, and I was treating him like shit. Playing games with his head, making him reel off yard after yard of completely needless explanation. I couldn’t keep the pretense up another minute. So I blurted out the truth, just like that.”

“An impulse.”

“An impulse, yes. A simple irrational impulse. You’ve never had one of those, have you? No—no, of course not. Who am I asking? Roger Lehman, the human computer. Of course you haven’t.”

“That isn’t true and you damned well know it. You like to think of me as some sort of android, some kind of mechanical man, but in fact I’m every bit as human as you are, and maybe a little more so.” In his agitation he snatched up one of his astronomical instruments, a little gleaming armillary disk from whose center a hippopotamus image yawned, and ran his long tapering fingers around its edges. “Remember, I was the one who originally wanted to have a little talk with him, to find out, at least, what might be going on down the line. You said you shouldn’t do it, and you were right. And then you did it. An impulse. Christ, an impulse! Well, I have impulses too, whatever you may think. But even so I still have enough sense not to jump out of a third-floor window simply because I happen to be on the third floor. And enough sense not to say the one thing I shouldn’t be saying to the one person I shouldn’t be saying it to.”

“If I seriously thought that it could have done any harm—”

“You don’t think it can?”

“He’s here alone. I’ve got him in custody. He can’t make us do anything we don’t want to do. We’ve got complete control of the situation. Really we do.”

“I suppose,” Lehman said grudgingly. He wandered around the room, fingering his charts and instruments. He rubbed his hands over the bits of gold and lapis-lazuli embedded in the wall. He picked up three long tight rolls of sacred papyri that he used in his divinations and set them fussily down again in slightly different places. “How do you think they were able to trace us?” he asked.

“How would I know? Something with their computers, I guess. Calculating probable trajectories. Maybe they took a guess. Or a bunch of guesses. You know they sweat a lot whenever any mission goes astray. So they sweated the computers until they came up with a hypothetical location where we might have landed. And sent this kid to check it out.”

“And what happens now?”

“We go to talk to him. You and me both.”

“Why?”

“Because I think we owe it to him. There’s no sense pretending any longer, is there? He’s here, and he knows I’m here, and he’s probably guessed that you’re here too. He’s Service, Roger. We can’t simply leave him in the dark, now. We’ve got to make him understand the way this has to be handled.”

“I don’t agree. I think the best thing for us is just to keep away from him. I wish you hadn’t said anything to him in the first place.”

“It’s too late for that. I have. Anyway, he’s probably got news from people we knew in Home Era. Carrying messages, even.”

“That’s exactly what worries me.”

“Don’t you want to hear anything about—”

Lehman gave her a wild-eyed stare. “Elaine, those people are thirty-five centuries in the future. I want to keep them there.” He sounded almost desperate about it.

“Last week you were hot to hear the gossip,” she said.

“That was last week. I’ve had a week to think about things. I don’t want to stir all that old stuff up again. Let it stay where it is. And let us stay where we are. I’m not going to go near him.”

His lower lip was quivering. He seemed actually afraid, she thought. Where had granite-faced Senmut-Ptah gone?

She said, “We can’t simply stonewall him. We can’t. We owe him at least the opportunity to talk to us.”

“Why? We don’t owe him anything.”

“For Christ’s sake, Roger. He’s a human being. He came here with the intention of helping us.”

“I’m aware of that. But—”

“No buts. Come on with me. Right now. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. I can guarantee that.”

“You’re a terrible woman.”

“Yes. I know that. Listen, do you remember how it was for us when we first landed here? Helpless, bewildered, hopelessly lost in time, dressed like a couple of Romans fifteen centuries out of place, unable to read or write Egyptian, not speaking a word of the language, not the first inkling of it, hardly knowing anything about this civilization except what we learned in high school? Wondering how the hell we were going to survive? You remember how frightening that was?”

“We survived, though. We did more than survive.”

“Because we were good. We were adaptable, we were versatile, we were clever. Even so, we went through two years of hell before we started to make things happen for us. You remember? I certainly do. Life as a temple whore? You didn’t have to do that, at least, but you had your bad times too, plenty of them.”

“So? What does that have to do with—”

“This kid is here now, up against some of the same things we were. And the only two people in the world that he has anything in common with choose to turn their backs on him. I hate that.”

“What are you, in love with him?”

“I feel sorry for him.”

“We didn’t ask him to come here.”

“It was lousy of me just to dump him out on the streets to shift for himself in the City of the Dead. It’s going to be lousy of us to tell him that he’s wasted his time coming here, that we don’t want to be rescued, thank you very much but no deal. How would you feel if you came charging in to be somebody’s savior and got told something like that?” She shook her head firmly. “We have to go to see him.”

“You’re suddenly so soft-hearted. You surprise me.”

“Do I?” she said. “And here I was thinking you were the soft-hearted one. Secretly, behind the grim façade.”

“How discerning you are. But I still don’t want to see him.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

She moved closer to him.

“We have to. That’s all there is to it.”

“Well—”

“Do you think he’s a magician? A hypnotist? He’s just a kid, and we’ve got him locked safely away besides. He can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. Come with me.”

“No.”

“Come on, Roger.”

“Well—”

“Come. Now.”

She led him, still grumbling, out of the building, past the temple of Amenhotep II and the pylons of Tuthmosis I and Tuthmosis III, down the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes and into the Precinct of Mut. The storeroom where she had parked Davis for safe-keeping was partly below-ground, a cool, clammy-walled crypt not very different from a dungeon. When they entered it, Davis was sitting huddled on the straw-covered floor next to a shattered statue in pink granite of some forgotten king that had been tossed into the room for storage two or three or five hundred years earlier. The Egyptians never threw anything away.

He looked up and glared balefully at her.

“This is Roger Lehman,” she said. “Roger, I want you to meet Edward Davis.”

“It’s about fucking time,” Davis said.

Lehman extended his hand in a tentative, uncertain way. Davis ignored it.

“You look a whole lot older than I expected,” Davis said. “I would never have recognized you. Especially in that cockeyed costume.”

“Thank you.”

“You expect me to be polite?” Davis asked bitterly. “Why? What the hell kind of fucking reception did you people give me? You think it was fun, falling across three and a half thousand years? Have you forgotten what that feels like? And then what happens to me when I get here? First she ships me across the river to be an embalmer’s apprentice. After which she throws me in this hole in the ground when I come back over. What am I, your enemy? Don’t you two stupid monkeys realize that I’m here to goddamn rescue you?”

“There’s a lot you don’t understand,” Sandburg said.

“Damn right there is. I’d like you to tell me—”

“Wait,” Lehman said. Sandburg shot him an irritated look and started to speak, but he held up his hand to silence her. To Davis he said, “Talk to us about this rescue plan of yours, first. What’s the arrangement?”

“I’m on a thirty-day mission. We don’t need the full thirty, now that I’ve found you so fast, but we’ve got to wait it out anyway, right? On the thirtieth day they’ll drop the jump field into an alleyway just north of Luxor Temple. It’s the one I landed in, with a graffito on the wall pronouncing a curse on some wine-merchant who screwed one of his customers. The field arrives at noon sharp, but of course we’re there waiting for it a couple of hours before that. The rainbow lights up, the three of us step inside, away we go. Back home in a flash. You don’t know how hard they’ve been working, trying to locate you two.”

“They couldn’t have been in much of a hurry,” Lehman said. “Did Elaine tell you we’ve been here fifteen years?”

“In the Home Era time-line you’ve only been missing for a year and a half. And they’ve been running calculations non-stop most of that time. I’m sorry we couldn’t match up the displacement factors any better, but you’ve got to understand it was really just a stab in the dark sending me to the year they did. We had a twenty-year probability window to deal with.”

“I’m sure they did their best,” Sandburg said. “And you too. We appreciate your coming here.”

“Then why did you send me to—”

She held up her hand. “You don’t understand the situation, Edward.”

“Damned right I don’t.”

“There are certain factors that we have to explain. You see, we don’t actually—”

“Wait a second, Elaine,” Lehman said sharply.

“Roger, I—”

“Wait a second.”

It was his priest-voice again, his stony Senmut-Ptah voice. Sandburg peered at him in astonishment. His face was flushed, his eyes were strangely glossy.

He said, “Before you tell him anything, we need to have a discussion, Elaine. You and I.”

She looked at him blankly. “What’s to discuss?”

“Come outside and I’ll tell you.”

“What the hell is this all about?”

“Outside,” Lehman said. “I have to insist.”

She gave him a glance of cool appraisal. But he was unreadable.

“Whatever you say, O Senmut-Ptah.”

EIGHT

They stood in the darkness of the garden of the Precinct of Mut. Torches flickered in the distance. Somewhere, far away, the priests of Amon were chanting the evening prayer. From another direction came a more raucous sound: sailors singing down by the riverfront.

Lehman’s long, gaunt figure towered above her. Lines of strain were evident in his face. It had taken on the same strange expression that had come over him the week before, the night when she had first told him of the arrival of a member of the Service in Thebes.

“Well?” she said, perhaps a little too harshly.

“Let me think how to put this, Elaine.”

“Put what?”

He made a despairing gesture. “Wait, will you? Let me think.”

“Think, then.”

She paced in a fretful circle around him. A dim figure appeared on the pylon of a distant temple and unhurriedly began to take in the pennants for the night. Some dark-winged nocturnal bird fluttered by just overhead, stirring faint currents in the warm air.

Lehman said finally, speaking as though every word were very expensive, “What I need to tell you, Elaine, is that I’m half inclined to go back with him. More than half.”

“You son of a bitch!”

He looked abashed, uncomfortable. “Now do you see why I told you I didn’t want to see him? You yourself pointed out last week that there were risks in talking to him, that it could stir up troublesome old memories. Well, it has.” Lehman touched his hand to his forehead. “If you only knew how I’ve been churning inside since he got here. Every day it’s gotten a little worse. We should have simply kept clear of him, the way we had always planned to do if anyone came. But no. No. Bad enough that he stumbled right into you first thing. You still had the option of keeping your mouth shut. No, you had to spill everything, didn’t you? And now—now—” He scowled at her. “I was wavering even then, last week.”

“I know you were. I saw it. We talked about it.”

“I was able to put the idea away then. But now—”

“Just seeing him, that was enough to make you want to go back down the line? Why, Roger? Why?”

Lehman was silent again for a time. He scuffed at the ground with his sandaled foot. A young priest appeared from somewhere, staggering under the jeweled and gilded image of a cobra taller than he was, and came stumbling toward Lehman as though wanting to ask him some question about it. Lehman waved the boy away with a curt, furious gesture.

Then in a remote voice he said, “Because I’m starting to think that maybe we should. We’ve done all right for ourselves here, sure, but how long can our luck hold out? For one thing, consider the health angle. I don’t mean the exotic diseases they have here: I assume our immunizations will continue to hold out. I’m just talking about the normal aging process. We have to keep in mind that this is a primitive country in many ways, especially where it comes to medicine, and we’re starting to get older. It won’t be easy for us here when the medical problems begin—the big ones, the little ones, the medium ones. You want someone to help you get through your menopause with powdered scarab and a tincture of goose turds and a prayer to Thoth?”

“I’m doing all right so far.”

“And if you develop a lump in one of your breasts?”

“They have surgeons here. It isn’t all goose turds and powdered beetles. Why this sudden burst of hypochondria, Roger?”

“I’m just being realistic.”

“Well, so am I. I don’t know what you’re worrying about. This is a clean, healthy place, if you happen to belong to the privileged classes, and we do. We’ve kept ourselves in good condition the whole time we’ve been here and we’re in terrific shape right now with no sign of problems ahead and we’re going to have really beautiful mummies. What other reasons do you have for going home?”

“I don’t know. Homesickness? Curiosity about what’s been happening back there? Maybe I’ve just had enough of Egypt, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I haven’t.”

“So you want to stay?”

“Of course I do. That hasn’t changed. This is where I want to be, Roger. This is the time and the place that I prefer. I have a good life in a tremendously fascinating period of history and I’m waited on hand and foot and I don’t have to put up with any of the shit of the modern world. I like it here. I thought you did too.”

“I did,” he said. “I do. For so many reasons. But—”

“But now you want to go home.”

“Maybe.”

“Then go,” she said disgustedly. “If that’s what you think you want.”

“Without you?”

“Yes.”

He looked startled. “Do you mean that, Elaine?”

“If they ask where I am, just don’t say anything. Tell them you simply don’t know what happened to me when we overshot Rome. You came out of the jump field and discovered that you weren’t in Rome at all, that you were stranded on your own in Thebes, and there you stayed, shifting for yourself, until this Davis came and got you.”

“I can’t do that. You know what their debriefings are like. Anyway, he’d tell them.”

“Even if I asked him not to?”

“Why would he want to lie for you, Elaine?”

“Maybe he would, if I asked him very nicely. Or maybe he wouldn’t. But in any case, you’ve just said that you’d tell them where I am.”

“I’d have to. Whether or not I wanted to.”

“Then I don’t want you going back, Roger.” Her tone was cold and quiet.

“But—”

“I don’t. I won’t let you do it.”

“Won’t let me?” he repeated.

“That’s right. Not if you’d give me away. And I see now that that’s exactly what you’d do. So I’m not going to let you leave here.”

“How could you stop me?”

She reached out. Her hand rested lightly on his bony wrist. She rubbed her fingertips back and forth over his skin.

Softly she said, “Maybe I’m putting it too strongly. You know I couldn’t stop you if you were really determined to go. But I don’t want you to go. Please. Please, Roger? What I want is for you to stay here with me. I don’t want to be left by myself here.”

“Then come with me.”

“No. No, I won’t do that.” She leaned close to him. “Don’t go, Roger.”

He stared at her, mesmerized.

“We can be wonderful together,” she said, smiling up at him. “We were. We can be again. I’ll see to that, I promise you. It’ll be the way it was for us in the beginning.”

He looked skeptical. “Will it, now?”

“I promise. But stay. There’s nothing for you back there. You’re homesick? For what? You want to rejoin the Service? Hop when they tell you to? Let them ship you around to a lot of strange places? The glory of the Time Service! What glory? It’s just a job, and a damned hard one. You don’t want that any more, do you, Roger? Or maybe they’d give you a desk job. And a nice little one-room apartment with a view of the Potomac, and in ten years you can have your pension and move to Arizona and sit on your porch and watch the cactus grow until you get old. No, listen to me: You want to stay here. This is the right place for us. You’ve said it a million times. You have a life here, a damned good one. Your estate, your slaves, your chariot, your observatory, your—all of it. You don’t want to go back there and be Roger Lehman again. There’s nothing for you in that. You very much prefer being Senmut-Ptah. Don’t you? Don’t you, Roger? Tell me the truth.”

Now he was plainly wavering again, back the other way.

“Well—”

“I know it’s a temptation, wanting to see your own time again. Don’t you think I’ve felt it too, now and then? But it’s not worth it. Giving up all this.”

“Well—”

“Think about it.”

He looked into the distance. The faint warm breeze brought the sound of a harp, some temple slave playing to amuse the elder priests in the Amon temple.

“Think.”

“Yes.”

She watched him. She saw the knots come and go in his craggy face. He was adding up the columns in that precise mathematical way of his, tallying the profits and the losses.

“Well?” she said.

“All right,” he told her. He sounded almost relieved. “Forget what I’ve been saying. We stay in Egypt. Both of us.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Good,” she said. She grinned at him and winked. “And now we ought to go back in there and finish talking to him.”

He nodded. “Yes. We do.”

“Do we understand each other completely now, Roger?”

“Yes. Yes.”

She gave him a long cool look. “Let’s go back inside, then, and get it over with.”

“Not there,” Lehman said. “Not in that miserable musty storeroom. It’s too depressing down in a hole like that. Let’s take him over to my chambers in the observatory, at least. It’ll be a little more civilized, talking to him over there.”

“If you want to.”

“I think we should,” Lehman said.

NINE

This part of the Karnak complex that they had brought him to was new to him, a round two-story domed building behind the main temple. Since Roger Lehman’s priestly specialty was supposed to be astronomy, the building was surely his observatory, Davis thought. So far as he could recall there had been no trace of any such structure in the modern-day Karnak ruins that he had visited on the orientation trip. Perhaps it had been demolished during the tremendous religious upheavals that were due to hit Egypt after Amenhotep III died.

“How about a little wine?” Lehman asked, with unconvincing geniality. “This is good stuff, from the royal vineyards in the Delta. The very best.”

“You must have good connections at the court,” Davis said.

“The very best,” said Lehman.

From a cupboard in the wall he drew forth three alabaster drinking-cups embellished elaborately with hieroglyphics and a tall graceful terra-cotta amphora with two small handles and a pointed base. A clay stopper plugged its narrow mouth. As he broke it he said, “Elaine? Wine?”

“Please.”

Davis took a sip, and then a deeper draught. The wine was sweet and thick, with a raisiny underflavor. Not bad, really. And the cup he was drinking out of was a little masterpiece, museum quality. The room itself, Lehman’s private priestly chamber, was splendidly furnished, the walls magnificently covered with dark, vividly realistic murals of gods and demons and stars. It had a look of quiet luxury. Sandburg and Lehman had done all right for themselves in Egypt, especially considering that they had started with absolutely nothing only fifteen years ago, worse off than slaves, having no identities, not even knowing how to speak the language. Lehman seemed to have made himself into an important figure in the scientific establishment, such as it was. And she a high priestess and the mistress of the heir to the throne, no less. Both of them obviously wealthy, powerful, well connected. He had felt sorry for them a year ago when he first had heard the story of their being lost in time, far from the Imperial Rome that had been their intended destination, marooned in some alien hostile place where they were doubtlessly eking out miserable, difficult lives. He couldn’t have been more wrong about that. They had proved to be paragons of adaptability. But of course they were Service personnel, trained to handle themselves satisfactorily under all sorts of unfamiliar and bewildering conditions.

Lehman turned to the cupboard again. This time he took from it a lovely little game-board, ebony inlaid with golden hieroglyphic inscriptions. Thirty gleaming squares of ivory veneer were set into it, arranged in three rows of ten, each square separated from its neighbors by ebony strips. From a box at its base he withdrew a pair of odd curving dice and a handful of pawn-shaped gaming-pieces made of some polished blue stone.

“You know what this is?” he asked.

“A senet-board?” Davis said at once.

“They really gave you a good briefing.”

“The works. But I’ve always been interested in Egypt. I made special studies on my own.”

“You don’t know how to play, though, do you?”

“Senet? No. The rules are lost.”

“Not here they aren’t. Everyone plays it. Soldiers, slaves, construction workers, whores. The king plays it very well. So does the royal astronomer.”

From a corner of the room Sandburg said, “Roger, why don’t you get down to business?”

“Please, Elaine,” Lehman said.

Calmly he arranged the pieces on the game-board.

“It even figures in the Book of the Dead, you know. Spell 17: the dead man plays senet with an invisible adversary, and has to win the game in order to continue his passage safely through the Netherworld.”

“I know,” said Davis. “But I’m not dead, and this isn’t the Netherworld. Ms. Sandburg is right. If there’s business for us to get down to, let’s get down to it.”

“Let me show you the rules of the game first, at least. We arrange the pieces like this. And then—a roll of the dice to determine who the challenger is and who’s the defender—”

“Roger,” Sandburg said.

“There. You challenge. I defend. Now, we start at this end of the board—”

“Roger.”

Lehman smiled. “Well then. Senet afterward, perhaps.”

He poured more wine into Davis’ cup and his own and leaned forward across the table, bringing his face uncomfortably close. Davis saw what fifteen years of the Egyptian sun had done to Lehman’s skin: he was as dry as a mummy, his skin drumhead-tight over his bones.

He said, “About this rescue proposal of yours, Davis. It was very kind of you to take the leap all the way back here for the sake of locating us. And marvelous luck that you found us at all. But I have to tell you: it’s no go.”

“What?”

“We’re staying here, Elaine and I.”

Staying?

Davis stared. Yes, yes, of course. It all fit together now, their odd fidgety elusiveness; her failure to disclose herself to him the first day, when she had heard him babbling deliriously in English; her side-tracking of him to the City of the Dead; her clapping him in that dungeon-like storeroom once she finally had blurted out the truth about herself. They were renegades. They were deserters. So dumb of him to have failed to see it.

He could hear Charlie Farhad’s words echoing in his mind.

The past’s a weird place. It can make you pretty weird yourself if you stay in it long enough.

Farhad hadn’t been willing to go looking for them.

I’m not so sure I want to find out what they’ve turned into, Farhad had said.

Yes.

“You like it here that much?” Davis asked, after a bit.

“We’ve settled in,” Elaine Sandburg said from across the room. “We have our niches here.”

“We’re Egyptians now,” said Lehman. “Very highly placed court figures leading very pleasant lives.”

“So I see. But still, to turn your back forever on your own era, your own world—”

“We’ve been here a long time,” Lehman said. “To you we’ve only been missing a year or so. But we’ve lived a third of our lives here. Egypt’s a real place to us. It’s fantastic, it’s bizarre, it’s full of magic and mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to modern-day people. But it’s beginning to make sense to us.”

“Osiris? Thoth? Gods with the heads of birds and beetles and goats? They make sense to you?”

“In a larger sense. A metaphorical sense. You want more wine, Davis?”

“Yes. I think I do.”

He drank more deeply this time.

“So this place is real to you and Home Era isn’t?” he asked.

Lehman smiled. “I won’t deny that Elaine and I feel a certain pull toward Home Era. Certainly I do. I suppose I still have family there, friends, people who remember me, who would be happy to see me again. I have to admit that when you first showed up I felt a powerful temptation to go back there with you when the jump field comes to get you. What is it, a thirty-day mission, you said?”

“Thirty, yes.”

“But the moment of temptation passed. I worked my way through it. We’re not going to go. The decision is final.”

“That’s a hell of a thing. Desertion, in fact. Completely against all the rules.”

“It is, isn’t it? But it’s what we want. We’re sorry about the rules. We didn’t ask to come here, or expect it or want it. But somehow we did, and we made our own way upward. Clawed our way. You think working in the mummy factory is bad? You ought to know some of the things Elaine and I had to do. But we put new lives together for ourselves, against all the odds. Damned fine new lives, as a matter of fact. And now we want to keep them.”

“The Time Service is a damned fine life too.”

“Screw the Time Service,” Lehman said. He wasn’t smiling now. “What did the Service ever do for us except dump us fifteen hundred years from where we were hoping to go?” His long skeletal fingers toyed with the pieces on the senet-board. He fondled them a moment; then, in a single swift motion, he swept them brusquely off the board and into their box. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what we had to tell you. Your kind offer is refused with thanks. No deal. No rescue. That’s the whole story. Please don’t try to hassle us about it.”

Davis looked at them in disbelief.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “Stay here, if that’s what your choice is. I can’t force you to do anything you aren’t willing to do.”

“Thank you.”

Davis helped himself to a little more of Lehman’s wine.

They were both watching him in a strange way. There was something more, he realized.

“Well, what happens next?” he asked. “Now do you take me back to that beautiful little room under Ms. Sandburg’s temple so I can get a little sleep? Or am I supposed to catch the night ferry over to the City of the Dead, so that I can learn a little more about how to make mummies before my time in Egypt runs out?”

“Don’t you understand?” Sandburg said.

“Understand what?”

“Your time in Egypt isn’t going to run out. You’re staying here too, for keeps. We can’t possibly let you go back. You mean to say you haven’t figured that out?”

TEN

At least this time they had given him a room that was above ground-level, instead of returning him to the cheerless subterranean hole they had stashed him in before. He actually had a window of sorts—a rectangular slot, about fifteen feet high up in the wall, which admitted a long shaft of dusty light for five or six hours every day. He could hear the occasional twitterings of birds outside and now and then the distant chanting of priests. And, since the Egyptians evidently hated to leave so much as a square inch of any stone surface uncovered by incredible artistic masterpieces, there were superbly done bas-reliefs of gods on the walls of his cell to give him something to look at: good old ibis-headed Thoth aloofly accepting an offering of fruit and loaves of bread from some worshipful king, and the crocodile-faced god Sobek on the opposite wall holding a pleasant conversation with winged Isis while Osiris in his mummy-wrappings looked on benignly. Three times a day someone opened a little window in the door and passed a tray of food through to him. It wasn’t bad food. They gave him a mug of beer or wine at least once every day. There could be worse places to be imprisoned.

This was the fourteenth day of the thirty. He was still keeping meticulous count.

Through the niche in the wall came the sound of singing voices, high-pitched, eerily meeting in harmonies that made his ears ache:

O my Sister, says Isis to Nepthys,

Here is our brother

Let us raise up his head

Let us join his sundered bones

Let us restore his limbs to his body

O Sister, come, let us make an end to all his sorrow.

He had no idea where he was, because they had brought him here in the middle of the night, but he assumed that he must be in one of the innumerable outbuildings of the Karnak Temple complex. What Sandburg and Lehman intended, he assumed, was to keep him bottled up in here until the thirtieth day had passed and the jump field had come and gone in the alleyway near Luxor Temple. After that they would be safe, since he’d have no way of getting back to Home Era and letting the authorities know where and in what year the two missing renegades were hiding out. So they could afford to let him go free, then: stranded in time just like them, forever cut off from any chance of making his return journey, one more unsolved and probably unsolvable mystery of the Time Service.

Thinking about that made his temples pound and his chest ache. Trapped? Stranded here forever?

Over and over again he tried to understand where he had made his critical mistake. Maybe it had been to reveal the nature of his mission to the supposed priestess Nefret before he knew that she was Sandburg and Sandburg was dangerous. But she had already known the nature of his mission, because he evidently had been muttering in English during that time of delirium. So she was always a step ahead of him, or maybe two or three.

If he had been able to recognize Nefret as being Elaine Sandburg, either the first time when she was taking care of him, or a week later when he had walked back into her grasp, so that he could have been on his guard against—

No, that wouldn’t have made any difference either. He hadn’t had any reason to expect treachery from her. He had come here to rescue her, after all; why would she greet him with anything other than gratitude?

That was his mistake, he saw. Failing to anticipate that Sandburg and Lehman were deserters who didn’t want to be rescued. Why hadn’t anyone warned him of that? They had simply sent him off to Thebes and let him blithely walk right into the clutches of two people who had every reason to prevent him from returning to Home Era with news of their whereabouts and whenabouts.

He heard a sound outside the door. Someone scrabbling around out there, fooling with the bolt.

He felt a foolish surge of hope.

“Eyaseyab? Is that you?”

Yesterday, when his evening food-tray had arrived, he had been waiting by the window in the door. “Tell the slave-girl Eyaseyab I’m here,” he had said through the tiny opening. “Tell her her friend Edward-Davis needs help.” A desperate grasping at straws, sure. But what else was there? He had to escape from this room. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in ancient Egypt. Egypt was remarkable, yes, Egypt was astounding, he’d never deny that; but as a member of the Service he had the whole range of human history open to him, and prehistory too, for that matter, and to have that snatched away from him by these two, to be sentenced to a lifetime in the land of the Pharaohs—

The bolt slid back.

“Eyaseyab?”

He imagined her bribing his guards with jewels stolen from Nefret’s bedchamber, with amphoras of royal wine, promises of wild nights of love, anything—anything, so long as she was able to let him out of here. And then she and that one-eyed brother of hers, maybe, would help him make his way across the river to the City of the Dead, where he could probably hide out safely in that maze of tiny streets until the thirtieth day. Then he could slip aboard the ferry again, entering Thebes proper, finding his alleyway with the graffito and the palm tree, waiting for the shimmering rainbow of the jump field to appear. And he’d get himself clear of this place. To hell with Sandburg and Lehman: let them stay if that was what they wanted to do. He’d report what had happened—he was under no obligation to cover for them; if anything quite the contrary—and then it was up to the Service. They could send someone else to bring them back. The defection would be expunged; the unauthorized intrusion into the domain of the past would be undone.

If only. If.

Now the door was opening. The dim smoky light of a little oil lamp came sputtering through from the hallway, just enough illumination to allow him to see that the veiled figure of a woman was entering his room.

Not Eyaseyab, no. Too tall, too slender.

It was Sandburg. “You?” he said, astonished. “What the hell are you doing—”

“Shh. And don’t get any funny ideas. The guards are right outside and they’ll be in here in two seconds if they hear anything they don’t like.”

She set her lamp down on the floor and came toward him. Close enough to grab, he thought. She didn’t seem to be carrying a weapon. He could twist one of her arms up behind her back and put his hand on her throat and tell her that unless she issued an order to have him released and gave him a safe-conduct out of this building he would strangle her.

“Don’t,” she said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t even toy with the idea. You wouldn’t stand a chance of finding your way out of here no matter what you did. And you’d be throwing away the only chance you have to salvage things for yourself.”

“Where do I have any chance of salvaging anything?”

“It’s all up to you,” she said. “I’ve come here to try to help you work things out.”

She came closer to him and pulled aside her veil. In the flickering glow of the lamplight her violet-flecked eyes had an amethyst sheen. Her face looked younger than it did by day. She seemed unexpectedly beautiful. That sudden revelation of beauty jarred him, and he was startled by his own reaction.

He said, “There’s only one way you could help me. I want you to let me out of here.”

“I know you do. I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t try to sound naive. If we release you, you’ll go back to Home Era and tell them exactly where and when we are. And the next time they’ll send out a whole crew to get us and bring us back.”

He thought for a moment.

“I could tell them I never located any trace of you,” he said.

“You would do that?”

“If that was the price of my being allowed to go home, yes. Why not? You think I want to be stuck here forever?”

“How could we trust you?” she asked. “I know: you’d give us your word of honor, right? You’ll swear a solemn oath at the high altar of Amon, maybe? Oh, Davis, Davis, how silly do you think we are? You’ll simply go back where you came from and let us live out our lives in peace? Sure you will. Five minutes after you’re back there you’ll be spilling the whole thing out to them.”

“No.”

“You will. Or they’ll pry it out of you. Come on, boy: don’t try to weasel around like this. You aren’t fooling me for a second and you’re simply making yourself look sneaky. Listen, Davis, there’s no sense either of us pretending anything. You’re screwed and that’s all there is to it. There’s no way we’re going to let you go home, regardless of anything you might promise us.”

Her voice was low, steady, unyielding. He felt her words sinking in. He could hear the hundred gates of Thebes closing on him with a great metallic clangor.

“Then why have you come here?” he asked, staring into those troublesome amethyst eyes.

She waited a beat or two.

“I had to. To let you know how much I hate having to do this to you. How sorry I am that it’s necessary.”

“I bet you are.”

“No. I want you to believe me. You’re a completely innocent victim, and what we’re doing is incredibly shitty. I want to make it clear to you that that’s how I feel. Roger feels that way too, for that matter.”

“Well,” he said. “I’m really tremendously sorry that you’re forced to suffer such terrible pangs of guilt on my behalf.”

“You don’t understand a thing, do you?”

“Probably not.”

“Do you have family back there down the line?”

“A mother. In Indiana.”

“No wife? Children?”

“No. I was engaged, but it fell apart. You feel any better now?”

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“I figured you to be a little younger than that.”

“I’m very tricky that way,” Davis said.

“So you joined the Service to see the marvels of the past. This your first mission?”

“Yes. And apparently my last, right?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he said. “You still could let me go and take your chances that I’ll cover up for you, or that the Service will have lost interest in you. Or you could opt to go back with me. Why the hell do you want to stay in Egypt so much, anyway?”

“We want to, that’s all. We’re accustomed to it. We’ve been here fifteen years. This is our life now.”

“The hell it is.”

“No. You’re wrong. We’ve come up from nowhere and we’re part of the inside establishment now. Roger’s considered practically a miracle man, the way he’s revolutionized Egyptian astronomy. And I’ve got my temple responsibilities, which I take a lot more seriously than you could ever imagine. It’s a fantastically compelling religion.” Her voice changed, taking on an odd quavering intensity. “I have to tell you—there are moments when I can feel the wings of Isis beating—when I’m the Goddess—the Bride, the Mother, the Healer.” She hesitated a moment, as though she was taken aback by her own sudden rhapsodic tone. When she spoke again it was in a more normal voice. “Also I have high connections at the court, very powerful friends who make my life extremely rewarding in various material ways.”

“I know about those connections. I saw one of your very powerful friends leaving your temple just as I was arriving. He’s crazy, isn’t he, your prince? And you sound pretty crazy too, I have to tell you. Jesus! Two lunatics take me prisoner and I have to spend the rest of my life marooned in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt for their convenience. A hell of a thing. Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Don’t you see?”

“Of course we do,” she said. “I’ve already told you so.”

Tears were glistening on her cheeks, suddenly. Making deep tracks in the elaborate makeup. He had seen her weep like that once before.

“You’re a good actress, too.”

“No. No.”

She reached for him. He jerked his hand away angrily; but she held him tight, and then she was up against him, and, to his amazement, her lips were seeking his. His whole body stiffened. The alien perfume of her filled his nostrils, overwhelming him with mysterious scents. And then, as her fingertips drew a light trail down the skin of his back, he shivered and trembled, and all resistance went from him. They tumbled down together onto the pile of furs that served him as a bed.

“Osiris—” she crooned. “You are Osiris—”

She was muttering deep in her throat, Egyptian words, words he hadn’t been taught at Service headquarters but whose meaning he could guess. There was something frightening about her intensity, something so grotesque about this stream of erotic babble that he couldn’t bear to listen to it, and to shut it off he pressed his mouth over hers. Her tongue came at him like a spear. Her pelvis arched; her legs wrapped themselves around him. He closed his eyes and lost himself in her.

Afterward he sat with his back against the wall, looking at her, stunned.

She grinned at him.

“I’ve wanted to do that since the day you came here, do you know that? Ever since I first saw you stretched out on that bed in the House of Life.”

His heart was still thundering. He could scarcely breathe. The air in the room, hot and close and dense, sizzled with her strange aromas.

“And now you have,” he said, when he could speak again. “All right. Now you have.” A new idea was blossoming in his mind. “We were pretty good together, weren’t we?”

“Yes. I’ll say we were.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to stop there. We can go back together, you and I. Lehman can do whatever he damned pleases. But we could become a team. The Service would send us anywhere, and—”

“Stop it. Don’t talk nonsense.”

“We could. We could.”

“I’m almost old enough to be your mother.”

“It didn’t seem that way just now.”

“It would in broad daylight. But regardless. I choose to stay in Egypt. And therefore you have to stay too.”

Her words came at him like a volley of punches.

He had almost hoped, for a moment, that he had won her over. But what folly that was! Change her mind with a single roll in the furs? Expect her to walk away from her plush life at Pharaoh’s court for the sake of a little heavy breathing? What a child you are, he told himself.

He heard the hundred gates clanging shut again.

“Now you listen to me,” she said. She crouched opposite him, on the far side of the little lamp, under the bas-relief of Sobek and Isis. She was still naked and her body had an oiled gleam in the near darkness. She still looked beautiful to him, too. Although now, in the aftermath of passion, he was able to see more clearly the signs of aging on her. “You said a little while ago that you think Roger and I are crazy for wanting to stay here. You want to save us from ourselves. Well, you’re wrong about that. We’re staying here because it’s where we want to be. And you’ll feel the same way yourself, after you’ve been here for a little while longer.”

“I don’t—”

“Listen to me,” she said. “Here are your options. There’s an embassy leaving next month for Assyria. It’s an ugly crossing, passing through a pretty desolate stretch of wasteland that someday will be called the Sinai Peninsula. We can arrange to have you become a slave attached to the ambassador’s party, with the understanding that at some disagreeable place in the middle of the Sinai you’ll be left behind to fend for yourself. That’s your first choice. If you opt for it, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever find your way back to Thebes. In which case you’re not going to be here to greet any possible rescuers that the Service may decide to send out to find you.”

“Let me hear some other options.”

“Option Two. You stay in Thebes. I use my influence to have you appointed a captain in the army—it’s safe, there’s no significant military activity going on these days—or a priest of Amon or anything else that might strike your fancy. We get you a nice villa in a good part of town. You can have Eyaseyab as your personal slave, if you like, and a dozen more pretty much like her. A certain priestess of Isis might pay visits to your villa also, possibly. That would be up to you. You’ll have a very pleasant and comfortable existence, with every luxury you can imagine. And when the Service sends a mission out to rescue you—and they will, I’m sure they will—we’ll help you deal with the problem of staying out of their clutches. You’ll want to stay out of their clutches, believe me, because by the time they come for you you’ll be an Egyptian just like us. And once you’ve had a chance to discover what life is like as a member of the privileged classes in the capital city of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt, you won’t want to go back to Home Era any more than we do. Believe me.”

“Are there any further choices?”

“That’s it. Go with the ambassador’s party to Assyria and end up chewing sand, or stay here and live like a prince. Either way, of course, we keep you secluded in this room for another couple of weeks, until the time of the jump field’s return is safely past.” She stood up and began to don her filmy robe. Smiling, she said, “You don’t have to tell me which one you choose right now. Think it over. I wouldn’t want you to be too hasty about your decision.”

She kissed him lightly on the lips and went quickly out of the room.

“No—wait—come back!”

He heard the bolt slamming home.

ELEVEN

The days went by, slowly at first, then with bewildering swiftness, then with an excruciating unwillingness to end. He took care to keep count of them, as he had been trained to do, but he knew there was no hope. Sandburg’s last lighthearted words tolled in his brain again and again and again, like the sound of somber leaden bells. He lived in a frozen abyss of despair.

The chanting priestly voices from outside went on and on, all day long, and by now the strange clashing harmonies seemed not at all strange to him:

I am Nepthys.

Here comes Horus at your call, O Osiris.

He will take you upon his arms.

You will be safe in his embrace.

As the time passed he could feel his former existence running out of him as if through a funnel. All his memories were slipping away, every shred of identity: mother, father, school days, girls, books, sports, college, Service, everything. Leaving nothing but an empty shell, gossamer-thin.

He had danced his way through life, sneaked his way through, dealt somehow with all the uncertainties and the perils and the cruelties. Held his own. More than held his own. He had done very well for himself, in fact. And then had taken one risk too many; and now the game was up. He had run up against a pair of players who were willing to cast him aside without hesitation and with nothing more than the pretense of remorse.

He had only one day left, now. Tomorrow the jump field would return and wait for him to enter it, and after a little while, whether he had entered it or not, it would take off again for his own era.

I am Nepthys.

How beautiful you are that rise this day!

Like Horus of the Underworld

Rising this day, emerging from the great flood.

You are purified with those four jars

With which the gods have washed themselves.

He stared at the wall. Gradually the weirdly serene faces of the monstrous gods that were carved into it began to emerge out of the darkness. The first light of morning was coming through the slot high overhead. The last day: his final chance. But there was no hope. The door was bolted and would stay that way. The day would come and go and the jump field would leave without him and that would be that.

He stood empty and tottering, waiting for the breeze that would blow him to dust.

But he was surprised to discover that he seemed to be filling again. A new Edward Davis was rushing in. An Egyptian Edward Davis. Already he felt Thebes spinning its web around him, as it had around them. A new life, rich and strange. The daily company of Horus and Thoth, Isis and Osiris, Sobek and Khnum. Fine robes; lovely women; fountains and gardens. A life spent playing senet and sipping sherbet in his villa and attending elegant parties of the sort portrayed on all the tombs of the nobility across the river in the Valley of the Kings. And eventually to have his own fine tomb over there, where his own splendiferous mummy would be put to rest.

No. No. He was amazed at himself. What kind of insane fantasy was this? How could he even be thinking such stuff? Angrily he thrust it from his mind.

Which left him empty again, marooned, defenseless.

He trembled.

He felt once more the devastating inrush of fear, mingled with savage resentment. They had trapped him. They had stolen his life from him.

But had they really?

Was the situation actually that bad?

Horus has cleansed you.

Thoth has glorified you.

The masters of the Great White Crown have abolished the troubles of your flesh.

Now you can stand on your own legs, entirely restored.

You will open the way for the gods.

For them you will act as the Opener of the Way.

They had him. He might as well give in. What choice did he have, really? When they finally let him out of here, he would allow Sandburg and Lehman to help him. And they would, if only out of guilt. He would take full advantage of what had happened to him. Build a new life for himself. He could go a long way here.

He knew the history of the years that lay ahead, after all. The whole thing was there, neatly filed in the electronic memory that the Service had poured into his brain. The upheavals that would come after the death of Amenhotep III and the succession of crazy Prince Amenhotep to the throne, the idealistic religious revolution and the bitter counter-revolution that would follow it, the short and turbulent reigns of Tut-ankh-Amon and the others who would follow him—he knew it all, every twist and turn of events. And could benefit from his special knowledge. He would rise high in the kingdom. Higher than Lehman had, higher than Sandburg. A grand vizier, say. A viceroy. The power behind the throne. The powerful men had lovely titles here. The Eyes and Ears of the King, the Fan-Bearer at Pharaoh’s Right Hand. Edward C. Davis of Muncie, Indiana, Fan-Bearer at Pharaoh’s Right Hand. Why not? Why not? He laughed. It was almost a giggle. You are getting a little hysterical, Mr. Fan-Bearer, he told himself.

But then came a bewildering thought. What if he achieved all that—and then a rescue team arrived from Home Era to bring him back? A year from now, say. Five years. They couldn’t pinpoint the delivery time all that precisely. They’d know what year they had sent him to, but they couldn’t be absolutely certain he’d reached it, and there was likely to be a little overshoot on the part of the rescue mission, too. Five years, say. Ten. Enough for him to get really comfortably established.

The Service will send a mission out to rescue you, Sandburg had said. They will, I’m sure they will.

Who? Charlie Farhad? Nick Efthimiou?

Yes. Somebody like that. A couple of the tough, capable operators who always knew how to manage things the right way. That’s who he’d have to deal with. But how soon? And was he going to welcome them, when they came?

We’ll help you to stay out of their clutches, she had promised. Because by the time they come for you you’ll be an Egyptian just like us.

He wondered. He didn’t know.

Priests were beginning to sound the morning chants at the temple, now. The unearthly music of Amon and Horus and Anubis came floating through the little slot-like window in the wall. A shaft of bright sunlight poured into his room and lit up the carvings. He stared at the calm figures of the gods: winged Isis, full of love, and mummified Osiris and bird-headed Thoth and smiling crocodile-faced Sobek, high above. They stared back at him.

And then he heard the bolt sliding back. Voices outside: Sandburg’s voice, Lehman’s.

He couldn’t believe it. Here on the last day, they had relented after all! The guilt, the shame, had been too much for them, finally. They were giving him back his life. Tears of gratitude burst from him suddenly. They would want him to cover up for them, of course, when he got back down the line. And he would. He would. Just let me out of here, he thought, and I’ll tell any lie you want me to.

“Hello, there,” Sandburg said cheerily. She was wearing some sort of elaborate priestess-rig, white linen done up in curl upon stiff curl and a shimmering diadem in her black ringlets. “Ready for some fresh air?”

“So you’ve decided not to keep me here?” he said.

“What?”

“This is the day the jump field is coming back, isn’t it? And you’re letting me out.”

She blinked and peered at him as though he had spoken in some unknown language.

“What? What?”

“I’ve been keeping count. This is the day.”

“Oh, no,” she said, with an odd little laugh. “The field came yesterday. We found your alleyway, and we were there to see it. Oh, I’m so sorry, Edward. Your count must be off by a day.”

He was bewildered. “My count—off a day—”

“No doubt of it.”

He couldn’t believe it. He had ticked off the dawn of each new day so carefully, updating in his mind. The tally couldn’t be off. Couldn’t.

But it was. Why else would they be here? He saw Lehman standing behind her, now, looking fidgety and guilty. There were others there also. Eyaseyab, for one. A little party to celebrate his release. In the solitude of his cell he had lost track of the days somehow. He must have.

Sandburg took him by the hand. Numbly he let her lead him out into the hall.

“These are your slaves,” she said. “I’m giving Eyaseyab to you.”

“Thank you.” What else did you say, when they gave you a slave?

“And a charioteer, and a cook, and some others.”

Davis nodded. “Thank you very much,” he said stonily.

She leaned close to him. “Are you ever going to forgive us?” she asked in a soft, earnest tone. “You know we really had no choice. I wish you had never come looking for us. But once you did, we had to do what we did. If you could only believe how sorry I am, Edward—”

“Yes. Yes. Of course you are.”

He stepped past her, and into the hall, and on beyond, around a row of huge columns and into the open air. It was a hot, dry day, like all the other days. The sun was immense. It took up half the sky. I am an Egyptian now, he thought. I will never see my own era again. Fine. Fine. Whatever will be, will be. He took a deep breath. The air was like fire. It had a burning smell. Somewhere down at the far end of the colonnade, priests in splendid brocaded robes were carrying out some sort of rite, an incomprehensible passing back and forth of alabaster vessels, golden crowns, images of vultures and cobras. One priest wore the hawk-mask, one the crocodile-mask, one the ibis-mask. They no longer looked strange to him. They could have stepped right out of the reliefs on the wall of his cell.

Eyaseyab came up beside him and took his arm. She nestled close.

“You will not miss your old home,” she said. “I will see to that.”

So she knew the story too.

“You’re very kind,” he said.

“Believe me,” Eyaseyab said. “You will be happy here.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Perhaps I will.”

The masked priests were casting handfuls of some aromatic oil on a little fire in front of a small shrine. Flames rose from it, green and turquoise and crimson ones. Then one of them turned toward him and held out a tapering white vessel of the oil as if inviting him to throw some on too.

How different from Indiana all this is, Davis thought. And then he smiled. Indiana was 3500 years away. No: farther even than that. There was no Indiana. There never had been. Indiana was something out of a dream that had ended. This was a different dream now.

“It is the Nekhabet fire,” Eyaseyab said. “He wants you to make an offering. Go on. Do it, Edward-Davis. Do it!”

He looked back toward Sandburg and Lehman. They were nodding and pointing. They wanted him to do it too.

He had no idea what the Nekhabet fire was. But he shrugged and walked toward the shrine, and the priest handed him the vessel of oil. Hesitating only a moment, Davis upended it over the fire, and watched a sudden burst of colors come blazing up at him, for a moment as bright as the colors of the jump-field vortex itself. Then they died away and the fire was as it had been.

“What was that all about?” he asked Sandburg.

“The new citizen asks the protection of Isis,” she said. “And it is granted. Isis watches over you, now and forever. Come, now. We’ll take you to your new home.”

IT COMES AND GOES

The rainy season of 1990-91 went on and on; and I, having finished my allotted rainy-season novel far ahead of schedule, trudged onward into the new year still writing short fiction. First came the novella, Thebes of the Hundred Gates, and then, late in January, 1991, this odd little story, occupying the hazy borderline between science-fiction and fantasy, that went to Playboy.

And involved me, for the only time in my long career, in an artistic crisis stemming from a magazine’s advertising policy. My protagonist in “It Comes and Goes” is an alcoholic. Playboy, unlike science-fiction magazines, depends substantially on advertising for its income, and no little fraction of that comes from ads for liquor. In some embarrassment, the powers that be at Playboy let me know that it would be awkward for the magazine to run a story about an alcoholic in an issue that was going to have an advertisement for whiskey on its back cover. But Playboy does not run ads for cocaine or marijuana. Would I, I was asked, mind making my character a drug addict instead?

For ten agonizing seconds I debated whether my artistic integrity would be compromised by that. But for story purposes all that mattered, really, was that my character be recovering from some substance-abuse problem that had caused him to suffer from hallucinations; and a drug habit would do that at least as efficiently as alcohol, perhaps better. So I made a few small modifications in my text and the story ran in the January, 1992 Playboy, which, as a Christmas issue, was loaded with liquor ads.

On the other hand, I’ve chosen to reprint my original version of the story here, not as some ultimate gesture of defiance, but simply because it happens that the version of the text that I happened to store in my computer is the one in which Tom was a boozer instead of a druggie. On such casual, even random events are founded the textual issues which literary scholars debate with great passion for centuries.

——————

The house comes and goes, comes and goes, and no one seems to know or to care. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You keep your head down; you take notice only of the things that are relevant to your own personal welfare; you screen everything else out as irrelevant or meaningless or potentially threatening.

It’s a very ordinary house, thirty or forty years old, a cheap one-story white-stucco job on a corner lot, maybe six rooms: green shutters on the windows, a scruffy lawn, a narrow, badly paved path running from the street to the front steps. There’s a screen door in front of the regular one. To the right and left of the doorway is some unkempt shrubbery with odds and ends of rusting junk scattered among it—a garbage can, an old barbecue outfit, stuff like that.

All the houses around here look much the same way: there isn’t a lot of architectural variety in this neighborhood. Just rows of ordinary little houses adding up to a really ordinary kind of place, neither a slum nor anything desirable, aging houses inhabited by stranded people who can’t move upward and who are settled enough so that they’ve stopped slipping down. Even the street-names are stereotyped small-town standards, instantly forgettable: Maple, Oak, Spruce, Pine. It’s hard to tell one street from another, and usually there’s no reason why you should. You’re able to recognize your own, and the others, except for Walnut Street where the shops are, are just filler. I know how to get to the white house with the screen door from my place—turn right, down to the corner and right again, diagonal left across the street—but even now I couldn’t tell you whether it’s on Spruce corner of Oak or Pine corner of Maple. I just know how to get there.

The house will stay here for five or six days at a time and then one morning I’ll come out and the lot will be vacant, and so it remains for ten days or two weeks. And then there it is again. You’d think people would notice that, you’d think they’d talk; but they’re all keeping their heads down, I guess. I keep my head down too but I can’t help noticing things. In that sense I don’t belong in this part of town. In most other senses I guess I do, because, after all, this is where I am.

The first time I saw the house was on a drizzly Monday morning on the cusp of winter and spring. I remember that it was a Monday because people were going to work and I wasn’t, and that was still a new concept for me. I remember that it was on the cusp of winter and spring because there were still some curling trails of dirty snow on the north-facing side of the street, left over from an early-March storm, but the forsythias and crocuses were blooming in the gardens on the south-facing side. I was walking down to the grocery on Walnut Street to pick up the morning paper. Daily walking, rain or shine, is very important to me; it’s part of my recovery regimen; and I was going for the paper because I was still into studying the help-wanted ads at that time. As I made my way down Spruce Street (or maybe it was Pine Street) some movement in a doorway across the way caught my eye and I glanced up and over.

A flash of flesh, it was.

A woman, turning in the open doorway.

A naked woman, so it seemed. I had just a quick side glimpse, fuzzed and blurred by the screen door and the gray light of the cloudy morning, but I was sure I saw gleaming golden flesh: a bare shoulder, a sinuous hip, a long stretch of haunch and thigh and butt and calf, maybe a bit of bright pubic fleece also. And then she was gone, leaving incandescent tracks on my mind.

I stopped right on a dime and stood staring toward the darkness of the doorway, waiting to see if she’d reappear. Hoping that she would. Praying that she would, actually. It wasn’t because I was in such desperate need of a free show but because I wanted her to have been real. Not simply an hallucination. I was sober that morning and had been for a month and a half, ever since the seventh of February, and I didn’t want to think that I was still having hallucinations.

The doorway stayed dark. She didn’t reappear.

Of course not. She couldn’t reappear because she had never been there in the first place. What I had seen was an illusion. How could she possibly have been real? Real women around here don’t flash their bare butts in front doorways at nine in the morning on cold drizzly days, and they don’t have hips and thighs and legs like that.

But I let myself off the hook. After all, I was sober. Why borrow trouble? It had been a trick of the light, I told myself. Or maybe, maybe a curious fluke of my weary, overwrought mind. An odd mental prank. But in any case nothing to take seriously, nothing symptomatic of significant cerebral decline and collapse.

I went on down to the Walnut Street Grocery and bought that morning’s Post-Star and looked through the classified ads for the one that said, If you are an intelligent, capable, hard-working human being who has gone through a bad time but is now in recovery and looking to make a comeback in the great game of life, we have just the job for you. It wasn’t there. Somehow it never was.

On my way home I thought I’d give the white house on the corner lot a second glance, just in case something else of interest was showing. The house wasn’t there either.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

I tell you that three times because what I tell you three times is true. If anything at all is true about me, that much is. It is also true that I am forty years old, that I have had successful careers in advertising, public relations, mail-order promotion, and several other word-oriented professions. Each of those successful careers came to an unsuccessful end. I have written three novels and a bunch of short stories, too. And between the ages of sixteen and thirty-nine I consumed a quantity of brandy, scotch, bourbon, sherry, rum, and beer—and so on down to Cherry Kijafa, Triple Sec, and gin fizzes—that normal people would find very hard to believe. I suppose I would have gone on to rubbing alcohol and antifreeze if nothing else had been available. On my fortieth birthday I finally took the necessary step, which was to admit that alcohol was a monster too strong for me to grapple with and my life had become unmanageable as a result. And that I was willing to turn to a Power that is stronger than I am, stronger even than the booze monster, and humbly ask that Power to restore me to sanity and help me defend myself against my enemy.

I live now in a small furnished room in a small town so dull you can’t remember the names of the streets. I belong to the Program and I go to meetings three or four times a week and I tell people whose surnames I don’t know about my faults, which I freely admit, and my virtues, which I do have, and about my one great weakness. And then they tell me about theirs.

My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

I’ve been doing pretty well since the seventh of February.

Hallucinations were one thing I didn’t need in this time of recovery. I had already had my share.

I didn’t realize at that point that the house had vanished. People don’t customarily think in terms of houses vanishing, not if their heads are screwed on right, and as I have just pointed out I had a vested interest in believing that as of the seventh of February my head was screwed on right and it was going to stay that way.

No, what I thought was simply that I must have gone to the grocery by way of one street and come home by way of another. Since I was sober and had been for a month and a half, there was no other rational explanation.

I went home and made some phone calls to potential employers, with the usual result. I watched some television. If you’ve never stayed home on a weekday morning you can’t imagine what television is like at that time of day, most of it. After a while I found myself tuning to the home shopping channel for the sheer excitement of it.

I thought about the flash of flesh in the screen doorway.

I thought about the color of the label on a bottle of Johnny Walker, too. You don’t ever stop thinking about things like that, the look of labels and bottlecaps and the shape of bottles and the taste of what’s inside and the effect that it has. You may stop using the product but you don’t banish it from your mind, quite the contrary, and when you aren’t thinking about the flavor or the effect you’re thinking about weird peripheral things like the look of the label. Believe me, you are.

It rained for three or four days, miserable non-stop rain, and I didn’t do much of anything. Then finally I went outdoors again, a right and a right and look across to the left, and there was the white house, very bright in the spring sunshine. Very casually I glanced over at it. No flashes of flesh this time.

I saw something much stranger, though. A rolled-up copy of the morning paper was lying on the lawn of a house with brown shingles next door. A dog was sniffing around it, a goofy-faced nondescript white mutt with long legs and a black head. Abruptly the dog scooped the paper up in its jaws, as dogs will do, and turned and trotted around to the front of the white house.

The screen door opened a little way. I didn’t see anybody opening it. It remained ajar. The wooden door behind it seemed to be open also.

The dog stood there, looking around, shaking its head from side to side. It seemed bewildered. As I watched, it dropped the paper and began to pant, its tongue hanging out as if this were the middle of July and not the end of March. Then it picked the paper up again, bending for it in an oddly rigid, robotic way. It raised its head and turned and stared right at me, almost as though it was asking me to help it. Its eyes were glassy and its ears were standing up and twitching. Its back was arched like a cat’s. Its tail rose straight up behind it. I heard low rusty-sounding growls.

Then, abruptly, it visibly relaxed. It lowered its ears and a look of something like relief came into its eyes and its posture became a good old droopy dog-posture again. It wriggled its shoulders almost playfully. Wagged its tail. And went galloping through the open screen door, bounding and prancing in that dumb doggy way that they have, holding the newspaper high. The door closed behind it.

I stayed around for a little while. The door stayed closed. The dog didn’t come out.

I wondered which I would rather believe: that I had seen a door open itself and let a dog in, or that I had imagined I had seen a door open itself and let a dog in?

Then there was the cat event. This was a day or two later.

The cat was a lop-eared ginger tom. I had seen it around before. I like cats. I liked this one especially. He was a survivor, a street-smart guy. I hoped to learn a thing or two from him.

He was on the lawn of the white house. The screen door was ajar again. The cat was staring toward it and he looked absolutely outraged.

His fur was standing out half a mile and his tail was lashing like a whip and his ears were flattened back against his head. He was hissing and growling at the same time, and the growl was that eerie banshee moan that reminds you what jungle creatures cats still are. He was quivering as if he had electrodes in him. I saw muscles violently rippling along his flanks and great convulsive shivers running the length of his spine.

“Hey, easy does it, fellow!” I told him. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, guy?”

What the matter was was that his legs seemed to want to move toward the house and his brain didn’t. He was struggling every step of the way. The house was calling him, I thought suddenly, astonishing myself with the idea. As it had called the dog. You call a dog long enough and eventually his dog instincts take command and he comes, whether he feels like it or not. But you can’t make a cat do a fucking thing against its will, not without a struggle. There was a struggle going on now. I stood there and watched it and I felt real uneasiness.

The cat lost.

He fought with truly desperate fury, but he kept moving closer to the door all the same. He managed to hold back for a moment just as he reached the first step, and I thought he was going to succeed in breaking loose from whatever was pulling him. But then his muscles stopped quivering and his fur went back where it belonged and his whole body perceptibly slackened; and he crept across the threshold in a pathetically beaten-looking way.

At my meeting that night I wanted to ask the others whether they knew anything about the white house with the screen door. They had all grown up in this place; I had lived here only a couple of months. Maybe the white house had a reputation for weirdness. But I wasn’t sure which street it was on and a round-faced man named Eddie had had a close escape from the bottle after an ugly fight with his wife and needed to talk about that, and when that was over we all sat around the table and discussed the high school basketball playoffs. High school basketball is a very big thing in this part of the state. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Do you mind if I change the subject, fellows? Because I saw a house a few blocks from here gobble up a dog and then a cat like it was a roach motel.” They’d just think I had gone back on the sauce and they’d rally round like crazy to help me get steady again.

I went back there a few days later and couldn’t find the house. Just an empty lot, grizzled brown late-winter grass, no paved pathway, no steps, no garbage cans, nothing. This time I knew I hadn’t accidentally gone up some other street. The house next door to the white house was still there, the brown-shingled one where the dog had found the newspaper. But the white house was gone.

What the hell? A house that comes and goes?

Sweat came flooding out all over me. Was it possible to be having hallucinations in such convincing detail when I had been sober for a couple of months? First I was frightened and then I was angry. I didn’t deserve this. If the house wasn’t a hallucination, and I didn’t seriously think it was, then what was it? I was working hard at putting my life back together and I was entitled to have reality stay real around me.

Easy, I thought. Easy. You’re not entitled to anything, fellow. But you’ll be okay as long as you recognize that nobody requires you to be able to explain mysteries that are beyond your understanding. Just go easy, take things as they come, and stay cool, stay cool, stay cool.

The house came back four days later.

I still couldn’t bring myself to talk about it at meetings, even though that probably would have been a good idea. I had no problem at all with admitting publicly that I was an alcoholic, far from it. But standing up and telling everyone that I was crazy was something else entirely.

Things got even more bizarre. One afternoon I was out in front of the house and a kid’s tricycle came rolling down the street all by itself, as though on an invisible cord. It rolled right past me and turned the corner and I watched it traverse the path and go up the steps of the white house and disappear inside. Some sort of magnetic pull? Radio waves?

Half a minute later the owner of the tricycle came huffing along, a chubby boy of about five in blue leggings. “My bike!” he was yelling. “My bike!” I imagined him running up the path and disappearing into the house too, like the dog, the cat, and the tricycle. I couldn’t let that happen. But I couldn’t just grab him up and hold him, either, not in an era when if a grown man simply smiles at a kid in the street he’s likely to get booked. So I did the next best thing and planted myself at the head of the path leading across the white house’s lawn. The kid banged into my shins and fell down. I looked up the block and saw a woman coming, his aunt, maybe, or his grandmother. It seemed safe to help the kid up, so I did. Then I smiled at her and said, “He really ought to look where he’s going.”

“My bike!” the boy wailed. “Where’s my bike?”

The woman looked at me and said, “Did you see someone take the child’s tricycle?”

“Afraid I can’t say, ma’am,” I replied, shrugging my most amiable shrug. “I was coming around the corner, and there was the boy running full tilt into me. But I didn’t see any tricycles.” What else was I going to tell her? I saw it go up the steps by itself and into the house?

She gave me a troubled glance. But obviously I didn’t have the tricycle in my coat pocket and I guess I don’t look like the sort of man who specializes in stealing things from little children.

A dog. A cat. A tricycle.

I turned and walked away. Up Maple to Juniper, and down Juniper to Beech, and left on Beech onto Chestnut. Or maybe it was up Oak to Sycamore and then on to Locust and Hickory. Maple, Oak, Chestnut, Hickory: what difference did it make? They were all alike.

I doubled back eventually and got to the house just in time to see a boy of about fourteen wearing a green-and-yellow jersey come trotting down the street, tossing a football from hand to hand. As he went past the white house the screen door swung open and the inner door swung back and the kid halted, turned, and very neatly threw the football through, a nice high tight arc.

The doors closed.

The kid stood stock-still in the street, staring at his hand as though he had never seen it before. He looked stunned.

Then after a moment he broke out of his stasis and started up the path to the house. I wanted to call out to him to keep away, but I couldn’t get any sound out; and I wasn’t sure what I could say to him, anyway.

He rang the doorbell. Waited.

I held my breath.

The door started to open again. Trying to warn him, I managed to make a scratchy little choking sort of sound.

But the kid didn’t go in. He stood for a moment peering inside and then he turned and began to run, across the lawn, over the hedges, down the street.

What had he seen?

I ran after him. “Hey, kid! Kid, wait!”

He was going so fast I couldn’t believe it. I was a pretty good runner in my time, too. But my time was some time ago.

Instead of going to the meeting that night, I went to scout out the house. Under cover of darkness I crept around it in the shrubbery like your basic peeping-tom, trying to peer through the windows.

Was I scared? Utterly shitless, yes. Wouldn’t you be?

Did I want a drink? Don’t be naïve. I always want a drink, and not just one. I certainly wanted a good jolt of the stuff now. Three fingers of Jim Beam and I’d have had the unshakeable savoir-faire of Sherlock Holmes himself. But I wouldn’t have stopped at three fingers. My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

What did I see? I saw a woman, very likely the same one I had had that quick glimpse of in the doorway that first drizzly Monday morning. I got only quick glimpses now. She was moving around from room to room so that I didn’t have a chance to see her clearly, but what I saw was plenty impressive. Tall, blonde, sleek, that much was certain. She wore a floor-length red robe made of some glossy metallic fabric that fell about her in a kind of liquid shimmer. Her movements were graceful and elegant. There didn’t seem to be anything in the way of furniture inside, just some cartons and crates, which she was carrying back and forth. Stranger and stranger. I didn’t see the cat or the dog or the bicycle.

I scrabbled around from window to window for maybe half an hour, hoping for a good look at her. I was moving with what I thought was real skill, keeping low, staying down behind the lilacs or whatever, rising cautiously toward windowsill level for each quick peek. I suppose I might have been visible from the street, but the night was moonless and people don’t generally go out strolling around here after dark.

There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the house. And for about fifteen minutes I didn’t see her either. Maybe she was in the shower; maybe she had gone to bed. I was tempted to ring the bell. But what for? What would I say to her if she answered? What was I doing here in the first place?

I crept backward through the shrubbery, thinking it was time to leave. And then there she was, framed in a window, looking straight out at me.

Smiling. Beckoning.

Come hither, Tommy-boy.

I thought about the cat. I thought about the dog. I began to shake.

Like the kid with the football, I turned and ran, desperately loping through the quiet streets in an overwhelming excess of unreasoning terror.

I was getting to the point where I thought it might be calming to have a drink. In the old days the first drink always settled me down. It lifted the burden; it soothed the pain; it answered the questions. It made taking the second drink very easy. The second suggested the third; the third required the fourth; the fourth demanded the fifth; and so on without hindrance, right on to insomnia, vomiting, falling hair, bloody gums, raw eyes, exploding capillaries, nightmares, hallucinations, impotence, the shakes, the shivers, the queebles, the collywobbles, and all the rest.

I didn’t take the drink. I went to a meeting instead, jittery and perplexed. I said I was wrestling with a mystery. I didn’t say what it was. Let them fill in the blanks, anything they felt like. Even without the details, they’d know something of what I was going through. They too were wrestling with mysteries. Otherwise what were they doing there?

The house was gone for two weeks. I checked for it every day. Spring had arrived in full force before it returned. Trees turned green, plants were blooming, the air grew warm and soft.

The woman was back too, the blonde. I never failed to see her now, every time I went by, and I went by every day. It was as if she knew I was coming. Sometimes she was at the window, but more usually she was standing just inside the screen door. Some days she dressed in the red slinky robe, some days in a green one. She had a few other outfits too, all of them classy but somewhat oddly designed, shoulders too wide, the cut too narrow. Once—incredibly, unforgettably—she came to the door in nothing at all but a pair of stockings, and stood for a long moment on splendid display, framed perfectly in the doorway, sunlight glinting off her lush lovely body.

She was always smiling. She must have known I was the one who had been peeping that night and it didn’t seem to bother her. The look on her face said, Let’s get to know each other a little better shall we? Always that warm, beckoning smile. Sometimes she’d give me a little come-on-in flick of her fingertips.

Not on your life, sister. Not on your life.

But I couldn’t stop coming by. The house, the woman, the mystery, all pulled me like a magnet.

By now I had two theories. The simple one was that she was lonely, horny, bored, looking for distraction. Maybe it excited her to be playing these games with me. In this quiet little town where the chief cause of death surely must be boredom, she liked to live dangerously.

Too simple, much too simple. Why would a woman who looked like that be living a lonely, horny life? Why would she be in this kind of town in the first place? What was more important, the theory didn’t account for the comings and goings of the house. Or for what I had seen happen to the cat, the dog, the tricycle, the boy with the football. The dog had returned—he was sitting crosslegged on the steps just below the screen door the day I was given the full frontal show—but he never went more than a couple of yards from the house and he moved in a weird lobotomized way. There hadn’t been any further sign of the cat or the tricycle.

Which led to my other theory, the roach-motel theory.

The house comes from the future, I told myself. They’re studying the late twentieth century and they want to collect artifacts. So every now and then they send this time machine disguised as a little white-stucco house here and it scoops up toys, pets, newspapers, whatever it can grab. Most likely they aren’t really looking for cats or dogs, but they takes what they gets. And now they’re trying to catch an actual live twentieth-century man. Trolling for him the way you’d troll for catfish, using a beautiful woman—sometimes naked—as the bait.

A crazy idea? Sure. But I couldn’t come up with a saner one.

Ten days into springtime and the house was gone again. When it came back, about a week later, the woman didn’t seem to be with it. They were giving her some time off, maybe. But they still seemed interested in luring me inside. I’d come by and take up my position by the curb and the door would quietly swing open, though no one was visible inside. And would stay open, waiting for me to traipse up the walk and go in.

It was a temptation. I felt it pulling on me harder and harder every day, as my own here-and-now real-life everyday options looked bleaker and bleaker. I wasn’t finding a new job. I wasn’t making useful contacts. My money, not much to begin with, was running out. All I had was the Program and the people who were part of it here, and though they were fine enough people they weren’t the kind I could get really close to in any way not having to do with the Program.

So why not go up that path and into the house? Even if they swept me up and took me off to the year 2999 and I was never heard from again, what did I have to lose? A drab life in a furnished room in a nowhere town, living on the last of my dwindling savings while I dreamed of fifths of Johnny Walker and went to meetings at which a bunch of victims of the same miserable malady struggled constantly to keep their leaky boats from sinking? Wherever I went would be better than that. Perhaps incredibly better.

But of course I didn’t know that the shining visitors from the future would sweep me off to an astounding new existence in the year 2999. That was only my own nutty guess, my wild fantasy. Anything at all might happen to me if I passed through that doorway. Anything. It was a kind of Russian roulette and I didn’t even know the odds against me.

One day I taped a piece of paper to a rubber ball from the five-and-dime and tossed it through the door when it opened for me. On it I had written these questions:

WHO ARE YOU?

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

DO YOU WANT ME?

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

WILL YOU HARM ME?

And I waited for an answering note to come bouncing out. But none ever did.

The house went away. The house came back. The woman still wasn’t there. Nobody else seemed to be, either. But the door swung expectantly open for me, seemingly of its own accord. I would stand and stare, making no move, and after a time it would close again.

I bought another rubber ball and threw another message inside.

SEND ME THE GIRL AGAIN. THE BLONDE ONE.

I WANT TO TALK TO HER.

The house went away again and stayed away a long while, nearly a month this time, so that I began to think it would never come back and then that it had never actually been here at all. There were days when I didn’t even bother to walk past the vacant lot where I had seen it.

Then I did, and it was there, and the woman was in the doorway smiling, and she said, “Come on in and visit me, sailor?”

She was wearing something gauzy and she was leaning against the door-frame with her hand on her hip. Her voice was a soft throaty contralto. It all felt like a scene out of a 1940’s movie. Maybe it was; maybe they’d been studying up.

“First you tell me who you are, all right? And where you come from.”

“Don’t you want to have a good time with me, pal?”

Damn right I do. I felt it in my groin, my pounding chest, my knees.

I moistened my lips. I thought of the way the house had reeled in that angry snarling cat. How it had pulled that tricycle up the stairs. I felt it pulling on me. But I must have more ability to fight back than a cat. Or a tricycle.

I said, “There’s a lot I need to know, first.”

“Come on in and I’ll tell you everything.” Softly. Huskily. Irresistibly. Almost irresistibly.

“Tell me first. Come out here and talk to me.”

She winked and shook her head. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Studying old movies, all right. She closed the door in my face.

What they hammer into you in the Program is that you may think you’re pretty tough but in fact when you’ve added up all the debits and credits the truth is you aren’t as strong as you like to pretend you are. You’re too weak not to take the next drink, and it’s only after you admit how weak you are and turn elsewhere for help that you can begin to find the strength you need.

I had found that strength. I hadn’t had a drink on the seventh of February, or on the eighth, or on the ninth. One day at a time I wasn’t having any drinks and by now that one day at a time had added up to four months and eleven days and when tomorrow came around I would add another day to the string, and I was beginning to feel fairly confident that I could keep going that way for the rest of my life.

But the house was something else again. I was starting to see it as a magic gateway to God knows where, just as booze had once been for me. It came and went and the woman smiled and beckoned and offered throaty invitations, and I recognized that I had let myself become obsessed with it and couldn’t keep away from it, and the next time the house came back there was a good chance that I’d go sauntering up the path and through the door.

Which was crazy.

I hadn’t put myself through this whole ordeal of recovery just for the sake of waltzing through a different magic gateway, had I? Especially when I didn’t have the slightest idea of what might lie on the far side.

I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and decided that the safest and smartest thing to do was to get out of here: I would move to some other town that didn’t have houses that came and went, or languid naked blondes standing in doorways inviting me to step inside for a good time. So one drowsy July morning I bought a bus ticket to a town forty miles from the one where I’d been living. It was about the same size and had a similar name and looked just about as dull; and on the street behind the lone movie theater I found a house with a FURNISHED ROOM sign stuck in its lawn and rented a place very much like the one I had, except that the rent was ten dollars more a month. Then I went around to the local A.A. headquarters—I had already checked with my own to make sure they had one here, you can bet on that—and picked up the schedule of meeting hours.

Done. Safe. A clean break.

I’d never see that white house again.

I’d never see her again.

I’d never face that mysterious doorway and never feel the pull that it exerted.

And as I told myself all that, the pain of irrevocable loss rose up inside me and hit me from within, and I thought I was going to fall down.

I was in the bus depot then, waiting to catch the bus going back, so I could pack my suitcase and settle things with my landlady and say goodbye to my friends, such as they were, in the Program back there. I looked around and there she was, standing stark naked in the doorway of the baggage room, smiling at me in that beckoning way of hers.

Not really. It was a different woman, and she wasn’t blonde, and she was wearing a bus company uniform, and she wasn’t even looking at me.

I knew that, actually. I wasn’t hallucinating. But I had wanted her to be the other one so badly that I imagined that I saw her. And I realized how deep the obsession had become.

I must have seen her fifty times during the ride back. Waving at me from the head of a country lane as the bus flashed by. Smiling at me from a bicycle going the other way. Riding in the back of a pickup truck bouncing along in front of us. Standing by the side of the road trying to get a hitch. Her image haunted me wherever I looked. I sat there shivering and sweating, seeing her beckoning in the doorway and watching that door closing and closing and closing again in my mind.

It was evening by the time the bus reached town. The wise thing would have been to take a shower and go to a meeting, but I went to the house instead, and there was someone standing outside, staring at the screen door.

I had never before encountered anyone else, in all my visits to the house.

He was about my age, a short guy with a good gut and tousled reddish hair just beginning to fade into gray. He looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if I had seen him at a meeting once or twice, perhaps. As I came by, he threw me an uneasy, guilty glance, as if he was up to something. His eyes were a pale blue, very bloodshot.

I went past him about ten paces, paused there, turned around.

“You waiting for someone?” I asked.

“I might be.”

“Someone who lives in there?”

“What’s that to you?”

“I was just wondering,” I said. “If you could tell me who lives in that house.”

He shrugged as if he hadn’t quite heard me. The blue eyes turned chilly. I wanted to pick him up and throw him into the next county. The way he was looking at me, he probably felt the same way about me.

I said, “A woman lives there, right?”

“Fuck off, will you?”

“A blonde woman?”

“Fuck off, I said.”

Neither of us moved.

“Sometimes I come by here and I see a blonde woman in the window, or standing in the doorway,” I went on. “I wonder if you’ve seen her sometimes too.”

He didn’t say anything. His eyes flickered almost involuntarily toward the house.

I followed the motion and there she was, visible through the window with the green shutters to the right of the door. She was wearing one of her misty wraps and her hair was shining like spun gold. She smiled. Gestured with a quick movement of her head.

Come on inside, why don’t you?

I almost did. Another five seconds, another three, and I would have trotted down that little narrow paved pathway as obediently as the dog who had had the newspaper in his mouth. But I didn’t. I was still afraid of what might lie beyond. I froze in my tracks; and then the redheaded man started to move. He went past me and up the path. Like a sleepwalker; like a zombie.

“Hey—wait—”

I caught him by the arm. He swung around, furious, and we struggled for a moment and then he broke loose and clamped both his hands on my shoulders and pushed me with tremendous force into the shrubbery. I tripped over one of the pieces of odd metal junk that were always lying around near the door and went sprawling on my face, and when I got myself disentangled it was just in time to see the redheaded man wrench the screen door open and run inside.

I heard the inner door slam.

And then the house disappeared.

It vanished like a pricked bubble, taking the shrubbery with it, the garbage cans and other junk as well, and I found myself kneeling on weeds in the midst of a vacant lot, trembling as if I had just had a stroke. After a moment or two I got shakily to my feet and walked over to the place where the house had been. Nothing. Nothing. No trace. Gone as though it had never been there at all.

A couple of days later I moved back to my old place. There didn’t seem much risk any more, and I missed the place, the town, the guys at the meetings. It’s been months now, and no house. I rarely skip a day, going by the lot, but it remains empty. The memory of it, of her, haunts me. I look for the house in other parts of town, even in other towns. I look for the redheaded man too, but I’ve never seen him. I described him once at a meeting and someone said, “Yeah, sounds like Ricky. He used to live around here.” Where was he now? Nobody had any idea. Neither do I.

Another time I got brave enough to ask some of them if they had ever heard about a little white house that, well, sort of comes and goes. “Comes and goes?” they said. “What the hell does that mean?” I let the question drop.

I have a feeling that it was all some kind of a test, and I may have flunked it. I don’t mean that I’ve missed out on a terrific woman. She was only the bait; I know better than to think that she was real or that she ever could have been available for me if she was. But that sense of a new start—of another life, however weird, beyond the horizon, forever lost to me now—that’s what I’m talking about. And the pain runs deep.

But there’s always a second chance, isn’t there? They tell you that in the Program, and I believe it. I have to. From time to time I’ve left notes in the empty lot:

WHEN YOU COME BACK NEXT TIME, DON’T LEAVE WITHOUT ME.

I’M READY NOW. I’M SURE OF IT.

Maybe they will. The house comes and goes, that I know. It’s gone now, but it’ll come again. I’m here. I’m watching. I’m waiting.

LOOKING FOR THE FOUNTAIN

We are still in the early months of 1991; and I am still writing short stories and waiting for the coming of the long California summer.

This one was commissioned by another friend, Gregory Benford, who in conjunction with the redoubtable Marty Greenberg was editing a series of alternative-history anthologies under the title, What Might Have Been. I had already done stories (“To the Promised Land” and “A Sleep and a Forgetting”) for the first two volumes of the series, a couple of years earlier. Somehow I missed Volume Three, but now a fourth was being assembled—stories of Alternate Americas—and, calling on my knowledge of the exploration narratives of the Spanish conquistadores in the New World and throwing in a speculation about a vagrant band of Crusaders, I came up with this one, which saw print first in the May, 1992 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine before making its way into the anthology for which it was written.

——————

My name is Francisco de Ortega and by the grace of God I am eighty-nine years old and I have seen many a strange thing in my time, but nothing so strange as the Indian folk of the island called Florida, whose great dream it is to free the Holy Land from the Saracen conquerors that profane it.

It was fifty years ago that I encountered these marvelous people, when I sailed with his excellency the illustrious Don Juan Ponce de León on his famous and disastrous voyage in quest of what is wrongly called the Fountain of Youth. It was not a Fountain of Youth at all that he sought, but a Fountain of Manly Strength, which is somewhat a different thing. Trust me: I was there, I saw and heard everything, I was by Don Juan Ponce’s side when his fate overtook him. I know the complete truth of this endeavor and I mean to set it all down now so there will be no doubt; for I alone survive to tell the tale, and as God is my witness I will tell it truthfully now, here in my ninetieth year, all praises be to Him and to the Mother who bore Him.

The matter of the Fountain, first.

Commonly, I know, it is called the Fountain of Youth. You will read that in many places, such as in the book about the New World which that Italian wrote who lived at Seville, Peter Martyr of Anghiera, where he says, “The governor of the Island of Boriquena, Juan Ponce de León, sent forth two caravels to seek the Islands of Boyuca in which the Indians affirmed there to be a fountain or spring whose water is of such marvelous virtue, that when it is drunk it makes old men young again.”

This is true, so far as it goes. But when Peter Martyr talks of “making old men young again”, his words must be interpreted in a poetic way.

Perhaps long life is truly what that Fountain really provides, along with its other and more special virtue—who knows? For I have tasted of that Fountain’s waters myself, and here I am nearly ninety years of age and still full of vigor, I who was born in the year of our Lord 1473, and how many others are still alive today who came into the world then, when Castile and Aragon still were separate kingdoms? But I tell you that what Don Juan Ponce was seeking was not strictly speaking a Fountain of Youth at all, but rather a Fountain that offered a benefit of a very much more intimate kind. For I was there, I saw and heard everything. And they have cowardly tongues, those who say it was a Fountain of Youth, for it would seem that out of shame they choose not to speak honestly of the actual nature of the powers that the Fountain which we sought was supposed to confer.

It was when we were in the island of Hispaniola that we first heard of this wonderful Fountain, Don Juan Ponce and I. This was, I think, in the year 1504. Don Juan Ponce, a true nobleman and a man of high and elegant thoughts, was governor then in the province of Higuey of that island, which was ruled at that time by Don Nicolás de Ovando, successor to the great Admiral Cristóbal Colón. There was in Higuey then a certain Indian cacique or chieftain of remarkable strength and force, who was reputed to keep seven wives and to satisfy each and every one of them each night of the week. Don Juan Ponce was curious about the great virility of this cacique, and one day he sent a certain Aurelio Herrera to visit him in his village.

“He does indeed have many wives,” said Herrera, “though whether there were five or seven or fifty-nine I could not say, for there were women surrounding me all the time I was there, coming and going in such multitudes that I was unable to make a clear count, and swarms of children also, and from the looks of it the women were his wives and the children were his children.”

“And what sort of manner of man is this cacique?” asked Don Juan Ponce.

“Why,” said Herrera, “he is a very ordinary man, narrow of shoulders and shallow of chest, whom you would never think capable of such marvels of manhood, and he is past middle age besides. I remarked on this to him, and he said that when he was young he was easily exhausted and found the manly exercises a heavy burden. But then he journeyed to Boyuca, which is an island to the north of Cuba that is also called Bimini, and there he drank of a spring that cures the debility of sex. Since then, he asserts, he has been able to give pleasure to any number of women in a night without the slightest fatigue.”

I was there. I saw and heard everything. El enflaquecimiento del sexo was the phrase that Aurelio Herrera used, “the debility of sex.” The eyes of Don Juan Ponce de León opened wide at this tale, and he turned to me and said, “We must go in search of this miraculous fountain some day, Francisco, for there will be great profit in the selling of its waters.”

Do you see? Not a word had been spoken about long life, but only about the curing of el enflaquecimiento del sexo. Nor was Don Juan Ponce in need of any such cure for himself, I assure you, for in the year 1504 he was just thirty years old, a lusty and aggressive man of fiery and restless spirit, and red-haired as well, and you know what is said about the virility of red-haired men. As for me, I will not boast, but I will say only that since the age of thirteen I have rarely gone a single night without a woman’s company, and have been married four times, on the fourth occasion to a woman fifty years younger than myself. And if you find yourself in the province of Valladolid where I live and come to pay a call on me I can show you young Diego Antonio de Ortega whom you would think was my great-grandson, and little Juana María de Ortega who could be my great-granddaughter, for the boy is seven and the girl is five, but in truth they are my own children, conceived when I was past eighty years of age; and I have had many other sons and daughters too, some of whom are old people now and some are dead.

So it was not to heal our own debilities that Don Juan Ponce and I longed to find this wonderful Fountain, for of such shameful debilities we had none at all, he and I. No, we yearned for the Fountain purely for the sake of the riches we might derive from it: for each year saw hundreds or perhaps thousands of men come from Spain to the New World to seek their fortunes, and some of these were older men who no doubt suffered from a certain enflaquecimiento. In Spain I understand they use the powdered horn of the unicorn to cure this malady, or the crushed shells of a certain insect, though I have never had need of such things myself. But those commodities are not to be found in the New World, and it was Don Juan Ponce’s hope that great profit might be made by taking possession of Bimini and selling the waters of the Fountain to those who had need of such a remedy. This is the truth, whatever others may claim.

But the pursuit of gold comes before everything, even the pursuit of miraculous Fountains of Manly Strength. We did not go at once in search of the Fountain because word came to Don Juan Ponce in Hispaniola that the neighboring island of Borinquen was rich in gold, and thereupon he applied to Governor Ovando for permission to go there and conquer it. Don Juan Ponce already somewhat knew that island, having seen its western coast briefly in 1493 when he was a gentleman volunteer in the fleet of Cristóbal Colón, and its beauty had so moved him that he had resolved someday to return and make himself master of the place.

With one hundred men, he sailed over to this Borinquen in a small caravel, landing there on Midsummer Day, 1506, at the same bay he had visited earlier aboard the ship of the great Admiral. Seeing us arrive with such force, the cacique of the region was wise enough to yield to the inevitable and we took possession with very little fighting.

So rich did the island prove to be that we put the marvelous Fountain of which we had previously heard completely out of our minds. Don Juan Ponce was made governor of Borinquen by royal appointment and for several years the natives remained peaceful and we were able to obtain a great quantity of gold indeed. This is the same island that Cristóbal Colón called San Juan Bautista and which people today call Puerto Rico.

All would have been well for us there but for the stupidity of a certain captain of our forces, Cristóbal de Sotomayor, who treated the natives so badly that they rose in rebellion against us. This was in the year of our Lord 1511. So we found ourselves at war; and Don Juan Ponce fought with all the great valor for which he was renowned, doing tremendous destruction against our pagan enemies. We had among us at that time a certain dog, called Bercerillo, of red pelt and black eyes, who could tell simply by smell alone whether an Indian was friendly to us or hostile, and could understand the native speech as well; and the Indians were more afraid of ten Spaniards with this dog, than of one hundred without him. Don Juan Ponce rewarded Bercerillo’s bravery and cleverness by giving the dog a full share of all the gold and slaves we captured, as though he were a crossbowman; but in the end the Indians killed him. I understand that a valiant pup of this Bercerillo, Leoncillo by name, went with Nuñez de Balboa when he crossed the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the great ocean beyond.

During this time of our difficulties with the savages of Puerto Rico, Don Diego Colón, the son of the great Admiral, was able to take advantage of the trouble and make himself governor of the island in the place of Don Juan Ponce. Don Juan Ponce thereupon returned to Spain and presented himself before King Ferdinand, and told him the tale of the fabulous Fountain that restores manly power. King Ferdinand, who was greatly impressed by Don Juan Ponce’s lordly bearing and noble appearance, at once granted him a royal permit to seek and conquer the isle of Bimini where this Fountain was said to be. Whether this signifies that His Most Catholic Majesty was troubled by debilities of a sexual sort, I would not dare to say. But the king was at that time a man of sixty years and it would not be unimaginable that some difficulty of that kind had begun to perplex him.

Swiftly Don Juan Ponce returned to Puerto Rico with the good news of his royal appointment, and on the third day of March of the year of our Lord 1513 we set forth from the Port of San Germán in three caravels to search for Bimini and its extraordinary Fountain.

I should say at this point that it was a matter of course that Don Juan Ponce should have asked me to take part in the quest for this Fountain. I am a man of Tervás de San Campos in the province of Valladolid, where Don Juan Ponce de León also was born less than one year after I was, and he and I played together as children and were friends all through our youth. As I have said, he first went to the New World in 1493, when he was nineteen years of age, as a gentleman aboard the ship of Admiral Cristóbal Colón, and after settling in Hispaniola he wrote to me and told me of the great wealth of the New World and urged me to join him there. Which I did forthwith; and we were rarely separated from then until the day of his death.

Our flagship was the Santiago, with Diego Bermúdez as its master—the brother to the man who discovered the isle of Bermuda—and the famous Antón de Alaminos as its pilot. We had two Indian pilots too, who knew the islands of that sea. Our second ship was the Santa María de Consolación, with Juan Bono de Quexo as its captain, and the third was the San Cristóbal. All of these vessels were purchased by Don Juan Ponce himself out of the riches he had laid by in the time when he was governor of Puerto Rico.

I have to tell you that there was not one priest in our company, not that we were ungodly men but only that it was not our commander’s purpose on this voyage to bring the word of Jesus to the natives of Bimini. We did have some few women among us, including my own wife Beatriz, who had come out from Spain to be with me, and grateful I was to have her by my side; and my wife’s young sister Juana was aboard the ship also, that I could better look after her among these rough Spaniards of the New World.

Northward we went. After ten days we halted at the isle of San Salvador to scrape weeds from the bottom of one of our ships. Then we journeyed west-northwest, passing the isle of Ciguateo on Easter Sunday, and, continuing onward into waters that ran ever shallower, we caught sight on the second day of April of a large delightful island of great and surpassing beauty, all blooming and burgeoning with a great host of wildflowers whose delectable odors came wafting to us on the warm gentle breeze. We named this isle La Florida, because Easter is the season when things flower and so we call that time of year in our language Pascua Florida. And we said to one another at once, seeing so beautiful a place, that this island of Florida must surely be the home of the wondrous Fountain that restores men to their fleshly powers and grants all their carnal desires to the fullest.

Of the loveliness of Florida I could speak for a day and a night and a night and a day, and not exhaust its marvels. The shallowing green waters give way to white crests of foam that fall upon beaches paved hard with tiny shells; and when you look beyond the beach you see dunes and marshes, and beyond those a land altogether level, not so much as a hillock upon it, where glistening sluggish lagoons bordered brilliantly with rushes and sedges show the way to the mysterious forests of the interior.

Those forests! Palms and pines, and gnarled gray trees whose names are known only to God! Trees covered with snowy beards! Trees whose leaves are like swords! Flowers everywhere, dizzying us with their perfume! We were stunned by the fragrance of jasmine and honeyflower. We heard the enchanting songs of a myriad of birds. We stared in wonder at the bright blooms. We doffed our helmets and dropped to our knees to give thanks to God for having led us to this most beautiful of shores.

Don Juan Ponce was the first of us to make his way to land, carrying with him the banner of Castile and León. He thrust the royal standard into the soft sandy soil and in the name of God and Spain took possession of the place. This was at the mouth of a river which he named in honor of his patron, the blessed San Juan. Then, since there were no Indians thereabouts who might lead us to the Fountain, we returned to our vessels and continued along the coast of that place.

Though the sea looked gentle we found the currents unexpectedly strong, carrying us northward so swiftly that we feared we would never see Puerto Rico again. Therefore did Don Juan Ponce give orders for us to turn south; but although we had a fair following wind the current was so strong against us that we could make no headway, and at last we were compelled to anchor in a cove. Here we spent some days, with the ships straining against their cables; and during that time the little San Cristóbal was swept out to sea and we lost sight of her altogether, though the day was bright and the weather fair. But within two days by God’s grace she returned to us.

At this time we saw our first Indians, but they were far from friendly. Indeed they set upon us at once and two of our men were wounded by their little darts and arrows, which were tipped with sharp points made of bone. When night came we were able to withdraw and sail on to another place that we called the Río de la Cruz, where we collected wood and water; and here we were attacked again, by sixty Indians, but they were driven off. And so we continued for many days, until in latitude 28 degrees 15 minutes we did round a cape, which we called Cabo de los Corrientes on account of the powerful currents, which were stronger than the wind.

Here it was that we had the strangest part of our voyage, indeed the strangest thing I have ever seen in all my ninety years. Which is to say that we encountered at this time in this remote and hitherto unknown land the defenders of the Christian Faith, the sworn foes of the Saracens, the last sons of the Crusades, whose great dream it was, even now, to wrest the Holy Land of our Savior’s birth from those infidel followers of Muhammad who seized it long ago and rule it today.

We suspected nothing of any of what awaited us when we dropped our anchors near an Indian town on the far side of Cabo de los Corrientes. Cautiously, for we had received such a hostile reception farther up the coast, we made our landfall a little way below the village and set about the task of filling our water casks and cutting firewood. While this work was being carried out we became aware that the Indians had left their village and had set out down the shore to encounter us, for we heard them singing and chanting even before we could see them; and we halted in our labors and made ourselves ready to deal with another attack.

After a short while the Indians appeared, still singing as they approached. Wonder of wonders, they were clothed, though all the previous natives that we had seen were naked, or nearly so, as these savages usually are. Even more marvelous was the nature of their clothing, which was of a kind not very different from that which Christians wear, jerkins and doublets and tunics, and such things. And—marvel of marvel—every man of them wore upon his chest a white garment that bore the holy cross of Jesus painted brightly in red! We could not believe our eyes. But if we had any doubt that these were Christian men, it was eradicated altogether when we saw that in the midst of the procession came certain men wearing the dark robes of priests, who carried great wooden crosses held high aloft.

Were these indeed Indians? Surely not! Surely they must be Spaniards like ourselves! We might almost have been in Toledo, or Madrid, or Seville, and not on the shore of some strange land of the Indies! But indeed we saw without doubt now that the marchers were men of the sort that is native to the New World, with the ruddy skins and black hair and sharp features of their kind, Christian though they might be in dress, and carrying the cross itself in their midst.

When they were close enough so that we could hear distinctly the words of their song, it sounded to some of us that they might be Latin words, though Latin of a somewhat barbarous kind. Could that be possible? We doubted the evidence of our ears. But then Pedro de Plasencia, who had studied for the priesthood before entering the military, crossed himself most vigorously and said to us in wonder, “Do you hear that? They are singing the Gloria in excelsis Deo!” And in truth we could tell that hymn was what they sang, now that Pedro de Plasencia had picked out the words of it for us. Does that sound strange to you, that Indians of an unknown isle should be singing in Latin? Yes, it is strange indeed. But doubt me at your peril. I was there; I saw and heard everything myself.

“Surely,” said Diego Bermúdez, “there must have been Spaniards here before us, who have instructed these people in the way of God.”

“That cannot be,” said our pilot, Antón de Alaminos. “For I was with Cristóbal Colón on his second voyage and have been on every voyage since of any note that has been made in these waters, and I can tell you that no white man has set foot on this shore before us.”

“Then how came these Indians by their crosses and their holy hymns?” asked Diego Bermúdez. “Is it a pure miracle of the saints, do you think?”

“Perhaps it is,” said Don Juan Ponce de León, with some heat, for it looked as if there might be a quarrel between the master and the pilot. “Who can say? Be thankful that these folk are our Christian friends and not our enemy, and leave off your useless speculations.”

And in the courageous way that was his nature, Don Juan Ponce went forward and raised his arms to the Indians, and made the sign of the cross in the air, and called out to them, saying, “I am Don Juan Ponce de León of Valladolid in the land of Spain, and I greet you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” All of which he said clearly and loudly in his fine and beautiful Castilian, which he spoke with the greatest purity. But the Indians, who by now had halted in a straight line before us, showed no understanding in their eyes. Don Juan Ponce spoke again, once more in Spanish, saying that he greeted them also in the name of His Most Catholic Majesty King Ferdinand of Aragon and Castile. This too produced no sign that it had been understood.

One of the Indians then spoke. He was a man of great presence and bearing, who wore chains of gold about his chest and carried a sword of strange design at his side, the first sword I had ever seen a native of these islands to have. From these indications it was apparent that he was the cacique.

He spoke long and eloquently in a language that I suppose was his own, for none of us had ever heard it before, not even the two Indian pilots we had brought with us. Then he said a few words that had the sound and the ring of French or perhaps Catalan, though we had a few men of Barcelona among us who leaned close toward him and put their hands to their ears and even they could make no sense out of what they heard.

But then finally this grand cacique spoke words which we all could understand plainly, garbled and thick-tongued though his speaking of them was: for what he said was, and there could be no doubt of it however barbarous his accent, “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” and he made the sign of the cross over his chest as any good Christian man would do. To which Don Juan replied, “Amen. Dominus vobiscum.” Whereupon the cacique, exclaiming, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” went forthrightly to the side of Don Juan Ponce, and they embraced with great love, likewise as any Christian men might do, here on this remote beach in this strange and lovely land of Florida.

They brought us then to their village and offered a great feast for us, with roasted fish and the meat of tortoises and sweet fruits of many mysterious kinds, and made us presents of the skins of animals. For our part we gave them such trinkets as we had carried with us, beads and bracelets and little copper daggers and the like, but of all the things we gave them they were most eager to receive the simple figurines of Jesus on the cross that we offered them, and passed them around amongst themselves in wonder, showing such love for them as if they were made of the finest gold and studded with emeralds and rubies. And we said privately to each other that we must be dreaming, to have met with Indians in this land who were of such great devotion to the faith.

We tried to speak with them again in Spanish, but it was useless, and so too was speaking in any of the native tongues of Hispaniola or Puerto Rico that we knew. In their turn they addressed us in their own language, which might just as well have been the language of the people of the Moon for all we comprehended it, and also in that tantalizing other tongue which seemed almost to be French or Catalan. We could not make anything of that, try though we did. But Pedro de Plasencia, who was the only one of us who could speak Latin out loud like a priest, sat down with the cacique after the meal and addressed him in that language. I mean not simply saying things like the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria, which any child can say, but speaking to him as if Latin was a real language with words and sentences of common meaning, the way it was long ago. To which the cacique answered, though he seemed to be framing his words with much difficulty; and Pedro answered him again, just as hesitatingly; and so they went on, talking to each other in a slow and halting way, far into the night, nodding and smiling most jubilantly whenever one of them reached some understanding of the other’s words, while we looked on in astonishment, unable to fathom a word of what they were saying.

At last Pedro rose, looking pale and exhausted like a man who has carried a bull on his back for half a league, and came over to us where we were sitting in a circle.

“Well?” Don Juan Ponce demanded at once.

Pedro de Plasencia shook his head wearily. “It was all nonsense, what the cacique said. I understood nothing. Nothing at all! It was mere incomprehensible babble and no more than that.” And he picked up a leather sack of wine that lay near his feet and drank from it as though he had a thirst that no amount of drinking ever could quench.

“You appeared to comprehend, at times,” said Don Juan Ponce. “Or so it seemed to me as I watched you.”

“Nothing. Not a word. Let me sleep on it, and perhaps it will come clear to me in the morning.”

I thought Don Juan Ponce would pursue him on the matter. But Don Juan Ponce, though he was an impatient and high-tempered man, was also a man of great sagacity, and he knew better than to press Pedro further at a time when he seemed so troubled and fatigued. So he dismissed the company and we settled down in the huts that the Indians had given us for lodging, all except those of us who were posted as sentries during the night to guard against treachery.

I rose before dawn. But I saw that Don Juan Ponce and Pedro de Plasencia were already awake and had drawn apart from the rest of us and were talking most earnestly. After a time they returned, and Don Juan Ponce beckoned to me.

“Pedro has told me something of his conversation with the cacique,” he said.

“And what is it that you have learned?”

“That these Indians are indeed Christians.”

“Yes, that seems to be the plain truth, strange though it seems,” I said. “For they do carry the cross about, and sing the Gloria, and honor the Father and the Son.”

“There is more.”

I waited.

He continued, “Unless Pedro much mistook what the cacique told him, the greatest hope in which these people live is that of wresting the Holy Land from the Saracen, and restoring it to good Christian pilgrims.”

At that I burst out into such hearty laughter that Don Juan Ponce, for all his love of me, looked at me with eyes flashing with reproof. Yet I could not withhold my mirth, which poured from me like a river.

I said at last, when I had mastered myself, “But tell me, Don Juan, what would these savages know of the Holy Land, or of Saracens, or any such thing? The Holy Land is thousands of leagues away, and has never been spoken of so much as once in this New World by any man, I think; nor does anyone speak of the Crusade any longer in this age, neither here nor at home.”

“It is very strange, I agree,” replied Don Juan Ponce. “Nevertheless, so Pedro swears, the cacique spoke to him of Terra Sancta, Terra Sancta, and of infidels, and the liberation of the city of Jerusalem.”

“And how does it come to pass,” I asked, “that they can know of such things, in this remote isle, where no white man has ever visited before?”

“Ah,” said Don Juan Ponce, “that is the great mystery, is it not?”

In time we came to understand the solution to this mystery, though the tale was muddled and confused, and emerged only after much travail, and long discussions between Pedro de Plasencia and the cacique of the Indians. I will tell you the essence of it, which was this:

Some three hundred years ago, or perhaps it was four hundred, while much of our beloved Spain still lay under the Moorish hand, a shipload of Frankish warriors set sail from the port of Genoa, or perhaps it was Marseilles, or some other city along the coast of Provence. This was in the time when men still went crusading, to make war for Jesus’ sake in the Holy Land against the followers of Muhammad who occupied that place.

But the voyage of these Crusaders miscarried; for when they entered the great Mar Mediterraneo, thinking to go east they were forced west by terrible storms and contrary winds, and swept helpless past our Spanish shores, past Almería and Málaga and Tarifa, and through the narrow waist of the Estrecho de Gibraltar and out into the vastness of the Ocean Sea.

Here, having no sound knowledge as we in our time do of the size and shape of the African continent, they thought to turn south and then east below Egypt and make their voyage yet to the Holy Land. Of course this would be impossible, except by rounding the Buena Fortuna cape and traveling up past Arabia, a journey almost beyond our means to this day. But being unaware of that, these bold but hapless men made the attempt, coasting southerly and southerly and southerly, and the land of course not only not ending but indeed carrying them farther and farther outward into the Ocean Sea, until at last, no doubt weary and half dead of famine, they realized that they had traveled so far to the west that there was no hope of returning eastward again, nor of turning north and making their way back into the Mediterraneo. So they yielded to the westerly winds that prevail near the Canary Isles, and allowed themselves to be blown clear across the sea to the Indies. And so after long arduous voyaging they made landfall in this isle we call Florida. Thus these men of three hundred years ago were the first discoverers of the New World, although I doubt very greatly that they comprehended what it was that they had achieved.

You must understand that we received few of these details from our Indian hosts: only the tale that men bound to Terra Sancta departing from a land in the east were blown off course some hundreds of years previous and were brought after arduous sailing to the isle of Florida and to this very village where our three caravels had made their landfall. All the rest did we conclude for ourselves, that they were Crusaders and so forth, after much discussing of the matter and recourse to the scholarship that the finest men among us possessed.

And what befell these men of the Crusade, when they came to this Florida? Why, they offered themselves to the mercies of the villagers, who greeted them right honorably and took them to dwell amongst them, and married them to their daughters! And for their part the seafarers offered the word of Jesus to the people of the village and thereby gave them hope of Heaven; and taught these kindly savages the Latin tongue so well that it remained with them after a fashion hundreds of years afterward, and also some vestiges of the common speech that the seafaring men had had in their own native land.

But most of all did the strangers from the sea imbue in the villagers the holy desire to rid the birthplace of Jesus of the dread hand of the Mussulman; and ever, in years after, did the Christian Indians of this Florida village long to put to sea, and cross the great ocean, and wield their bows and spears valiantly amidst the paynim enemy in the defense of the True Faith. Truly, how strange are the workings of God Almighty, how far beyond our comprehension, that He should make Crusaders out of the naked Indians in this far-off place!

You may ask what became of those European men who landed there, and whether we saw anyone who plainly might mark his descent from them. And I will tell you that those ancient Crusaders, who intermarried with the native women since they had brought none of their own, were wholly swallowed up by such intermarrying and were engulfed by the fullness of time. For they were only forty or fifty men among hundreds, and the passing centuries so diluted the strain of their race that not the least trace of it remained, and we saw no pale skin or fair hair or blue eyes or other marks of European men here. But the ideas that they had fetched to this place did survive, that is, the practicing of the Catholic faith and the speaking of a debased and corrupt sort of Latin and the wearing of a kind of European clothes, and such. And I tell you it was passing strange to see these red savages in their surplices and cassocks, and in their white tunics bearing the great emblem of our creed, and other such ancient marks of our civilization, and to hear them chanting the Kyrie eleison and the Confiteor and the Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth in that curious garbled way of theirs, like words spoken in a dream.

Nay, I have spoken untruthfully, for the men of that lost voyage did leave other remnants of themselves among the villagers beside our holy faith, which I have neglected to mention here, but which I will tell you of now.

For after we had been in that village several days, the cacique led us through the close humid forest along a tangled trail to a clearing nearby just to the north of the village, and here we saw certain tangible remains of the voyagers: a graveyard with grave markers of white limestone, and the rotting ribs and strakes and some of the keel of a seafaring vessel of an ancient design, and the foundation walls of a little wooden church. All of which things were as sad a sight as could be imagined, for the gravestones were so weathered and worn that although we could see the faint marks of names we could not read the names themselves, and the vessel was but a mere sorry remnant, a few miserable decaying timbers, and the church was only a pitiful fragment of a thing.

We stood amidst these sorry ruins and our hearts were struck into pieces by pity and grief for these brave men, so far from home and lonely, who in this strange place had nevertheless contrived to plant the sacred tree of Christianity. And the noble Don Juan Ponce de León went down on his knees before the church and bowed his head and said, “Let us pray, my friends, for the souls of these men, as we hope that someday people will pray for ours.”

We spent some days amongst these people in feasting and prayer, and replenishing our stock of firewood and water. And then Don Juan Ponce gave new thought to the primary purpose of our voyage, which was, to find the miraculous Fountain that renews a man’s energies. He called Pedro de Plasencia to his side and said, “Ask of the cacique, whether he knows such a Fountain.”

“It will not be easy, describing such things in my poor Latin,” answered Pedro. “I had my Latin from the Church, Don Juan, and what I learned there is of little use here, and it was all so very long ago.”

“You must try, my friend. For only you of all our company has the power to speak with him and be understood.”

Whereupon Pedro went to the cacique; but I could see even at a distance that he was having great difficulties. For he would speak a few halting words, and then he would act out his meaning with gestures, like a clown upon a stage, and then he would speak again. There would be silence; and then the cacique would reply, and I would see Pedro leaning forward most intently, trying to catch the meaning of the curious Latin that the cacique spoke. They did draw pictures for each other also in the sand, and point to the sky and sweep their arms to and fro, and do many another thing to convey to each other the sense of their words, and so it went, hour after hour.

At length Pedro de Plasencia returned to where we stood, and said, “There does appear to be a source of precious water that they cherish on this island, which they call the Blue Spring.”

“And is this Blue Spring the Fountain for which we search?” Don Juan Ponce asked, all eagerness.

“Ah, of that I am not certain.”

“Did you tell him that the water of it would allow a man to take his pleasure with women all day and all night, and never tire of it?”

“So I attempted to say.”

“With many women, one after another?”

“These are Christian folk, Don Juan!”

“Yes, so they are. But they are Indians also. They would understand such a thing, just as any man of Estremadura or Galicia or Andalusia would understand such a thing, Christian though he be.”

Pedro de Plasencia nodded. “I told him what I could, about the nature of the Fountain for which we search. And he listened very close, and he said, Yes, yes, you are speaking of the Blue Spring.”

“So he understood you, then?”

“He understood something of what I said, Don Juan, so I do firmly believe. But whether he understood it all, that is only for God to know.”

I saw the color rise in Don Juan Ponce’s face, and I knew that restless choleric nature of his was coming to the fore, which had always been his great driving force and also his most perilous failing.

He said to Pedro de Plasencia, “And will he take us to this Blue Spring of his, do you think?”

“I think he will,” said Pedro. “But first he wishes to enact a treaty with us, as the price of transporting us thither.”

“A treaty.”

“A treaty, yes. He wants our aid and assistance.”

“Ah,” said Don Juan Ponce. “And how can we be of help to these people, do you think?”

“They want us to show them how to build seafaring ships,” said Pedro. “So that they can sail across the Ocean Sea, and go to the rescue of the Holy Land, and free it from the paynim hordes.”

There was much more of back and forth, and forth and back, in these negotiations, until Pedro de Plasencia grew weary indeed, and there was not enough wine in our sacks to give him the rest he needed, so that we had to send a boat out to fetch more from one of our ships at anchor in the harbor. For it was a great burden upon him to conduct these conversations, he remembering only little patches of Church Latin from his boyhood, and the cacique speaking a language that could be called Latin only by great courtesy. I sat with them as they talked, on several occasions, and not for all my soul could I understand a thing that they said to each other. From time to time Pedro would lose his patience and speak out in Spanish, or the cacique would begin to speak in his savage tongue or else in that other language, somewhat like Provençal, which must have been what the seafaring Crusaders spoke amongst themselves. But none of that added to the understanding between the two men, which I think was a very poor understanding indeed.

It became apparent after a time that Pedro had misheard the cacique’s terms of treaty: what he wished us to do was not to teach them how to build ships but to give them one of ours in which to undertake their Crusade.

“It cannot be,” replied Don Juan Ponce, when he had heard. “But tell him this, that I will undertake to purchase ships for him with my own funds, in Spain. Which I will surely do, after we have received the proceeds from the sale of the water from the Fountain.”

“He wishes to know how many ships you will provide,” said Pedro de Plasencia, after another conference.

“Two,” said Don Juan Ponce. “No: three. Three fine caravels.”

Which Pedro duly told the cacique; but his way of telling him was to point to our three ships in the harbor, which led the cacique into thinking that Don Juan Ponce meant to give him those three actual ships then and now, and that required more hours of conferring to repair. But at length all was agreed on both sides, and our journey toward the Blue Spring was begun.

The cacique himself accompanied us, and the three priests of the tribe, carrying the heavy wooden crosses that were their staffs of office, and perhaps two dozen of the young men and girls of the village. In our party there were ten men, Don Juan Ponce and Pedro and I, and seven ordinary seamen carrying barrels in which we meant to store the waters of the Fountain. My wife Beatriz and her sister Juana accompanied us also, for I never would let them be far from me.

Some of the ordinary seamen among us were rough men of Estremadura, who spoke jestingly and with great licentiousness of how often they would embrace the girls of the native village after they had drunk of the Fountain. I had to silence them, reminding them that my wife and her sister could overhear their words. Yet I wondered privately what effects the waters would have on my own manhood: not that it had ever been lacking in any aspect, but I could not help asking myself if I would find it enhanced beyond its usual virtue, for such curiosity is but a natural thing to any man, as you must know.

We journeyed for two days, through hot close terrain where insects of great size buzzed among the flowers and birds of a thousand colors astounded our eyes. And at last we came to a place of bare white stone, flat like all other places in this isle of Florida, where clear cool blue water gushed up out of the ground with wondrous force.

The cacique gestured grandly, with a great sweep of his arms.

“It is the Blue Spring,” said Pedro de Plasencia.

Our men would have rushed forward at once to lap up its waters like greedy dogs at a pond; but the cacique cried out, and Don Juan Ponce also in that moment ordered them to halt. There would be no unseemly haste here, he said. And it was just as well he did, for we very soon came to see that this spring was a holy place to the people of the village, and it would have been profaned by such an assault on it, to our possible detriment and peril.

The cacique came forward, with his priests beside him, and gestured to Don Juan Ponce to kneel and remove his helmet. Don Juan Ponce obeyed; and the cacique took his helmet from him, and passed it to one of the priests, who filled it with water from the spring and poured it down over Don Juan Ponce’s face and neck, so that Don Juan Ponce laughed out loud. The laughter seemed to offend the Indians, for they showed looks of disapproval, and Don Juan Ponce at once grew silent.

The Indians spoke words which might almost have been Latin words, and there was much elevating of their crosses as the water was poured down over Don Juan Ponce, after which he was given the order to rise.

And then one by one we stepped forth, and the Indians did the same to each of us.

“It is very like a rite of holy baptism, is it not?” said Aurelio Herrera to me.

“Yes, very much like a baptism,” I said to him.

And I began to wonder: How well have we been understood here? Is it a new access of manly strength that these Indians are conferring upon us, or rather the embrace of the Church? For surely there is nothing about this rite that speaks of anything else than a religious enterprise. But I kept silent, since it was not my place to speak.

When the villagers were done dousing us with water, and speaking words over us and elevating their crosses, which made me more sure than ever that we were being taken into the congregation of their faith, we were allowed to drink of the spring—they did the same—and to fill our barrels. Don Juan Ponce turned to me after we had drunk, and winked at me and said, “Well, old friend, this will serve us well in later years, will it not? For though we have no need of such invigoration now, you and I, nevertheless time will have its work with us as it does with all men.”

“If it does,” I said, “why, then, we are fortified against it now indeed.”

But in truth I felt no change within. The water was pure and cool and good, but it had seemed merely to be water to me, with no great magical qualities about it; and when I turned and looked upon my wife Beatriz, she seemed pleasing to me as she always had, but no more than that. Well, so be it, I thought; this may be the true Fountain or maybe it is not, and only time will tell; and we began our return to the village, carrying the casks of water with us; and the day of our return, Pedro de Plasencia drew up a grand treaty on a piece of bark from a tree, in which we pledged our sacred honor and our souls to do all in our power to supply this village with good Spanish ships so that the villagers would be able to fulfill their pledge to liberate the Holy Land.

“Which we will surely do for them,” said Don Juan Ponce with great conviction. “For I mean to come back to this place as soon as I am able, with many ships of our own as well as the vessels I have promised them from Spain; and we will fill our holds with cask upon cask of this virtuous water from the Fountain, and replenish our fortunes anew by selling that water to those who need its miraculous power. Moreover we ourselves will benefit from its use in our declining days. And also we will bring this cacique some priests, who will correct him in his manner of practicing our faith, and guide him in his journey to Jerusalem. All of which I will swear by a great oath upon the Cross itself, in the presence of the cacique, so that he may have no doubt whatsoever of our kindly Christian purposes.”

And so we departed, filled with great joy and no little wonder at all that we had seen and heard.

Well, and none of the brave intentions of Don Juan Ponce were fulfilled, as you surely must know, inasmuch as the valiant Don Juan Ponce de León never saw Spain again, nor did he live to enjoy the rejuvenations of his body that he hoped the water of the Fountain would bring him in his later years. For when we left the village of the Indian Crusaders, we continued on our way along the coast of the isle of Florida a little further in a southerly direction, seeking to catch favorable winds and currents that would carry us swiftly back to Puerto Rico; and on the 23rd of May we halted in a pleasing bay to gather wood and water—for we would not touch the water of our casks from the Fountain!—and to careen the San Cristóbal, the hull of which was fouled with barnacles. And as we did our work there, a party of Indians came forth out of the woods.

“Hail, brothers in Christ!” Don Juan Ponce called to them with great cheer, for the cacique had told him that his people had done wonderful things in bringing their neighbors into the embrace of Jesus, and he thought now that surely all the Indians of this isle had been converted to the True Faith by those Crusading men of long ago.

But he was wrong in that; for these Indians were no Christians at all, but only pagan savages like most of their kind, and they replied instantly to Don Juan Ponce’s halloos with a volley of darts and arrows that struck five of us dead then and there before we were able to drive them off. And among those who took his mortal wound that day was the valiant and noble Don Juan Ponce de León of Valladolid, in the thirty-ninth year of his life.

I knelt beside him on the beach in his last moments, and said the last words with him. And he looked up at me and smiled—for death had never been frightening to him—and he said to me, almost with his last breath, “There is only one thing that I regret, Francisco. And that is that I will never know, now, what powers the water of that Fountain would have conferred upon me, when I was old and greatly stricken with the frailty of my years.” With that he perished.

What more can I say? We made our doleful way back to Puerto Rico, and told our tale of Crusaders and Indians and cool blue waters. But we were met with laughter, and there were no purchasers for the contents of our casks, and our fortunes were greatly depleted. All praise be to God, I survived that dark time and went on afterward to join the magnificent Hernando Cortés in his conquest of the land of Mexico, which today is called New Spain, and in the fullness of time I returned to my native province of Valladolid with much gold in my possession, and here I live in health and vigor to this day.

Often do I think of the isle of Florida and those Christian Indians we found there. It is fifty years since that time. In those fifty years the cacique and his people have rendered most of Florida into Christians by now, as we now know, and I tell you what is not generally known, that this expansion of their nation was brought about the better to support their Crusade against the Mussulman once the ships that Don Juan Ponce promised them had arrived.

So there is a great warlike Christian kingdom in Florida today, filling all that land and spreading over into adjacent isles, against which we men of Spain so far have struggled in vain as we attempt to extend our sway to those regions. I think it was poor Don Juan Ponce de León, in his innocent quest for a miraculous Fountain, who without intending it caused them to become so fierce, by making them a promise which he could not fulfill, and leaving them thinking that they had been betrayed by false Christians. Better that they had remained forever in the isolation in which they lived when we found them, singing the Gloria and the Credo and the Sanctus, and waiting with Christian patience for the promised ships that are to take them to the reconquest of the Holy Land. But those ships did not come; and they see us now as traitors and enemies.

I often think also of the valiant Don Juan Ponce, and his quest for the wondrous Fountain. Was the Blue Spring indeed the Fountain of legend? I am not sure of that. It may be that those Indians misunderstood what Pedro de Plasencia was requesting of them, and that they were simply offering us baptism—us, good Christians all our lives!—when what we sought was something quite different from that.

But if the Fountain was truly the one we sought, I feel great sorrow and pity for Don Juan Ponce. For though he drank of its waters, he died too soon to know of its effects. Whereas here I am, soon to be ninety years old, and the father of a boy of seven and a girl of five.

Was it the Fountain’s virtue that has given me so long and robust a life, or have I simply enjoyed the favor of God? How can I say? Whichever it is, I am grateful; and if ever there is peace between us and the people of the isle of Florida, and you should find yourself in the vicinity of that place, you could do worse, I think, than to drink of that Blue Spring, which will do you no harm and may perhaps bring you great benefit. If by chance you go to that place, seek out the Indians of the village nearby, and tell them that old Francisco de Ortega remembers them, and cherishes the memory, and more than once has said a Mass in their praise despite all the troubles they have caused his countrymen, for he knows that they are the last defenders of the Holy Land against the paynim infidels.

This is my story, and the story of Don Juan Ponce de León and the miraculous Fountain, which the ignorant call the Fountain of Youth, and of the Christian Indians of Florida who yearn to free the Holy Land. You may wonder about the veracity of these things, but I beg you, have no doubt on that score. All that I have told you is true. For I was there. I saw and heard everything.

THE WAY TO SPOOK CITY

Here’s a case where the author experienced more thrills and chills than his own protagonist in the course of writing one simple 18,000-word story.

The saga begins in the hot, dry summer of 1991, when—looking forward to the autumn writing season—I proposed to the editors of Playboy that I write a story of double the usual story length for them. I was having increasing difficulty confining my Playboy stories to their top limit of 7500 words or so. Long ago, I pointed out, the magazine had regularly run novellas, such stories as George Langelaan’s “The Fly,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Lost City of Mars.” What about reviving that custom and letting me write a long one now?

The powers that be mulled the idea and gave me a qualified go-ahead; I submitted an outline; on September 10, 1991, we came to an agreement on the deal. Two days later the printer of my venerable computer, which I had been using for nearly a decade, declined to print a document upon receiving the usual command. Somehow I jollied it into going back to work, and, although the rainy season was nowhere in sight yet, I blithely got started on the story that was to become “The Way to Spook City” a day or two later, thinking to have the piece behind me before settling down to the upcoming winter novel. I promised to deliver it by mid-October so that it could be used in a space being reserved for it in the August, 1992 issue.

But the printer trouble returned, and worsened, and on September 27—when I was forty pages into the story—the printer died entirely and permanently. I was trying to print out my forty pages at the time, but what came out was this:

“Everyone had been astonished when Nick announced he was going LIa kciN disiruprus oo, that he should be setting himself up for such a crazy LKthguoht eh nruter ot brawny young man Tom had become but of the soft-eyed LJs’kciN fo lla nehgt dna ,n” and then silence, not another garbled word.

No problem, you say. Get a new printer, hook it up, do the printout. But there was a problem. I had been something of a pioneer, as writers go, in the use of a computer for word-processing, and the computer I had been using all those years was now obsolete—incompatible, in fact, with any existing brand. The company that had made it was out of business, and no one now alive knew how to connect a modern printer to it. I did, of course, have a backup of my forty pages on a floppy disk; but my computer was a pre-MS-DOS model and its operating system could not be made to speak to that of any machine now in use. Whatever texts were on my computer were trapped in it forever, all my business records and the first half of “Spook City” among them. They could be brought up on screen but they were inaccessible for purposes of printing.

I would need to buy one of the newfangled MS-DOS computers and learn how to use it. But now I contemplated the gloomy prospect of having to type “Spook City” and hundreds of other documents onto the new computer, one word at a time. It would take forever. What about my mid-October deadline?

It was possible, at least, to rescue the unfinished story from the old computer. The technician who had been servicing my old computer discovered that he still had one machine of that model in working order (more or less) in his San Francisco office. I gave him my backup disk; he printed out the forty pages of “Spook City” and faxed them to me that day; and later in the day I began keying the story into the only working computer in the house, which belonged to my wife Karen and was a perfectly standard DOS-based job. I also went out and bought a new computer myself, also, of course, a DOS machine compatible with hers.

For the next ten days or so, while waiting for the new computer to arrive, I continued writing “Spook City” using my prehistoric manual typewriter, which had served me nobly back in the 1960’s but which certainly seemed quaint now, and entering each day’s typewritten work on Karen’s computer after her work-day was over. By October 4 I had 59 pages on disk. By then, though, I saw the need for all sorts of revisions in the early pages, revisions that would be too complicated to make with a typewriter (how did we ever manage to write stories on the things?) and I decided on Sunday, October 6, to print out the 59 pages and halt further work until my own new machine was here.

Karen’s computer wouldn’t print it. I don’t know why. The text looked fine on screen, but when I gave the familiar print command I was told that the document was “corrupted” and couldn’t be sent on to the printer.

Again? Was there a curse on this story?

The backup disk was corrupted too. It began to look as though I had lost the nineteen pages I had written since the first computer glitch plus all the rewriting I had done on the original forty that the computer pro had rescued.

“I’m pretty much in shellshock now,” I wrote Alice Turner of Playboy, “but what I suppose I’ll do is wait for the new computer to arrive, maybe Wednesday, and then start putting the whole damn thing in once more, trying to reconstruct (though you never really can) the stuff I had been doing all this past week. I can see that I’m going to wind up earning about five cents an hour on this project even if everything goes perfectly the third time, which is by no means assured.

“The one consolation I have is that I didn’t write the final scene yet, and so I didn’t lose the final scene. The rest of it exists in my head and in all sorts of fragmentary drafts, which I suppose I can piece together, but the problem is that the second time around I had tidied up all the problems that I had created in the first draft, and I will never be confident in the next version that I’ve rewritten the dialog properly. Hurts too much to laugh, said Adlai Stevenson, but I’m too old to cry, so I guess I’ll have a couple of drinks instead. Tomorrow, as Tolstoy said, is another day.”

Enter a second savior that grim Sunday evening, though: our friend and neighbor Carol Carr, who showed up equipped with some program that allowed us to bring up on screen, page by page, the whole corrupted document, and print it from the screen. What came out, alas, was mostly babble: a Martian mix, miscellaneous random consonants (not vowels!) and numbers and keyboard symbols with an occasional intelligible phrase glaring out of the welter of nonsense. But that was better than nothing. The next day I told Alice Turner what Carol had achieved: “She spent hours waving magic wands in front of Karen’s computer and was able to coax out pages and pages of gibberish printout, which I am now reassembling, jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by locating recognizable passages, putting them into the proper order, and transcribing them by hand onto the old first draft that the last bunch of computer wizards coaxed out of my old computer last week. So far I’ve reached page 28 of the original 40-page draft and have pretty much reconstructed all the revisions. Unfortunately a lot of the really good stuff in the climactic scenes didn’t emerge yesterday, but at least I have typed rough drafts of that and I ought to be able to put them back together in something approximating the level of yesterday’s destroyed version.”

New computer came, finally. I learned how to use it by entering poor garbled “Spook City” in something like proper form. I rewrote as I went, and cautiously produced a new printout every afternoon. On Friday, October 18, I finally finished what looked like a complete draft of the story, though it still needed some trimming and polishing. Two days later—a furiously hot summer day—my part of California caught fire and three thousand houses all about me were destroyed. It looked as though our house might go as well. Karen and I were forced to flee, taking with us our cats, a handful of household treasures, and a backup disk of the accursed “Spook City.” Whatever else happened, I didn’t want to have to write that thing a third time.

We were able to return home after eighteen hours. The fire had stopped a mile north of us. (Carol Carr had had an even closer singe; all the houses across the street from hers were burned, but hers went unharmed.) After a couple of shaky days I got back to work and on October 25, only two weeks beyond deadline, I sent it to Playboy, telling Alice:

“Here, thank God, is the goddamned story, and what a weird experience it has been. Written on four different machines—my old computer, Karen’s computer, my ancient manual typewriter, and my jazzy new computer—and lost twice by computers and both times recovered with the aid of technical wizardry, and typed over and over from one machine to the other, and interrupted by a natural disaster that makes our earthquake of a few years ago seem trivial—I feel as though I’ve been writing it forever. I wake up mumbling it to myself. I never dreamed I was embarking on such an epic struggle when I proposed the story; I thought it would simply be a few weeks of the usual tough work, a nice payday, and on to the next job…Anyway, here’s the story. I hope you like it. You must be starting to feel as though you’ve been writing it forever too.” She did like it, and published it in the August, 1992 Playboy, just as had been planned when we first started talking about my doing a novella for her a year before.

And, with some trepidation, I will herewith instruct my computer to copy its text from my 1991 story file into this present collection. If you don’t find it here, you’ll know why.

——————

The air was shining up ahead, a cold white pulsing glow bursting imperiously out of the hard blue desert sky. That sudden dazzle told Demeris that he was at the border; he was finally getting his first glimpse of the place where human territory ended and the alien-held lands began.

He halted and stood staring for a moment, half expecting to see monsters flying around overhead on the far side of the line; and right on cue, something weird went flapping by, a blotch of darkness against the brilliant icy sheen over there in the Occupied Zone. It was a heavy thing the size of a hawk and a half, with a lumpy greenish body and narrow wings like sawblades and a long snaky back that had a little globular purple head at the end of it. The bird, if that was what it was, flew on past, heading north, dropping a line of bright turquoise turds behind it. A little burst of flame sprang up in the dry grass where each one fell.

“Thank you kindly for that pretty welcome,” Demeris called out after it, sounding jauntier than he felt.

He went closer to the barrier. It sprang straight up out of the ground like an actual wall, but one that was intangible and more or less transparent: He could make out vague outlines of what lay beyond that dizzying shield of light, a blurry landscape that should have been basically the same on the Spook side of the line as it was over here, low sandy hills, gray splotches of sagebrush, sprawling clumps of prickly pear, but that was in fact mysteriously touched by strangeness—unfamiliar serrated buttes, angular chasms with metallic blue-green walls, black-trunked leafless trees with rigid branches jutting out like horizontal crossbars. Everything was veiled by the glow of the barrier that separated the Occupied Zone from the fragment of the former United States that lay to the west of it, and he couldn’t be sure how much he was actually seeing and how much was simply the product of his expectant imagination.

A shiver of distaste ran through him. Demeris’ father, who was dead now, had always regarded the Spooks as his personal enemy. “They’re just biding their time, Nick,” his father would say. “One of these days they’ll come across the line and grab our land the way they grabbed what they’ve got already. And there won’t be a goddamned thing we can do about it.” Demeris had dedicated himself to maintaining the order and prosperity of the little ranch near the eastern border of Free Country that was his family heritage. He loathed the Spooks, not just for what they had done but simply because they were hateful—unknown, strange, unimaginable, alien. Not us. Others were able to take the aliens and the regime they had imposed on the old U.S.A. for granted: It had happened long ago, ancient history. There had never been a hint that the elder Demeris’ fears were likely to be realized. In 150 years, the Spooks had shown no interest in expanding beyond the territory they had seized at the beginning, the Occupied Zone.

He took another step forward, and another, and waited for things to come into better focus. But they didn’t.

Demeris had made the first part of the journey from Albuquerque to Spook Land on muleback, with his brother Bud accompanying him as far as the west bank of the Pecos. But when they reached the river, Demeris had sent Bud back with the mules. Bud was five years younger than Demeris, but he had three kids already. Men who had kids had no business going into Spook territory. You were supposed to go across when you were a kid yourself, for a lark, for a stunt.

Demeris had had no time for larks and stunts. His parents had died when he was a boy, leaving him to raise his two small sisters and three younger brothers. By the time they were grown, he was too old to be very interested in adventures in the Occupied Zone. But this last June his youngest brother, Tom, an unpredictable kid whose head seemed stuffed with fantasies and incoherent yearnings, had turned 18 and gone to make his entrada. That was what New Mexicans called someone’s first crossing of the border—a rite of passage, the thing you did to show that you had become an adult. Demeris had never seen anything particularly adult about going to Spook Land, but he saw such things differently from most people. So Tom had gone in.

He hadn’t come out, though.

The traditional length of time for an entrada was 30 days. Tom had been gone three months now. Worry over Tom nagged at Demeris like an aching tooth. Tom was his reckless baby. Always had been, always would be. And so Demeris had decided to go in after him. Someone had to fetch Tom out of that place. The head of the family, the one who sought responsibility the way other people looked for shade on a sunny day, had appointed himself the one to do it. Demeris was the only family member, besides Tom himself, who had never married, who had no kids, who could afford to take a risk.

And now he was at the barrier zone itself.

The moment he stepped through the fringes of the field he felt it starting. It came on in undulating waves, shaking him as an earthquake would, making him slip and slide and struggle to stay upright. The air around him turned thick and yellow so that he couldn’t see more than a couple of yards in any direction. Just in front of him was a blood-hued blur that abruptly resolved itself into an army of scarlet caterpillars looping swiftly toward him over the ground, millions of them, a blazing carpet. They spread out all around him. Little teeth were gnashing in their pop-eyed heads, and they made angry muttering sounds as they advanced. He walked on, trying to avoid them, but it was like walking on a sea of slime. A growling thunder rose from them as he crushed them underfoot. “Bad dreams,” Bud was saying, in his ear, in his brain. “All they are is a bunch of bad dreams.” Sure. Demeris forged onward. How deep was the boundary strip, anyway? Twenty yards? Fifty? His eyes were stinging, his teeth seemed to be coming loose.

Beyond the caterpillars, he found himself at the edge of an abyss of pale quivering jelly. He compelled himself into it. A wave of pain swept upward from the scrotum to the back of his neck: He pivoted and twisted and then felt his backbone bending as if it was going to pop out of his flesh the way the fishbone comes away from the filleted meat. Stinking rain swept horizontally, and then hot sleet that raked his forehead till he howled with rage. No wonder you couldn’t get a mule to cross this barrier.

Head down, gasping for breath, he pushed himself forward another few steps. Something like a crab with wings came fluttering up out of a steaming mudhole and seized his arm, biting it just below the elbow on the inside. A stream of black blood spurted out. He yelled and flapped his arm until he shook off the thing. The pain lit a track of fire all along his arm, up to the shoulder and doubling back to his twitching fingers. He stared at his hand and saw just a knob of raw meat with blackened sticks jutting from it. Then it flickered and looked whole again.

He felt tears on his cheeks and that amazed him: The last time he had wept was when his father died, years ago. Suddenly the urge arose in him to give up and turn back while he still could. That surprised him too. It had always been his way to plug ahead, even when others were telling him, Demeris, don’t be an asshole. Now, here, in this place where he absolutely could not yield, he felt the temptation to slough off and go back. But he knew it was only the barrier playing devil tricks with him. So he encapsulated the desire to turn back into a hard shell and hurled it from him and watched it burn up in a puff of flame. And he went onward.

Three suns blazed overhead, a red one, a green one, a blue. The air seemed to be melting. He heard chattering voices like demonic static, and then disembodied faces were hovering all around him, jittering and shimmering in the soupy murk, the faces of people he knew, his sisters, Ellie and Netta, his nieces and nephews, his friends. He cried out to them. But everyone was horridly distorted, blobby-cheeked and bug-eyed, grotesque fun-house images. They pointed at him and laughed. Then he saw his father and mother pointing and laughing too, which had to be impossible, and he understood. Bud was right: These were nothing but illusions or maybe delusions. Things that he carried within him. Part of him. Harmless.

He began to run, plunging on through a tangle of slippery threads, a soft, spongy curtain. It yielded as he ripped at it and he fell face down onto a bank of dry sandy soil that was unremarkable in every way: desert dirt, real-world stuff, no fancy colors, no crazy textures. The extra suns were gone and the one that remained was the yellow one he had always known. A wind blew against his face. He was across. He had made it through the barrier.

He lay still for a minute or two, catching his breath.

Hot stabs of pain were coming from his arm, and he looked down at a jagged bloody cut near the inside of the elbow, where he had imagined the crab thing had bitten him. But the crab thing had been only a dream, only an illusion. Can an illusion bite? he wondered. The pain was no illusion. A nasty pulsation ran through the whole arm, making his hand quiver rhythmically, dribbling fresh blood from the cut in time with his heartbeat. He wiped some of the blood away and examined it: maybe two inches long and deep enough to see into. Fine, he thought, I’ll bleed to death from an imaginary cut before I’m ten feet inside the Occupied Zone. But after a moment, the wound began to clot and the bleeding stopped, though the pain remained.

Shakily, he stood and glanced about.

Behind him was the vertical column of the barrier field, looking no more menacing than a searchlight beam. Dimly, he saw the desert flatlands of Free Country beyond it, the scrubby ordinary place from which he had come.

On this side was a realm of magic and mysteries.

He was able to make out the basic raw material of the landscape, the barren New Mexico or Texas Nowheresville that he had known his entire life. But here on the far side of the barrier the invaders had done some serious screwing around with the look of the land. The jag-edged buttes and blue-green arroyos that Demeris had glimpsed from the other side of the barrier field were no illusions; somebody had taken the trouble to redesign the empty terrain. He saw strange zones of oddly colored soil, occasional ramshackle metal towers, deformed geological formations—twisted cones and spiky spires and uplifted layers—that made his eyes hurt. He saw groves of unknown wire-leafed trees and arroyos crisscrossed by sinister glossy black threads like stitches across a wound. Everything looked solid and real, none of it wiggling and shifting as things did inside the barrier field.

Wherever he looked, there was evidence of how the conquerors had put their mark on the land. Some of it was actually almost beautiful, he thought; and then he recoiled, astonished at his own reaction.

They must have been trying to make it look like the place they had originally come from, he told himself. Then the idea of their doing that affronted him, practically nauseated him. Land was something to live on and to use productively, not to turn into a toy.

He thought of his ranch, the horses, the turkeys, the barns, the ten acres of good soil, the rows of crops ripening in the autumn sun, the fencing that he had made with his own hands running beyond the line of virtually identical fencing his father had made. That was home and family, good clean hard work, sanity itself. This, though, this was lunacy.

He tore a strip of cloth from one of the shirts in his backpack and tied it around the bite on his arm. Then he started walking east toward the place where he hoped his brother Tom would be, the big settlement midway between the former site of Amarillo and the former site of Lubbock that was known as Spook City.

He kept alert for alien wildlife, constantly scanning to front and rear, sniffing, watching for tracks. The Spooks had brought a bunch of jungle beasts from their home world and turned them loose in the desert. “It’s like Africa out there,” Bud had said. “You never know what’s going to come up and try to gobble you.” Once a year, Demeris knew, the aliens held a tremendous hunt on the outskirts of Spook City, a huge apocalyptic round-up where they surrounded and killed the strange beasts by the thousands and the streets ran blue and green with rivers of their blood. The rest of the time the animals roamed free in the hinterlands. Some of them occasionally strayed across the border into Free Country. While preparing himself for his journey, Demeris had visited a ranch near Bernalillo where a dozen or so of them were kept on display as a zoo of nightmares, grisly things with red scaly necks and bird beaks and ears like rubber batwings and tentacles on their heads, huge ferocious animals that seemed to have been put together randomly out of a stock of miscellaneous parts. But so far he had encountered nothing more threatening-looking than jackrabbits and lizards. A bird that was not a bird passed overhead—one of the snake-necked things he had seen earlier, and another the size of an eagle with four transparent veined wings like a dragonfly’s but a thick mothlike furry body between them, and a third one with half a dozen writhing prehensile rattails dangling behind it for eight or ten feet, trolling for food, snatching a shrieking bluejay out of the air as though it were a bug.

When he was about three hours into the Occupied Zone, he came to a cluster of bedraggled little adobe houses at the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression that had the look of a dry lake. A thin fringe of scrubby plant growth surrounded the place, ordinary things, creosote bush and mesquite and yucca. Demeris saw horses standing at a trough, a couple of scrawny black-and-white cows munching on prickly pears, a few half-naked children running circles in the dust. There was nothing alien about them or about the buildings or the wagons and storage bins that were scattered all around. Everyone knew that Spooks were shapeshifters, that they could take on human form when the whim suited them. The advance guard of Spook infiltrators that had first entered the United States to prepare the way for the invasion all wore human guises. But most likely this was a village of genuine humans. Bud had said there were a few towns between the border and Spook City inhabited by the descendants of those who had chosen to remain in the Occupied Zone after the conquest. Most people with any sense had moved out when the invaders came, even though the aliens hadn’t asked anyone to leave. But some had stayed.

The afternoon was well along and the first chill of evening was beginning to creep into the clear dry air. His arm throbbed and he didn’t want to camp in the open. Perhaps these people would let him crash for the night.

When he was halfway to the houses, a gnomish leathery-skinned man who looked to be about 90 years old stepped slowly out from behind a gnarled mesquite bush and took up a watchful position in the middle of the path. A moment later, a boy of about 16, short and stocky in torn denim pants and a frayed undershirt, emerged from the same place. The boy was carrying what might have been a gun, which at a gesture from the older man he raised and aimed. It was a shiny tube a foot and a half long with a nozzle at one end and a squeeze bulb at the other. The nozzle pointed squarely at the middle of Demeris’ chest. Demeris stopped short and put his hands in the air.

The old man said something in a language that was full of grunts and clicks and some whistling snorts. The boy nodded and replied in the same language.

To Demeris the boy said, “You traveling by yourself?” He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, mostly Indian or Mexican probably. A ragged red scar ran up along his cheek up to his forehead.

Demeris kept his hands up. “By myself, yes. I’m from the other side.”

“Well, sure you are. Fool could see that.” The boy’s tone was thick, his accent unfamiliar, the end of each word clipped off in an odd way. Demeris had to work to understand him. “You making your entrada? You’re kind of old for that sort of thing.” Laughter sparkled in the boy’s eyes but not anywhere else on his face.

“This is my first time across,” Demeris said. “But it isn’t exactly an entrada.”

“Your first time, that’s an entrada.” The boy spoke again to the old man and got a long reply. Demeris waited patiently. Finally the boy turned back to him and said, “OK. Remigio here says we should make it easy for you. You want to stay here your thirty days, we let you do it. You work as a field hand, that’s all. We even sell you some Spook things you can take back and show off like all you people do. OK?”

Demeris’ face grew hot. “I told you, this isn’t my entrada. I’m not a kid.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Trying to find my brother.”

The boy frowned and spat on the dust, not quite in Demeris’ direction. “You think we got your brother here?”

“He’s in Spook City, I think.”

“Spook City. Yeah. I bet that’s where he is. They all go there. For the hunt, they go.” He put his finger to his head and moved it in a circle. “You do that, you got to be a little crazy, you know? Going there for the hunt. Sheesh! What dumb crazy fuckers.” Then he laughed and said, “Well, come on, I’ll show you where you can stay.”

The place where they put him up was a weather-beaten shack made of wooden slats with big stripes of sky showing through, at the edge of town, 100 yards or so from the nearest building. There was nothing in it but a mildewed bundle of rags tied together for sleeping on. Some of the rags bore faded inscriptions in the curvilinear Spook script. A ditch out back served as a latrine. A stream, hardly more than a rivulet, ran nearby. Demeris crouched over it and washed out his wound, which was still pulsing unpleasantly.

As darkness fell, the boy reappeared and led Demeris to the eating hall. Fifty or 60 people were sitting at long benches in family groups. There was little conversation, and that was in the local language. Nobody paid any attention to him, but he could feel the force of their hostility, an intangible thing.

He ate quickly and went back to his shack. For a while there was singing—chanting, really—coming up from the village. It was harsh and guttural and choppy, a barrage of stiff angular sounds that didn’t follow any musical scale he knew. Listening to it, he felt a powerful sense of the strangeness of these people who had lived under Spook rule for so long. How had they survived? How had they been able to stand it, the changes, the sense of being owned? They had adapted by turning themselves into something beyond his understanding.

Later, other sounds drifted to him, the night sounds of the desert, hoots and whines and screeches that might have been coming from owls and coyotes, but probably weren’t. He thought he heard noise just outside his shack, people moving, but he was too groggy to get up and see what was going on. He fell at last into a stupor and lay floating in it until dawn. Just before morning he dreamed he was a boy again, with his mother and father still alive and Dave and Bud and the girls just babies and Tom not yet born. He and his dad were out on the plains hunting Spooks, vast swarms of gleaming vaporous Spooks that drifted overhead as thick as mosquitoes, two brave men walking side by side, the big one and the smaller one, killing the thronging aliens with dart guns that popped them like balloons. When they died, they gave off a screeching sound like metal on metal and released a smell like rotting eggs and plummeted to the ground, covering it with a glassy scum that quickly melted away to leave a scorched and flaking surface. It was a satisfying dream. Then a flood of morning light broke through the slats and woke him.

Emerging from the shack, he discovered a small tent pitched about 20 yards away that hadn’t been there the night before. A huge mottled yellow animal was tethered nearby, grazing on weeds; something that might have been a camel except there weren’t any camels the size of elephants, camels with three shallow humps and great goggling green eyes the size of saucers, or knees on the backs of their legs as well as on the fronts. As he gaped at it, a woman wearing tight khaki slacks and a shirt buttoned up to the collar came out of the tent and said, “Never seen one of those before?”

“You bet I haven’t. This is my first time across.”

“Is it, now?” she said. She had an accent too. It wasn’t as strange to Demeris as the village boy’s, but there was some other kind of spin to it, a sound like a tolling bell beneath the patterns of the words themselves.

She was youngish, slender, not bad-looking: long straight brown hair, high cheekbones, tanned Anglo face. It was hard to guess her age. Somewhere between 25 and 35 was the best he could figure. She had very dark eyes, bright, almost glossy, oddly defiant. It seemed to him that there was a kind of aura around her, a puzzling crackle of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.

She told him what the camel thing was called. The word was an intricate slurred sound midway between a whistle and a drone, rising sharply at the end. “You do it now,” she said. Demeris looked at her blankly. The sound was impossible to imitate. “Go on. Do it.”

“I don’t speak Spook.”

“It’s not all that hard.” She made the sound again. Her eyes flashed with amusement.

“Never mind. I can’t do it.”

“You just need some practice.”

Her gaze was focused right on his, strong, direct, almost aggressive. At home he didn’t know many women who looked at him like that.

“My name’s Jill,” she said. “I live in Spook City. I’ve been in Texas a few weeks and now I’m on my way back.”

“Nick Demeris. From Albuquerque. Traveling up that way, too.”

“What a coincidence.”

“I suppose,” he said.

A sudden hot fantasy sprang up within him: that a sexual chemistry had stricken her like a thunderbolt, that she was going to invite him to travel with her, that they’d ride right off into the desert together, that when they made camp that evening she would turn to him with parted lips and shining eyes and beckon him toward her…

The urgency and intensity of the idea surprised him as much as its adolescent foolishness. Had he really let himself get as horny as that? She looked cool, self-sufficient, self-contained. She wouldn’t have any need for his companionship on her trip home, nor probably for anything else he might have to offer.

“What brings you over here?” she asked him.

He told her about his missing brother. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he spoke. She was studying his face with great care, staring at him as though peering through his skull into his brain.

“I think I may know him, your brother,” she said calmly after a time.

He blinked. “You do? Seriously?”

“Not as tall as you and stockier, right? But otherwise he looks pretty much like you, only younger. Face a lot like yours, broader, but the same cheekbones, the same high forehead, the same color eyes, the same blond hair, but his is longer. The same very serious expression all the time, tight as a drum.”

“Yes,” Demeris said, with growing wonder. “That’s him. It has to be.”

“Don, that was his name. No, Tom. Don, Tom, one of those short names.”

“Tom.”

“Tom, right.”

“How do you know him?” he asked.

“Turned up in Spook City a couple of months back. June, July, somewhere back then. It isn’t such a big place that you don’t notice new people when they come in. Had that Free Country look about him, you know. Kind of big-eyed, rawboned, can’t stop gawking at things. But he seemed a little different from most of the entrada kids. Like this trip wasn’t just a thing he was doing for the hell of it. Peculiar sort of guy, actually.”

“That was Tom, yes.” One side of Demeris’ face was starting to twitch. “You think he might still be there?”

“Could be. More likely than not. He was talking about staying quite a while. At least until fall, until hunt time.”

“And when is that?”

“It starts late next week.”

“Maybe I can still find him, then. If I can get there in time.”

“I’m leaving here this afternoon. You can ride with me to Spook City if you want.”

“With you?” Demeris said. He was astonished. Instant chemistry after all? His adolescent fantasy coming to life? It seemed too neat, too slick. The world didn’t work like this. And yet…

“Sure. Plenty of room between those humps. Take you at least a week if you walk there, if you’re a good walker. Maybe longer. Riding, it’ll be just a couple of days.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’d be glad to. If you really mean it.”

“Why would I say it if I didn’t mean it?”

Abruptly, the notion came to him that this woman and Tom might have had something going for a while in Spook City. Of course. Of course. Why else would she remember in such detail some unknown kid who had wandered into her town months before? Tom wouldn’t hesitate, even with a woman ten, 15 years older than he was. And so she was offering Demeris this ride now as a courtesy to a member of the family, so to speak. It wasn’t his tremendous masculine appeal, it was mere politeness. Or curiosity about Tom’s older brother.

Into his long confused silence she said, “The critter here needs a little more time to feed itself up. Then we can take off. Around two o’clock, OK?”

After breakfast the boy went over to him in the dining hall and said, “You meet the woman who come in during the night?”

Demeris nodded. “She’s offering me a ride to Spook City.”

Something that might have been scorn flickered across the boy’s face. “You crazy if you go with her, man.”

Demeris said, frowning, “Why?”

The boy put his hand over his mouth and muffled a laugh. “That woman, she a Spook, man. You mean you don’t see that? Only a damn fool go traveling around with a Spook.”

Demeris was stunned for a moment and then angry. “Don’t play around with me,” he said, irritated.

“Yeah, man. I’m playing. It’s a joke. Just a joke.” The boy’s voice was flat, chilly, bearing its own built-in contradiction. The contempt in his dark hard eyes was unmistakable now. “Look, you go ride with her if you like. Let her do whatever she wants with you once she got you out there in the desert. Isn’t none of my goddamn business. Fucking Free Country guys, you all got shit for brains.”

Demeris squinted at him, shaken now, not sure what to believe. The kid’s cold-eyed certainty carried tremendous force. But it made no sense to him that this Jill could be an alien. Her voice, her bearing, everything about her, were too convincingly real. The Spooks couldn’t imitate humans that well, could they?

Had they?

“You know this thing for a fact?” Demeris asked.

“For a fact I don’t know shit,” the boy said. “I never see her before, not that I can say. She come around and she wants us to put her up for the night, that’s OK. We put her up. We don’t care what she is if she can pay the price. But anybody with any sense, he can smell Spook. That’s all I tell you. You do whatever you fucking like, man.”

The boy strolled away.

Demeris stared after him, shaking his head. He felt bewilderment and shock, as though he had abruptly found himself looking over the edge of an abyss.

But why would the boy make up something like that? He had no reason for it. And maybe the kid could tell. They wouldn’t need any witch charms to tell them. They had had 150 years to get used to being around Spooks. They’d know the smell of them by now.

The more Demeris thought about it, the more uneasy he got.

He needed to talk to Jill again.

He found her a little way upstream from his shack, rubbing down the shaggy yellow flanks of her elephantine pack animal with a rough sponge. Demeris halted a short distance away and studied her, trying to see her as an alien being, searching for some clue to otherworldly origin, some gleam of Spookness showing through her human appearance.

He couldn’t see it. Not at all.

After a moment she noticed him. “You ready to go?” she asked over her shoulder.

“I’m not sure.”

“What?”

If she is a Spook, he thought, why would she want to pretend she was human? What would a Spook have to gain by inveigling a human into the desert?

He drew a deep breath. “Listen, I’ve changed my mind, OK? I think I’d just as soon travel by myself.”

She turned and gave him a startled look. “You serious?”

“Yep.”

“You really want to walk all the way to Spook City rather than ride with me?”

“Yep. That’s what I prefer to do.”

“Jesus Christ. What the hell for?”

Demeris could detect nothing at all inhuman in her exasperated tone or in the expression on her face. Uncomfortably he said, “Just the way I am, I guess. I like to go my own way, I guess, and—”

“Bullshit. I know what’s really going on in your head.”

Demeris shifted about uneasily and remained silent. He wished he had never become entangled with her in the first place.

Angrily she said, “Somebody’s been talking to you, right? Telling you a lot of garbage?”

“Well…”

“All right,” she said. “You dumb bastard. You want to test me, is that it?”

“Test?”

“With a witch charm.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not carrying any charms. Those things aren’t worth a damn.”

“Some are, some aren’t.” She reached into a saddlepack and pulled out a small device, wires and black cords intricately wound around and around each another. “Here,” she said harshly. “This is one. Push the button and it emits a red glow if you point it at a Spook. Use it to check out the next woman you meet.”

She tossed the little gadget toward him. Demeris grabbed it out of the air by reflex and stood watching helplessly as she slapped the elephant-camel’s flank to spur it into motion and started off downstream toward her tent.

Shit, he thought.

He felt like six kinds of idiot. The sound of her voice, tingling with contempt for him and his petty little suspicions, echoed in his ears.

Baffled and annoyed—with her, with himself, with the boy—he flipped the witch charm into the stream. The water hissed and bubbled for a moment and then the thing sank out of sight. He turned and walked back to his shack.

She had already begun to take down her tent. She didn’t so much as glance at him. But the elephant-camel peered somberly around, extended its long purple lower lip and gave him a sardonic toothy smirk. Demeris glared at the great beast and made a devil sign with his upraised fingers. From you, I don’t have to take any crap, he thought.

He hoisted his pack and started up the steep trail out of town.

He was somewhere along the old boundary between New Mexico and Texas, he figured, probably just barely on the New Mexico side of the line. Spook Land was roughly triangular, running from the Great Lakes to Montana along the Canadian border and tapering southward through what had been Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa down to Texas and Louisiana, but it included a piece of eastern New Mexico, too. Demeris had learned all that in school long ago. They made you study the map of the United States that once had been, so you wouldn’t forget the past, they said, because some day the old United States was going to rise again.

Fat chance. The Spooks had cut the heart right out of the country. They took over with scarcely a struggle, and every attempt at counterattack had been brushed aside with astonishing ease: America’s weapons had been neutralized, its communications networks silenced. Its army of liberation had disappeared into the Occupied Zone like raindrops into a lake. Now there was not one United States but two: the western one, which ran from Washington State and Idaho down to the Mexican border and liked to call itself Free Country, and the other one in the east, along the coast and inland as far as the Mississippi, which still insisted on using the old formal name. Between the two lay the Occupied Zone, and nobody in either United States had much knowledge of what went on in there. Nor did anyone Demeris knew take the notion of a reunited United States very seriously. Much of its technical capacity had eroded and great chunks of the country had reverted to a preindustrial condition.

What he had to do, he calculated, was keep heading more or less easterly until he saw indications of Spook presence. Right now, though, the country was pretty empty, just barren sandy waste with a covering of mesquite and sage. He saw more places where the aliens had indulged in their weird remodeling of the landscape, and now and again he was able to make out the traces of some little ancient human town, a couple of rusty signs or a few crumbling walls. But mainly there was nothing.

He was about an hour and a half beyond the village when what looked like a squadron of airborne snakes came by, a dozen of them flying in close formation. Then the sky turned heavy and purplish-yellow, like rotting bruised fruit, and three immense creatures with shining red scales and sail-like three-cornered fleshy wings passed overhead, emitting bursts of green gas that had the rank smell of old wet straw. They were almost like dragons. A dozen more of the snake things followed them. Demeris scowled and waved a clenched fist at them. The air had a tangible pressure. He waited to see what was coming next. But then, magically, all the ominous effects cleared away and he was in the familiar Southwest again, untouched by strangers from the far stars, back in the good old land of dry ravines and big sky that he had lived in all his life. He relaxed, but only a little.

Almost at once he heard a familiar snorting sound behind him. He turned and saw the ponderous yellow form of the elephant-camel looming up, with Jill sitting astride it just back of the front hump.

She leaned down and said, “You change your mind yet about wanting that ride?”

“I thought you were sore at me.”

“I am. Was. But it still seems crazy for you to be doing this on foot when I’ve got room up here for you.”

He stared up at her. You don’t often get second chances in this life, he told himself.

“Oh, Christ,” she said, as he hesitated. “Do you want a ride or don’t you?”

He remained silent.

She shot him a quick wicked grin. “Still worried that I’m a Spook? You can check me out.”

“I threw your gadget into the stream. I don’t like witch things around.”

“Well, that’s all right.” She laughed. “It wasn’t a charm at all, just an old power core, and a worn-out one at that. It wouldn’t have told you anything.”

“What’s a power core?”

“Spook stuff. You could have taken it back with you to prove you were over here. Look, do you want a ride or not?”

It seemed ridiculous to turn her down again.

“What the hell,” Demeris said. “Sure.”

Jill spoke to the animal in what he took to be Spook language, a hiccuping wheeze and a long indrawn whistling sound, and it knelt for him. Demeris took her hand and she drew him on top of the beast with surprising ease. An open-work construction made of loosely woven cord, half poncho and half saddle, lay across the creature’s broad back, with the three humps jutting through. Her tent and other possessions were fastened to it at the rear. “Tie your pack to one of those dangling strings,” she said. “You can ride right behind me.”

He fitted himself into the valley between the second and third humps and got a secure hold on the weaving, his fingers digging deep into it. She whistled another command and the animal began to move forward.

Its motion was a rolling, thumping, sliding kind of thing, very hard to take. The sway was both lateral and vertical and with every step the ground seemed to rise and plunge around them in lunatic lunges. Demeris had never seen the ocean or any other large body of water, but he had heard about seasickness and this was what he imagined it was like. He gulped, clamped his mouth shut, gripped the saddle even more tightly.

Jill called back to him, “How are you doing?”

“Fine. Fine.”

“Takes some getting used to, huh?”

“Some,” he said.

His buttocks didn’t have much padding on them. He could feel the vast bones of the elephant-camel grinding beneath him like the pistons of some giant machine. He held on tight and dug his heels in as hard as he could.

“You see those delta-winged things go by a little while ago?” she asked.

“The big dragons that were giving off the green smoke?”

“Right. Herders is what they are. On their way to Spook City for the hunt. They’ll be used to drive the game toward the killing grounds. Every year this time they get brought in to help in the roundup.”

“And the flying snakes?”

“They herd the herders. Herders aren’t very smart. They’re about like dogs, maybe. The snake guys are a lot brighter. The snakes tell the herders where to go and the herders make the game animals go there, too.”

Demeris thought about that. Level upon level of intelligence among these creatures that the Spooks had transported to the planet they had partly conquered. If the herders were as smart as dogs, he wondered how smart the snakes were. Dogs were pretty smart. He wondered how smart the Spooks were, for that matter.

“What’s the hunt all about? Why do they do it?”

“For fun,” Jill said. “Spook fun.”

“Herding thousands of exotic wild animals together and butchering them so the blood runs deep enough to swim through? That’s their idea of fun?”

“Wait and see,” she said.

They saw more and more transformation of the landscape: whorls and loops of dazzling fire, great opaque spheres floating just above ground level, silvery blades revolving in the air. Demeris glowered. All that strangeness made him feel vulnerable and out of place, and he spat and murmured bitterly at each intrusive wonder.

“Why are you so angry?” she asked.

“I hate this weird shit that they’ve strewn all over the place. I hate what they did to our country.”

“It was a long time ago. And it wasn’t your country they did it to, it was your great-great-grandfather’s.”

“Even so.”

“Your country is over there. It wasn’t touched at all.”

“Even so,” he said again, and spat.

When it was still well before dark, they came to a place where bright yellow outcroppings of sulfur, like foamy stone pillows, marked the site of a spring. Jill gave the command to make her beast kneel and hopped deftly to the ground. Demeris got off more warily, feeling the pain in his thighs and butt from his ride.

“Help me with the tent,” she said.

It wasn’t like any tent he had ever seen. The center post was nothing more than a little rod that seemed to be made of white wax, but at the touch of a hand it tripled in height and an elaborate strutwork sprang out from it in five directions to provide support for the tent fabric. The tent pegs were made of the same waxy material, and all you had to do was position them around the perimeter of the tent and they burrowed into the ground on their own.

Together they gathered mesquite brush and built a fire, and she produced some packets of powdered vegetables and a slab of dried meat for their dinner. While they waited for these to boil up, Jill went back to the spring, which despite the sulfurous outcroppings gave fresh, pure water, and crouched by it, stripping to the waist to wash herself. Seeing her like that was unsettling. He flicked a quick glance at her as she bathed, but she didn’t seem to care or even to notice. That was unsettling, too. Was she being deliberately provocative? Or did she just not give a damn?

He also washed himself, splashing handfuls of the cold water onto his face and over his sweaty shoulders. “Dinner’s ready,” she said a few minutes later.

Darkness descended swiftly. The sky went from deep blue to utter black in minutes. In the clear desert air, the stars began quickly to emerge, sharp and bright and unflickering. He looked up, trying to guess which star might be the home of the Spooks.

As they ate, he asked her whether she made this trip often. “Often enough,” she said. “I do a lot of courier work for my father, out to Texas, Louisiana, sometimes Oklahoma.” She paused a moment. “I’m Ben Gorton’s daughter,” she said as though she expected him to recognize the name.

“Sorry. Who?”

“Ben Gorton. The mayor of Spook City, actually.”

“Spook City’s got a human mayor?”

“The human part of it does.”

“Ah,” Demeris said. “I’m honored, then. The boss’s daughter. You should have told me before.”

“It didn’t seem important,” she said.

They were done with their meal. She moved efficiently around the campsite, gathering utensils, burying trash. When the cleanup was done, she lifted the tent flap and stepped halfway inside. He held back, unsure of the right move. “Well?” she asked. “It’s OK to come in. Or would you rather sleep out there?”

Demeris went in. Although the temperature outside was plunging with the onset of night, it was pleasantly warm inside. There was a single bedroll, just barely big enough for two if they didn’t mind sleeping very close together. He heard the sounds she made as she undressed and he tried in the absolute darkness to guess how much she was taking off. It wasn’t easy to tell. He removed his own shirt and hesitated with his jeans; but then she opened the flap again to call out something to the elephant-camel, which she had tethered just outside, and by starlight he caught a flashing glimpse of bare thigh, bare buttock. He pulled off his jeans and slipped into the bedroll. She joined him a moment later. He lay awkwardly, trying to avoid rubbing up against her. For a time there was a tense expectant silence. Then her hand reached out in the darkness and grazed his shoulder, lightly but clearly not accidentally. Demeris didn’t need a second hint. He had never taken any vows of chastity. He reached for her, found the hollow of her clavicle, trailed his hand downward until he was cupping a small, cool breast, resilient and firm. When he ran his thumb lightly across the nipple, she made a purring sound, and he felt the flesh quickly hardening. As was his. She turned to him. Demeris had some difficulty locating her mouth in the darkness, and she had to guide him, chuckling, but when his lips met hers, he felt the immediate flicker of her tongue coming forth to greet him.

And then almost as though he were willing his own downfall, he found himself perversely wondering if he might be embracing a Spook after all; and a wave of nausea swept through him, making him wobble and soften. But she was pressing tight against him, rubbing her breasts from side to side on him, uttering small eager murmuring sounds, and he got himself quickly back on track, losing himself in her fragrance and warmth and banishing completely from his thoughts anything but the sensations of the moment. After that one attack of doubt, everything was easy. He located her long smooth thighs with no problem whatever, and when he glided into her, he needed no guidance there either, and though their movements together had the usual first-time clumsiness, her hot gusts of breath against his shoulder and her soft sharp outcries told him that all was going well.

He lay awake for a time when it was over, listening to the occasional far-off cry of some desert creature. He imagined he could hear the heavy snuffling breathing of the elephant-camel, too, like a huge recirculating device just outside the tent. Jill had curled up against him as if they were old friends and was lost in sleep.

She said out of the blue, after they had been riding in silence the following morning, “Ever been married, Nick?”

The incongruity of the question startled him. Until a moment ago she had seemed to be a million miles away. His attempt to make love to her a second time at dawn had been met with indifference and she had been pure business, remote and cool, all during the job of breaking camp and getting on the road.

“No,” he said. “You?”

“Hasn’t been on my program,” she said. “But I thought everybody in Free Country got married. Nice normal people who settled down and raised big families.” The elephant-camel swayed and bumped beneath them. They were following a wide dirt track festooned on both sides with glittering strands of what looked like clear jelly, hundreds of feet long, mounted on spiny black poles that seemed to be sprouting like saplings from the ground.

“I raised a big family,” he said. “My brothers and sisters. Dad got killed in a hunting accident when I was ten. Possibly got mixed up with a Spook animal that was on the wrong side of the line. Nobody could quite figure it out. Then my mother came down with Blue Fever. I was fifteen then with five brothers and sisters to look after. Didn’t leave me a lot of time to think about finding a wife.”

“Blue Fever?”

“Don’t you know what that is? Infectious disease. Kills you in three days, no hope at all. Supposed to be something the Spooks brought.”

“We don’t have it over here,” she said. “Not that I ever heard.”

“Spooks brought it, I guess they must know how to cure it. We aren’t that lucky. Anyway, there were all these little kids to look after. Of course, they’re grown now.”

“But you still look after them. Coming over here to try to track down your brother.”

“Somebody has to.”

“What if he doesn’t want to be tracked down?”

Demeris felt a tremor of alarm. “Have you any reason to think that?”

“I didn’t say I did. But he might just prefer not to be found. A lot of boys come across and stay across, you know.”

“I didn’t know. Nobody I ever heard of did that. Why would someone want to live on the Spook side?”

“For the excitement?” she suggested. “To run with the Spooks? To play their games? To hunt their animals? There’s all sorts of mingling these days.”

“Is that so,” he asked uneasily. He stared at the back of her head. She was so damned odd, he thought, such a fucking mystery.

She said, sounding very far away, “I wonder about marrying.” Back to that again. “What it’s like, waking up next to the same person every day, day after day. Sharing your life, year after year. It sounds very beautiful. But also kind of strange. It isn’t easy for me to imagine what it might be like.”

“Don’t they have marriage in Spook City?”

“Not really. Not the way you people do.”

“Well, why don’t you try it and see? You don’t like it, you can get out of it. Nobody I know thinks being married is any way strange. Christ, I bet whatever the Spooks do is five hundred times as strange, and they probably think it’s the most normal thing in the world.”

“Spooks don’t marry. They don’t even have sex, really. What I hear, it’s more like how fish do it, no direct contact.”

“That sounds terrifically appealing. I’d really love that. And a cute Spook to try it with.” He attempted to keep it light. But she glanced around at him.

“Still suspicious, Nick?”

He let that go by. “Listen, you could always take a fling at getting married for a while, couldn’t you?” he said. “If you’re all that curious.”

“Is that an offer, Nick?”

“No,” he said. “Hardly. It was just a suggestion.”

At midday they stopped for lunch in a cottonwood grove that the Spooks had redecorated with huge crystalline mushroom-shaped things. The elephant-camel munched on one and seemed to enjoy it, but Demeris and Jill left them alone. There was a brackish stream running through the trees, and once again she stripped and cleaned herself. Bathing seemed very important to her and she had no self-consciousness about her nudity. He watched her with cool pleasure from the bank.

Once in a while during the long hours of the ride, she would break the silence with a quirky sort of question: “What do people like to do at night in Free Country?” or “Are men closer friends with men than women are with women?” or “Have you ever wished you were someone else?” He gave the best answers he could. She was a strange, unpredictable kind of woman, but he was fascinated by the quick darting movements of her mind, so different from that of anyone he knew in Albuquerque. Of course he dealt mainly with ranchers and farmers, and she was a mayor’s daughter. And a native of the Occupied Zone besides: no reason why she should be remotely like the people he knew.

They came to places that had been almost incomprehensibly transformed by the aliens. There was an abandoned one-street town that looked as though it had been turned to glass, everything eerily translucent—buildings, furniture, plumbing fixtures. If there had been any people still living there, you most likely could see right through them, too, Demeris supposed. Then came a sandy tract where a row of decayed rusting automobiles had been arranged in an overlapping series, the front of each humped up on the rear end of the one in front of it, like a string of mating horses. Demeris stared at the automobiles as though they were ghosts ready to return to life. He had never actually seen one in use. The whole technology of internal-combustion devices had dropped away before he was born, at least in his part of Free Country, though he had heard they still had cars of some sort in certain privileged enclaves of California.

After the row of cars there was a site where old appliances—sinks and toilets and chairs and fragments of things Demeris wasn’t able even to identify—had been fused together to form a dozen perfect pyramids 50 or 60 feet in height. It was like a museum of antiquity. By now Demeris was growing numb to the effects of Spook meddling. It was impossible to sustain anger indefinitely when evidence of the alien presence was such a constant impingement.

There were more traces now of the aliens’ living presence, too: glows on the horizon, mysterious whizzing sounds far overhead that Jill said were airborne traffic, shining roadways through the desert parallel to the unpaved track they were following. Demeris expected to see Spooks riding by next, but there was no sign of that. He wondered what they were like. “Like ghosts,” Bud had said. “Long, shining ghosts, but solid.” That didn’t help.

When they camped that night, Demeris entered the tent with Jill without hesitation and waited only a moment or two after lying down to reach for her. Her reaction was noncommittal. But then he heard a sort of purring sound and she turned to him, open and ready. There had been nothing remotely like affection between them all afternoon, but now she generated sudden passion out of nothing at all, pulling it up like water from a well; and he rode with her swiftly and expertly toward sweaty, noisy climaxes. He rested and went back to her a second time, but she said simply, “No. Let’s sleep now,” and turned her back to him. A very strange woman, he thought. He lay awake for awhile, listening to the rhythm of her breathing just to see if she was asleep, thinking he might nuzzle up to her anyway if she was still conscious and seemed at all receptive. He couldn’t tell. She was motionless, limp—for all he knew, dead. Her breathing was virtually imperceptible. After a time Demeris rolled away. He dreamed of a bright sky streaked with crimson fire and of dragons flying in formations out of the south.

Now they were distinctly nearing Spook City. Instead of following along a dusty unpaved trail, they had moved onto an actual road, perhaps some old United States of America highway that the aliens had jazzed up by giving it an internal glow, a cool throbbing green luminance rising in eddying waves from a point deep underground. Other travelers joined them here, some riding wagons drawn by alien beasts of burden, a few floating along on flatbed vehicles with no apparent means of propulsion. The travelers all seemed to be human.

“How do Spooks get around?” Demeris asked.

“Any way they like,” said Jill.

A corroded highway sign that looked five thousand years old announced that they had reached a town called Dimmitt. There wasn’t any town there, only a sort of checkpoint of light like a benign version of the border barrier: a cheerful shimmering sheen, a dazzling moiré pattern dancing in the air. One by one the wagons and flatbeds and carts passed through it and disappeared. “It’s the hunt perimeter,” Jill explained while they were waiting for their turn to go through. “Like a big pen around Spook City, miles in diameter, to keep the animals in. They won’t cross the line. It scares them.”

He felt no effect at all as they crossed it. On the other side she told him that she had some formalities to take care of and walked off toward a battered shed 100 feet from the road. Demeris waited for her beside the elephant-camel.

A grizzled-looking weather-beaten man of about 50 came limping up and grinned at him.

“Jack Lawson,” he announced. He put out his hand. “On my way back from my daughter’s wedding, Oklahoma City.”

“Nick Demeris.”

“Interesting traveling companion you got, Nick. What’s it like, traveling with one of those?”

“One of what?” Demeris said.

Lawson winked. “Come on, friend. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Your pal’s a Spook, friend. Surely you aren’t going to try to make me believe she’s anything else.”

“Friend, my ass. And she’s as human as you or me.”

“Right.”

“Believe me,” Demeris said flatly. “I know. I’ve checked her out at very close range.”

Lawson’s eyebrows rose a little. “That’s what I figured. I’ve heard there are men who go in for that. Some women, too.”

“Shit,” Demeris said, feeling himself beginning to heat up. He didn’t have the time or the inclination for a fight, and Lawson looked twice his age. As calmly as he could he said, “You’re fucking wrong. You don’t know shit about her.”

“I know one when I see one.”

“And I know an asshole when I see one,” said Demeris.

“Easy, friend. Easy. I see I’m mistaken, that you simply don’t understand what’s going on. OK. A thousand pardons, friend. Ten thousand.” Lawson gave him a smarmy smile, a courtly bow and started to move away.

“Wait,” Demeris said. “You really think she’s a Spook?”

“Bet your ass I do.”

“Prove it, then.”

“Don’t have any proof. Just intuition.”

“Intuition’s not worth much where I come from.”

“Sometimes you can just tell. There’s something about her. I don’t know. I can’t put it into words.”

“My father used to say that if you can’t put something into words, that’s on account of you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lawson laughed. It was that same patronizing I-know-better-than-you laugh that the kid in the village had given him. Anger welled up again in Demeris and it was all he could do to keep from swinging at the man.

But just then Jill returned. She looked human as hell as she came walking up, swinging her hips. Lawson tipped his hat to her with exaggerated courtesy and went sauntering back to his wagon.

“Ready?” Demeris asked her.

“All set.” She glanced at him. “You OK, Nick?”

“Sure.”

“What was that fellow saying to you?”

“Telling me about his daughter’s wedding in Oklahoma.”

He clambered up, taking his position behind the middle hump.

His anger gradually subsided. They all knew so much, these Occupied Zone people. Or thought they did. Always trying to get one up on the greenhorn from Free Country, giving you their knowledgeable looks, hitting you with their sly insinuations.

Some rational part of him told him that if two people over here had said the same thing about Jill, it might just be true. A fair chance of it, in fact. Well, fuck it. She looked human, she smelled human, she felt human when he ran his hands over her body. That was good enough for him. He had held his mouth to hers; he had been inside her body; he had given himself to her in the most intimate way. There was no way he could let himself believe that he had been embracing something from another planet.

And then he felt a sudden stab of wild, almost intoxicating temptation: the paradoxical hope that she was a Spook after all, that by embracing her he had done something extraordinary and outrageous. A true crossing of borders, his youth restored. He was amazed. It was a stunning moment, a glimpse of what it might be like to step outside the prison of his soul. But it passed quickly and he was his old sober self again. She is human, he told himself stolidly. Human.

A little closer in, he saw one of the pens where the hunt animals were being kept. It was like a sheet of lightning rising from the ground, but lightning that stayed and stayed. Behind it Demeris thought he could make out huge dark moving shapes. Nothing was clear, and after a few moments of staring at that fluid rippling wall of light, he started to feel the way he had felt when he was first pushing through the border barrier.

“What kind of things do they have in there?” he asked her.

“Everything,” she said. “Wait and see when they turn them loose.”

“When is that?”

“Couple of days from now.” She swung around and pointed. “Look there, Nick. There’s Spook City.”

In the valley below lay a fair-sized sprawling town, not as big as he had expected, a mongrel place made up in part of little boxy houses and in part of tall, tapering, flickering constructions that didn’t seem to be of material substance at all, ghost-towers, fairy castles, houses fit for Spooks. The sight of them gave him a jolt, the way everything was mixed together, human and non. A low line of the same immaterial stuff ran around the edge of the city like a miniature border, but softer in hue and dancing like little swamp fires.

“I don’t see any Spooks,” he said to her.

“You want to see a Spook? There’s a Spook for you.”

An alien fluttered up into view right then and there, as though she had conjured it out of empty air. Demeris, caught unprepared, muttered a whispered curse and his fingers moved with desperate urgency through the patterns of protection signs that his mother had taught him more than 20 years before and that he had never had occasion to use. The Spook was incorporeal, elegant, almost blindingly beautiful: a sleek cone of translucence, a node of darkness limned by a dancing core of light. He had expected them to be frightening, not beautiful. But this one, at least, was frightening in its beauty. Then a second one appeared, and it was nothing like the first except that it, too, had no solidity. It was flat below and almost formless higher up and drifted above the ground atop a pool of its own luminescence. The first one vanished; the second one revolved and seemed to spawn three more, and then it, too, was gone; the newest three, which had S-shaped curves and shining blue eye-like features at their upper tips, twined themselves together almost coquettishly and coalesced into a single fleshy spheroid crisscrossed by radiant purple lines. The spheroid folded itself across its own equator, taking on a half-moon configuration, and slipped downward into the earth.

Demeris shivered.

Spooks, yes. Well named. Dream beings. No wonder there had been no way of defeating them. How could you touch them? How could you injure them in any way when they mutated and melted and vanished while you were looking at them? It wasn’t fair, creatures like that coming to this world and taking a big chunk of it the way they had, simply grabbing, not even bothering to explain why, just moving in, knowing that they were too powerful to be opposed. All his hatred of them sprang into new life. And yet they were beautiful, almost godlike.

He and Jill rode into town without speaking. There was a sweet tingle when they went through the wall of dancing light, and then they were inside.

“Here we are,” Jill said. “Spook City. I’ll show you a place where you can stay.”

The city’s streets were unpaved—the Spooks wouldn’t need sidewalks—and most of the human-style buildings had windows of some kind of semiclear oiled cloth instead of glass. The buildings themselves were set down without much regard for order and logic. Sometimes there was a gap between them from which a tall Spook structure sprouted like nightmare fungus, but mainly the Spook sectors and the human sectors of the city were separate, however it had seemed when he had been looking down from the hill. All manner of flying creatures that had been gathered for the hunt were in busy circulation overhead: the delta-winged herders, the flying snakes, a whole host of weirdities traversing the air with such demonic intensity that it seemed to sizzle as they passed through it.

Jill conveyed him to a hotel of sorts made out of crudely squared logs held together clumsily by pegs, a gigantic ramshackle three-story cabin that looked as if it had been designed by people who were inventing architecture, and left him at the door. “I’ll see you later,” she told him when he had jumped down. “I’ve got some business to tend to.”

“Wait,” he said. “How am I going to find you when—”

Too late. The elephant-camel had already made a massive about-face and was ambling away.

Demeris stood looking after her, feeling puzzled and a little hurt. But he had begun to grow accustomed to her brusqueness and her arbitrary shifts by now. Very likely she’d turn up again in a day or two, he told himself. Meanwhile, though, he was on his own, just when he had started to count on her help.

He shrugged and went inside.

The place had the same jerry-built look within: a long, dark entry hall, exposed rafters, crazily leaning walls. To the left, from behind a tattered curtain of red gauze, came the sounds of barroom chatter and clinking glasses. On the right was a cubicle with a pale, owlish-looking heavyset woman peering out of a lopsided opening.

“I need a room,” Demeris told her.

“Got one left. Busy time on account of the hunt. It’s five labor units a night, room and board and a drink or two.”

“Labor units?”

“We don’t take Free Country money here, chumbo. An hour cleaning out the shithouse, that’s one labor unit. Two hours swabbing grease in the kitchen, that’s one. Don’t worry, we’ll find things for you to do. You staying thirty days?”

“I’m not on an entrada,” Demeris said. “I’m here to find my brother.” Then, with a sudden rush of hope: “Maybe you’ve seen him. Looks a lot like me, shorter, around eighteen. Tom Demeris.”

“Nobody here by that name,” she said and shoved a square metal key toward him. “Second floor, left, one-oh-three.”

The room was small, squalid, dim. A strangely shaped lamp sat on the crooked table next to the bare cot that would be his bed. It turned on when he touched it and an eerie tapering glow rose from it like a tiny Spook.

Downstairs, he found four men and a woman in the bar. They gave him only the quickest of glances.

“Whiskey,” Demeris told the bartender.

“We got Shagback, Billyhow, Donovan and Thread.”

“Donovan,” he said at random. The stuff was inky dark, vaguely sour-smelling, strong. Demeris felt it hit bottom like a fishhook. The others were looking at him with more interest now. He turned to them.

“How do you like the whiskey?” the woman asked him.

“It’s different from what I’m accustomed to. But not bad.” He fought back his anger. “I’m looking for my kid brother. Tom Demeris is his name.”

“Tom what?” one of the men said.

“Demeris. We’re from Albuquerque.”

They began to laugh. “Abblecricky,” the woman said.

“Dabblecricky,” said another men.

Demeris looked coldly from one face to another. “Albuquerque,” he said with great precision. “It used to be a big city in New Mexico. My brother was on his entrada, only he didn’t come back. Not quite as tall as I am, heavier set, longer hair than mine.”

The woman rolled her eyes and shrugged, and one of the men gestured to the bartender for another round.

“You want one, too?” the bartender asked Demeris.

“A different kind this time.”

It wasn’t any better. He sipped it morosely. A few moments later the others began to file out of the room. “Abblekirky,” the woman said as she went past Demeris, and laughed again.

He spent a troubled night. The room was musty and dank and made him feel claustrophobic. Sounds came from outside, grinding noises, screeches, strange honkings. When he turned the lamp off, the darkness was absolute and ominous, and when he turned it on, the light bothered him. He lay stiffly, waiting watchfully for sleep to take him, and when it failed to arrive, he rose and pulled the oilcloth window cover aside to stare into the night. Attenuated streaks of brightness were floating through the air, ghostly will-o’-the-wisp glowings, and by that faint illumination he saw huge winged things pumping stolidly across the sky, great dragons no more graceful than flying oxen, while in the road below the building, three flickering columns of light that surely were Spooks went past, driving a herd of lean little square-headed monsters as though they were sheep.

In the morning, after the grudging breakfast of stale bread and some coffee-like beverage with an undertaste of barley that the hotel bar provided, he went out into Spook City to look for Tom. But where was he supposed to begin?

It was a chaotic town. The unpaved streets went squiggling off in all directions, no two of them parallel. Wagons and flatbeds of the kind he had seen at the perimeter checkpoint, some of them ornate and bizarre, swept by constantly, stirring up whirlwinds of gray dust. Ethereal shimmering Spooks drifted in and among them, ignoring the perils of the busy traffic as though they were operating on some other plane of existence, which very likely they were. There was a great bleating of horns and everyone moved to the side of the street to allow a parade of menacing-looking beasts to pass through, a dozen green-scaled things like dinosaurs with high-stepping big-taloned feet or a procession of elephant-camels linked trunk to tail or a string of long slithery serpentine creatures moving on scores of powerful stubby legs.

Demeris felt a curious numbness coming over him as one enormity after another presented itself to his eyes. These few days across the border were changing him, creating a dreamy tolerance in him. He had absorbed all the new alien sights and experiences he could and he was overloaded now, no room left for reactions of surprise or fear or even of loathing. The crazy superabundance of strangeness in Spook City was quickly starting to appear normal. Albuquerque in all its somnolent ordinariness now seemed to him like a static vision, a mere photograph of a city.

There was still the problem of Tom, though. Demeris walked for hours and found no clue, no starting place: no building marked Police Station or City Hall or Questions Answered Here. What he really hoped to come upon was someone who was recognizably a native of Free Country, someone who could give him an inkling of how to go about tracing his brother through the network of kids making entradas that must exist on this side. But he saw no one like that, either. Where the hell was Jill? She was his only ally and she had left him to cope with this lunacy all by himself, abandoning him as abruptly as she had picked him up in the first place.

But she, at least, could be located. She was the mayor’s daughter, after all.

He entered a dark, squalid building that seemed to be some sort of shop. A small hunched-looking woman who could have been made of old leather gave him a surly look from behind a warped counter. He met it with the best smile he could manage and said to her, “I’m new in town and I’m trying to find Jill Gorton, Ben Gorton’s daughter. She’s a friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“Jill Gorton? Ben Gorton’s—”

She shook her head curtly. “Don’t know anybody by that name.”

“Ben Gorton, then. Where can he be found?”

“Wherever he might happen to be,” she said. “How would I know?” And then she slammed shut on him like a trapdoor. He peered at her in astonishment. She had turned away from him and was moving things behind her counter as though no one were there.

“Doesn’t he have an office?” Demeris asked. “Some kind of headquarters?”

No response. She got up, standing in the shadows, ignoring him.

“I’m talking to you,” Demeris said.

She might just as well have been deaf. He quivered with frustration. It was midday and he had had practically nothing to eat since yesterday afternoon, and he hadn’t accomplished anything all this day and it had started to dawn on him that he had no idea how he was going to find his way back to his hotel through the maze of the city—he didn’t even know its name or address, and the streets bore no signs anyway—and now this old bitch was pretending he was invisible. Furiously he said, “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you people? Haven’t you ever heard of common courtesy here? Have the fucking Spooks drained everything that’s human out of you all? All I want to know is how to find the goddamned mayor. Can’t you tell me that one little thing? Can’t you?”

Instead of answering him, she looked back over her shoulder and made a sound in Spook language, a wheezing whistling noise, the kind of sound that Jill might have directed to her elephant-camel. Almost instantly a tall flat-faced man of about 30 with the same sort of dark leathery skin as hers came out of a back room and gave Demeris a black, threatening stare.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing yelling at my mother?”

“Look,” Demeris said, “I just asked her for a little help, that’s all.” He was still churning with rage. “I need to find the mayor. I’m a friend of his daughter Jill’s, and she’s supposed to help me track down my brother Tom, who came across from Free Country a few months ago, and I don’t know one goddamned building from the next in this town, so I stopped in here hoping she could give me some directions and instead—”

“You yelled at her. You cursed at her.”

“Yeah. Maybe so. But if you people don’t have any decency, why the hell should I? All I want to know—”

“You cursed at my mother.”

“Yeah,” Demeris said. “Yeah, I did.” It was all too much. He was tired and hungry and far from home and the streets were full of monsters and nobody would give him the time of day here and he was sick of it. He had no idea who moved first, but suddenly they were both on the same side of the counter and swinging, butting heads and pummeling each other’s chests and trying to slam each other against the wall. The other man was bigger and heavier, but Demeris was angrier. He got his hands to the man’s throat and started to squeeze. Dimly he was aware of sounds all around him, doors closing, rapid footsteps, people shouting, a thick incoherent babble. Then someone’s arm was bent around his chin and throat, and hands were clamped on his wrists and he was being pulled to the floor, kicking as he went and struggling to reach the knife at his waist. The confusion grew worse after that: He had no idea how many of them there were, but they were sitting on him, they were holding his arms, they were dragging him out into the daylight. He thought he saw a Spook hovering in the air above him, but perhaps he was wrong about that. There was too much light everywhere around. Nothing was clear.

“Listen,” he said, “The only thing I want is—” And they hit him in the mouth and kicked him in the side, and there was some raucous laughter and he heard them speaking in the Spook language; and then he came to understand that he was in a wagon, a cart, a moving contrivance. His hands and feet were tied. A flushed sweaty face looked down at him, grinning.

“Where are you taking me?” Demeris asked.

“To Ben Gorton. That’s who you wanted to see, isn’t it? Ben Gorton, right?”

He was in a basement room somewhere, windowless, lit by three of the little Spook lamps. It was the next day, he supposed. They had given him a little to eat, some sort of bean mush. He was still bound, but two men were holding him anyway.

“Untie him,” someone said.

It had to be Gorton. He was around six foot seven, wide as a slab, with a big bald head and a great beaky nose, and everything about him spoke of power and authority. Demeris rubbed his wrists where the cord had chafed them and said, “I wasn’t interested in a fight. That’s not the sort of person I am. But sometimes when it builds up, and you can’t stand it anymore—”

“Right. You damn near killed Bobby Bridger, you know that? His eyes were bugging right out of his head. This is hunt season here, mister. The Spooks will be turning the critters loose any minute now and things are going to get real lively. It’s important for everybody to stay civil so things don’t get any more complicated than they usually are when the hunt’s going on.”

“If Bridger’s mother had been more civil to me, it would all have been a lot different,” Demeris said.

Gorton gave him a weary look. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

Taking a deep breath, Demeris said, “My name’s Nick Demeris and I live in Free Country, and I came over here to find my kid brother Tom, who seems to have gotten sidetracked coming back from his entrada.”

“Tom Demeris,” Gorton said, lifting his eyebrows.

“Yes. Then I met your daughter Jill at a town near the border, and she invited me to travel with her. But when we got to Spook City, she dropped me at some hotel and disappeared, so—”

“Wait a second,” said Gorton. His eyebrows went even higher. “My daughter Jill?”

“That’s right.”

“Shit,” the big man said. “I don’t have no fucking daughter.”

“No daughter?” asked Demeris.

“No daughter. None. Must have been some Spook playing games with you.”

The words fell on Demeris like stones. “Some Spook,” he repeated numbly. “Pretending to be your daughter. You mean that? For Christ’s sake, are you playing games with me, too?”

Something in Demeris’ tone seemed to register sympathetically with Gorton. He squinted, he blinked, he tugged at the tip of his great nose. He said in a much softer voice, “I’m not playing any games with you. I can’t say for sure that she was a Spook, but she sure as hell wasn’t my daughter because I don’t have any daughter. Spooks doing masks will tell you anything they damn please, though. Chances are, she was a Spook.”

“Doing masks?”

“Spooks going around playing at being human. It’s a big thing with them these days. The latest Spook fad.”

Demeris nodded. Doing masks, he thought. He considered it and it began to sink in, and sink and sink and sink.

Then quietly he said, “Maybe you can help me find my brother, at least.”

“No. I can’t do that and neither can anybody else. Tom Demeris, you said?”

“That’s right.”

Gorton glanced toward one of his men. “Mack, how long ago was it that the Demeris kid took the Spooks’ nickel?”

“Middle of July, I think.”

“Right.” To Demeris, Gorton said, “What we call ‘taking the Spooks’ nickel’ means selling yourself to them, do you know what I mean? You agree to go with them to their home planet. They’ve got a kind of plush country club for humans there where you live like a grand emperor for the rest of your life: comfort, luxury, women, anything you damn please. But the deal is that in return you belong to them forever, that they get to run psychological experiments on you to see what makes you tick, like a mouse in a cage. At least that’s what the Spooks tell us goes on there, and we might as well believe it. Nobody who’s sold himself to the Spooks has ever come back. I’m sorry, man. I wish it wasn’t so.”

Demeris looked away for a moment. He felt like smashing things but he held himself perfectly still. My brother, he thought, my baby brother.

“He was just a kid,” he said.

“Well, he must have been a damned unhappy kid. Nobody with his head screwed on right would take the nickel. Hardly anybody ever does.” Something flashed momentarily in Gorton’s eyes, and Demeris sensed that to these people, selling yourself to the Spooks was the ultimate surrender, the deepest sort of self-betrayal. Even here in the Occupied Zone there were levels of yielding to the alien conqueror, he realized, and in the eyes of Spook City people, the thing that Tom had done was the lowest level of all. He felt the weight of Gorton’s mingling of contempt for Tom and pity for himself, and tried to throw them back with a furious glare. Gorton watched him quietly, not reacting.

After a moment Demeris said, “All right. There’s nothing I can do, is there? I guess I’d better go back home.”

“You’d better go back to your hotel and wait until the hunt is over,” said Gorton. “It isn’t safe wandering around in the open while the critters are loose.”

“No,” said Demeris. “I suppose it isn’t.”

“Take him to wherever he’s staying, Mack,” Gorton said. He stared for a time at Demeris. The sorrow in his eyes seemed genuine. “I’m sorry,” Gorton said again. “I really am.”

Mack had no difficulty recognizing Demeris’ hotel from the description he gave, and took him to it in a floating wagon that made the trip in less than 15 minutes. The streets were practically empty now, no Spooks in sight and few humans, and those were moving quickly.

“You want to stay indoors while the hunt is going on,” Mack said. “A lot of idiots don’t, but some of them regret it. This is one event that ought to be left strictly to the Spooks.”

“How will I know when it starts?”

“You’ll know,” Mack said.

Demeris got out of the wagon. It turned immediately and headed away. He paused in front of the building, breathing deeply, feeling light-headed, thinking of Tom on the Spook planet, Tom living in a Spook palace, Tom on satin Spook sheets.

“Nick? Over here, Nick! It’s me!”

“Oh, Christ,” he said. Jill, coming up the street toward him, smiling as blithely as though this were Christmas Eve. He scanned her, searching for traces of some Spook gleam, some alien shimmer. When she reached him, she held out her arms to him as though expecting a hug. He stepped back just far enough to avoid her grasp.

In a flat, tight voice he said, “I found out about my brother. He’s gone off to the Spook world. Took their nickel.”

“Oh, Nick. Nick!”

“You knew, didn’t you? Everybody in this town must have known about the kid who came from Free Country and sold himself to the Spooks.” His tone turned icy. “It was your father the mayor that told me. He also told me that he doesn’t have any daughters.”

Her cheeks blazed with embarrassment. It was so human a reaction that he was cast into fresh confusion: How could a Spook learn to mimic a human even down to a blush? It didn’t seem possible. And it gave him new hope. She had lied to him about being Ben Gorton’s daughter, yes, God only knew why; but there was still the possibility that she was human, that she had chosen to put on a false identity but the body he saw was really her own.

If only it was so, he thought. His anger with her, his disdain, melted away in a flash. He wanted everything to be all right. He was rocked by a powerful rush of eagerness to be assured that the woman he had embraced those two nights in the desert was indeed a woman; and with it, astonishingly, came a new burst of desire for her.

“What he told me was that you were a Spook,” Demeris said in a guarded tone. He looked at her hopefully, waiting for her to deny it, praying for her to deny it, ready to accept her denial.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

It was like a gate slamming in his face.

Serenely she said, “Humans fascinate me. Their emotions, their reactions, their attitudes toward things. I’ve been studying them at close range for a hundred of your years and I still don’t know as much as I’d like to. And finally I thought, the only way I can make that final leap of understanding is to become one myself.”

“Doing masks,” Demeris said in a hollow voice. Looking at her he imagined he could see something cold and foreign peering out at him from behind her eyes, and it seemed to him that great chilly winds were sweeping through the empty caverns of his soul. He began to see now that somewhere deep within him he must have been making plans for a future that included this woman. He had wanted her so much that he had stubbornly refused to accept any of the evidence that had been given him. And now he had been given the one bit of evidence that was impossible to reject.

“Right,” she said. “Doing masks.”

He knew he should be feeling fury, or anguish, or something, at this final revelation that he had slept with a Spook. But he barely felt anything at all. He was like a stone. The Spooks are in charge here. We are their toys. All right.

“Taking human men as your lovers, too: that’s part of doing masks, isn’t it?” he asked. “Was my brother one of them?”

“No. I saw him only once or twice.”

He believed that. He believed everything she was saying, now.

She seemed about to say something else. But then suddenly a flare of lightning burst across the sky, a monstrous forking shaft of flame that looked as though it could split the world in two. It was followed not by thunder but by music, an immense alien chord that fell like an avalanche from the air and swelled up around them with oceanic force. The vault of the sky rippled with colors: red, orange, violet, green.

“What’s happening?” Demeris asked.

“The hunt is starting,” she said. “That’s the signal.”

Yes. In the wake of the lightning and the rippling colors came swarming throngs of airborne creatures, thousands of them, the delta-winged dragon-like herders and their snake-like pilots, turning the midday sky dark with their numbers, like a swarm of bees overhead, colossal ones whose wings made a terrible droning sound as they beat the air; and then Demeris heard gigantic roaring, bellowing sounds from nearby, as if monsters were approaching. There were no animals in the streets, not yet, but they couldn’t be very far away. Above him, Spooks by the dozens flickered in the air. Then he heard footsteps, and a pack of humans came running frantically toward them out of a narrow street, their eyes wild, their faces weirdly rigid. Did the Spooks hunt humans too? Demeris wondered. Or was one of the monsters chasing after them? The runners came sweeping down on him. “Get out of the way, man!” one of them cried. “Out of the way!”

Demeris stepped back, but not fast enough, and the runner on the inside smacked hard into his shoulder, spinning him around. For one startling moment Demeris found himself looking straight into the man’s eyes and saw something close to madness there, but no fear at all—only eagerness, impatience, excitement—and he realized that they must be running not from but to the hunt, that they were on their way to witness the crazy slaughter at close range or even to take part in it themselves, that they lived just as the Spooks did for this annual moment of apocalyptic frenzy.

Jill said, “It’ll be berserk here now for two or three days. You ought to be very careful if you go outdoors.”

“Yes. I will.”

“Listen,” she said, putting an edge on her voice to make it cut through the roar coming from overhead, “I’ve got a proposition for you, now that you know the truth.” She leaned close to him. “Let’s stay together, you and me. Despite all the problems. I like you, Nick.”

He peered at her, utterly astounded.

“I really think we can work something out,” she went on. Another horde of winged things shot by just above them, making raspy tearing sounds as they flailed the air, and a new gush of color stained the sky. “Seriously, Nick. We can stay in Spook City if you want to, but I don’t suppose you do. If you don’t, I’ll go back across the border with you and live with you in Free Country.”

“Are you crazy?” Demeris asked.

“No. Not in the least, I swear. Can you believe me? Can you?”

“I’ve got to go inside,” he said. He was trembling. “It isn’t smart to be standing out here while the hunt is going on.”

“What do you say, Nick? Answer.”

“It isn’t possible for us to be together. You know it isn’t.”

“You want to. Some part of you does.”

“Maybe so,” he said, amazed at what he was saying, but unable to deny it despite himself. “One fraction of me. But it isn’t possible, all the same. I don’t want to live here among the Spooks, and if I take you back with me, some bastard with a sharp nose will sniff you out sooner or later. I’m not going to take that risk. I’m just not, Jill.”

“That’s your absolute decision.”

“My absolute decision, yes.”

Something was coming down the street now, some vast hopping thing with a head the size of a cow and teeth like spears. A dozen or so humans ran along beside it, practically within reach of the creature’s clashing jaws, and a covey of Spooks hovered over it, bombarding it with flashes of light. Demeris took a step or two toward the door of the hotel.

He turned in the doorway. She was still standing there. The hunters and their prey sped right past her, but she took no notice. She waved to him.

Sure, he thought. He waved back. Goodbye, Jill.

He went inside. There was a clatter on the stairs, people running down, a woman and some men, the ones who had mocked him in the bar when he had first arrived. Two of the men ran past him and out the door, but the woman halted and caught him by the crook of the arm.

“Hey, Abblecricky!”

Demeris stared at her.

She leaned into his face and grinned. She was flushed and wild-looking, like the ones who had been running through the streets. “Come on, man! It’s the hunt! You’re heading the wrong way. Don’t you want to be there?”

He had no answer for that.

She was tugging at him. “Come on! Live it up! Kill yourself a dragon.”

“Ella!” one of the men called back.

She gave Demeris a wink and ran out the door.

He swayed uncertainly, torn between curiosity about what was going on out there and a profound wish to go upstairs and shut the door behind him. But the street had the stronger pull. He took a step or two after the woman, and then another, and then he was outside again. Jill was gone. The scene in the street was wilder: People ran back and forth yelling incoherently, colliding with one another in their frenzy. Overhead, streams of winged creatures swarmed, with Spooks like beams of pure light moving among them. In the distance, he heard the sounds of bellowing animals, thunderous explosions and high keening cries of what he took to be Spook pleasure. Far off to the south he saw a winged something the size of a small hill circle desperately in the sky, surrounded by implacable flaring pinpoints of Spook light, and halt and plummet like a falling moon. He could smell charred flesh, with a salty underflavor of what he suspected was the blood of alien beasts.

At a sleepwalker’s dreamy pace, Demeris went to the corner and turned left. Abruptly he found himself confronted with a thing so huge and hideous that it was almost funny—a massive long-snouted frog-shaped thing, sloping upward from a squat base, with a moist-looking greenish-black hide pocked with red craters and a broad, gaping, yellow-rimmed mouth. It was advancing slowly and clumsily down the middle of the street, toward the intersection, with its shoulders practically touching the buildings at either side.

Demeris drew his knife. What the hell, he thought. He was here at hunt time, he might as well join the fun. The creature was immense, but it didn’t have any visible fangs or talons and he figured he could move in at an angle and slash upward through the great baggy throat, and then step back fast before the thing fell on him. And if it turned out to be more dangerous than it looked, he didn’t give a damn. Not now.

He moved forward, knife already arcing upward.

“Hey!” someone cried behind him. “You out of your mind, fellow?”

Demeris glanced around. The bartender had come out of the hotel and was staring at him.

“That critter’s just a big sack of acid,” he said. “You cut it open, it’ll pour all over you.”

The frog thing made a sound like a burp, or perhaps a sardonic chuckle. Demeris backed away.

“You want to cut something,” the bartender said, “you better know what you’re cutting.”

“Yeah,” Demeris said. “I suppose so.” He returned the knife to its sheath and headed back across the street, feeling the craziness of the moment ebb from him like air from a balloon. This hunt was no business of his. Let the people who live here get mixed up in it.

As he reached the hotel entrance, he saw Spook light shimmering in the air at the corner—hunters hovering above—and then there was a soft sighing sound and a torrent of bluish fluid came rolling out of the side street, foaming and hissing as it edged along the gutter.

Demeris shuddered. He went into the building.

Quickly he mounted the stairs and entered his room and sat for a long while on the edge of the cot, gradually growing calm, while the din of the hunt went on and on.

Tom was gone, that was the basic thing he had to deal with. OK. He faced that and grappled with it. It was bitter news, but at least it was a resolution of sorts.

And Jill.

Doing masks. Taking humans as lovers. The whole matter went round and round in his mind, all that they had done together, everything that had passed between them. And how he had always felt about Spooks and how—somehow, he had no idea how—his time with Jill had changed that a little.

He remembered what she had said: “I want to be one of you.”

What did that mean? A tourist in the human race? A sightseer?

They are softening, then. They are starting to whore after strange amusements. And if that’s so, he thought, then we are beginning to win. The aliens had infiltrated earth in the first place; but now earth was infiltrating them. This yearning to do masks, to look and act like humans, to experience human feelings and human practices and human follies: It meant the end for them. There were too many humans on earth and not enough Spooks, and the Spooks would eventually be swallowed up. One by one, they would succumb to the temptation of giving up their chilly godliness and trying to imitate the messy, contradictory, troublesome creatures that humans are. And, Demeris thought, over the course of time—500 years, 1000, who could say?—earth would complete the job of absorbing the invaders and something new would emerge from the mixture of the species. That was an interesting thing to consider.

But then something clicked in his mind and he felt himself being flooded by a strange interior light, a light as weird and intense as the Spook light over the city. There was another way of looking at these things altogether. Jill dropped suddenly into a new perspective. If she were not a mere sightseer looking for forbidden thrills, she might be…a pioneer, an explorer, a border jumper; a defiant enemy of boundaries and limitations and rules. The same for Tom. They were two of a kind.

Demeris recognized now how little he understood his youngest brother. To him, Tom was a disturbed kid. To Ben Gorton, he was a contemptible sellout. But the real Tom, Tom’s own Tom, might be something entirely different. He might be someone ready to jump deep and far into otherness to find out what it was like. Like Jill, this alien, this Spook—she was of that kind too, but coming from the other direction.

And she had wanted his help. She had needed it all along, right from the start. She had missed her chance with Tom, but maybe she thought that Tom’s brother might be the same sort of person, someone who lived on the edge, who pushed the walls.

Well, well, well. How wrong she was.

He couldn’t do it. Tom might have done it, but Tom was gone, and he wasn’t Tom or anything like him.

Too bad, he thought. Too damned bad, Jill.

He walked to the window, raised the oilcloth and peered out. The hunt was reaching a peak. The street was more crowded than ever with frantic monsters. The sky was full of Spooks. Scattered bands of Spook City humans, looking half-crazed or more than half, ran back and forth. There was noise everywhere, sharp, percussive, discordant. Jill was nowhere to be seen. He let the oilcloth flap drop back in place and lay down on his cot and closed his eyes.

Three days later, when the hunt was over and it was safe to go out again, Demeris set out for home. For the first ten blocks or so, a glow that might have been a Spook hovered above him, keeping pace. He wondered if it was Jill.

She had given him a second chance once, he remembered. Maybe she was doing it again.

“Jill?” he called up to it. “That you?”

No answer came.

“Listen,” he called to the hovering glow. “Forget it. It isn’t going to work out, you and me. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. You hear me?”

A little change in the intensity of the flicker overhead. Or perhaps not.

He looked upward and said, “And listen, Jill—if that’s you—Jill, I want to tell you: Thanks for everything, OK?” It was strange, talking to the sky this way. But he didn’t care. “And good luck. You hear? Good luck, Jill! I hope you get what you want.”

The glow bobbed for a moment, up, down. Then it was gone.

Demeris, shading his eyes, looked up again, but there was nothing there to see. He felt a sharp momentary pang, thinking of the possibilities. But what could he have done? She had wanted something from him that he wasn’t able to give. If he had been somebody else, things might have been different. But he was who he was. He could go only so far toward becoming someone else and then he had to pull back and return to being who he really was, and that was all there was to it.

No one gave him any trouble at all on his way out, and the return trip through the western fringe of the Occupied Zone was just as smooth. Everything was quiet, all was peaceful, clear to the border.

The border crossing itself was equally uncomplicated. The fizzing lights and the weird hallucinatory effects of the barrier were visible, but they had no impact from this side. Demeris passed through them as though they were so much smoke, and kept on walking. In hardly any time he was across the border and back in Free Country again.

THE RED BLAZE IS THE MORNING

I didn’t write any science-fiction short stories at all in 1992, the first time in many years that was the case, and I wrote only two in 1993 and one in 1994—a sign, I suspect, of the increasing difficulties I’ve been experiencing in working in the shorter forms.

The themes of these few-and-far-between latter-day stories may reflect some of that difficulty. Here, written in April, 1993 for Greg Bear’s New Legends anthology and centering in my long-held passion for archaeology, is a tale of a veteran professional whose career, as it enters its later years, has become much more of a struggle than he ever could have anticipated in his younger days.

——————

The Red—Blaze—is the Morning

The Violet—is Noon—

The Yellow—Day—is falling

And after that—is none—

—Emily Dickinson

Day by blazing day Halvorsen stretches himself across a blistering abyss, patiently searching in recalcitrant rock and hot sand for morsels of the useless past, even though he has begun to doubt the meaning and value of his own work. By chilly night, soaking his damaged and aching leg in a shallow basin of tepid sea-water—in this arid part of Turkey, fresh water is a luxury—he feels seductive fingers tickling the membranes of his mind. Something is trying to get in: perhaps already has. Something keeps nestling down alongside his consciousness and whispering fantastic, tempting things to him, visions of far-off times, mighty civilizations yet unborn. Or so it often seems.

What is actually going on, Halvorsen suspects, is that he is beginning to go crazy. The fascination of what’s difficult, he thinks, has not merely dried the sap out of his veins, as old Yeats feared it would, but has parched his brain beyond the bounds of sanity. And yet he can still speak six languages, including Turkish and Hebrew and modern Greek, and he can read Latin and classical Greek besides. He can recite the names of the Roman emperors from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus without missing one. Yes, his mind still functions well enough. Something else, something equally intangible and even harder to define, is what has become impaired. And then there is the sore leg, too, which mended inadequately after last summer’s accident on the rocky slope and is painful all the time. The leg is really in very bad shape. He ought not to be out here on the summit of the hill with a pick and shovel. He should be sitting in his tent, supervising the work of others. But Halvorsen has always been a hands-on kind of archaeologist: a point of great pride for him.

This is the fifth week of the third season of the dig. It is high summer, when the blue cloudless sky reflects the light of the swollen sun like a hot metal plate, and the meltem, the dry, hot, unrelenting wind out of the inland plateau, sends fifty-mile-an-hour blasts of brown dust into your nostrils and eyes and mouth and every cranny of your clothing for four or five days without halting. Halvorsen’s site is on a ragged little peninsula in southwest Turkey, overlooking the Mediterranean coast. It is an unimportant place that does not even have a paved road running to it, nor running water or electricity, and yet it has a long history. There is a tiny fishing village here now; before that, there was a Byzantine naval base; before that, Romans; before them, a Greek trading outpost; before that, a Minoan trading outpost; before that, Halvorsen thinks, a proto-Hittite encampment. And before that—ah, nobody knows what was here before that. But Halvorsen has a hypothesis, based on a few scattered and questionable bits of evidence. For three summers, now, he has been trying to find more satisfactory proof to support that hypothesis.

At mid-morning on this blazingly hot day Halvorsen is working alone on high, extending the trench that runs along the proto-Hittite side of the hill. Nobody he knows believes that the Hittites ever lived here, or anywhere else along this coast; and he himself has nothing to go by in that direction except the presence at the highest point of the site of a double line of mud-brick walls, two courses high, that feel more or less Hittite to him. But he is not particularly concerned with the Hittites, anyway: they are a Bronze Age folk, and he is looking for something much more ancient. Still, it would be helpful to prove that the Hittites had passed this way, too. And this is his dig. He can call this wall proto-Hittite if he feels like it, at least for the time being.

The site where he is working is a difficult one, steep and precarious. A rainstorm of unprecedented ferocity for this dry coast, six winters back, had carved away half the western face of the hill, laying bare the very finds that had brought Halvorsen here in the first place; but the angle of the lie is practically vertical, the soil crumbles easily, and Halvorsen’s budget will not allow him to put proper bridging across the worst of the gaps. So he hobbles around up here, walking lopsided as it is because of his torn-up leg, testing the ground as he goes in order to make sure it will bear his weight, and fearing at every moment that he will hit a weak spot and go tumbling down in a black cloud to land on the fanged rocks below.

He knows that he ought to be letting his Turks extend this trench for him. But he feels that he is on the brink of a major discovery. How would the workmen be able to detect the place where the terrain changes, and the proto-Hittite stratum gives way to an even older one?

“They’ll know,” Jane Sparmann says. She’s the graduate student from Columbia who has been working with him out here for three years, now. “They may be illiterate laborers, but they’ve spent their whole lives digging in these mounds and they have a sixth sense about any kind of shift in the matrix.”

“Even so,” Halverson has replied whenever this comes up. “I want to do this myself. I have a seventh sense.”

Sparmann laughs. Halvorsen knows that she thinks he is stubborn to the point of irrationality. Very likely Sparmann believes that too many summers under the Mediterranean sun have addled his brain, grand old figure of the field that he is. Well, so be it: she’s probably right. But he intends to do his own digging up here, even so. Moving slowly along the stone base of the mud wall, looking for the precise spot at the end of the proto-Hittite wall where the soil darkens into virginity and then the place just beyond it where, he hopes, the Neolithic occupants of this site had erected their primordial acropolis.

It’s a fine place for an acropolis. No enemies can come upon you unaware, if you have watchmen posted up here. The hill runs athwart the peninsula for five hundred meters, a sharp rocky ridge. Look to the west and you see the smooth blue sea. To the east, you have a long view of the baking dusty plain.

Halvorsen pokes with his pick, scrapes, peers, brushes the dirt aside, pokes again. Nothing. It’s dull work, but he’s used to it. Steady toil, unrelieved boredom, sweat and dust, one clump of dirt and rock after another, poke and sift, move along. He thinks enviously of Schliemann unearthing rooms of golden treasure, Howard Carter shining his flashlight beam into the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen. But of course they had put in their months and years of dusty boredom too.

“Müdür Bey!” calls a loud rasping voice from below. “Müdür Bey!” His title: “Mr. Director.” The Turks can’t or won’t learn to pronounce his name. With difficulty Halvorsen levers himself upright, leaning on his shovel, and peers down the eastern slope of the hill to the place where Sparmann and three of the diggers are working, over at the edge of the Greek settlement. Ibrahim, his foreman, is standing in the trench, triumphantly holding up a crude buff-colored pot.

“What is it?” Halvorsen asks.

Jane Sparmann, at Ibrahim’s elbow, cups her hand and calls, “It’s full of coins! Athenian owls, some Corinthians, something from Syracuse.”

“Fine,” Halvorsen says, without enthusiasm. “Give him his bonus.”

“You don’t want to see them?”

“Later,” he says.

They always pay the diggers extra for any easily marketable artifacts, to keep them from taking them on their own behalf. The expense is trivial, a hundred lire per coin. Sparmann is excited by the find—she’s still young—but to Halvorsen the coins, and indeed the whole Greek settlement, are merely an irritating distraction. Dozens of Greek coins turn up wherever you put a spade in the ground. As for the stumps of a little temple, the hazy outlines of a marketplace: who cares? The Mediterranean world is full of Greek temples. They bring no news. Halvorsen is looking beneath such things, beyond, behind, searching for the secret from which all this Mediterranean splendor sprang. The unknown progenitor-race, the pivot, the fulcrum on which the magnificence turned as it began the centrifugal outreach of its grandeur.

He returns to his digging.

But almost immediately comes another booming cry from Ibrahim: “Paydos! Paydos!” Time to quit for the lunch-break.

Halvorsen would just as soon go on working while the others knock off. That would be bad form, though: you mustn’t let your workmen think you’re lazy, but it’s not good to seem maniacally compulsive, either. He hobbles down the hill and over to the workshed, where the usual meal of olives, eggs, canned tuna fish, and warm beer is being dispensed.

“How’d things go, Dr. H?” Sparmann asks. She smiles pleasantly—she’s very pretty, actually, though Halvorsen would never dream of laying a hand on her—but her subtext is fundamentally malevolent. She knows damned well how it has gone up there, how it goes all the time. But she is politely maintaining the pretense that he may eventually find something on the hill.

“Starting to look promising,” Halvorsen says. Why not? Hope costs nothing.

This season’s dig has four weeks to go. And then? Will he spend the off season, as usual, raising money for next year’s work, the grant applications, the lecture series, the endless begging among the well-heeled? Not to mention the interminable business of renewing the digging permit, a hassle that was always complicated in unpredictable ways by the twists and turns of Turkish politics. How much easier it would be simply to give up, retire from field work, write some books, find a soft curatorship or chairmanship somewhere. But that would be an admission of defeat. It had been a calculated risk to propose his theory as openly as he had; if the notion had come from a forty-year-old, the eventual failure to produce substantiation would be accepted by his colleagues simply as a case of a young man’s reach exceeding his grasp, but at Halvorsen’s age any such failure would be an irrevocable mark of decline, even senility, a regrettable third act to such a brilliant career. He didn’t dare abandon his field work. He was condemned by his own insistent hypothesis to stay out here under this glazed blue sky until he found what he was looking for, or else die trying.

“Beer?” someone asks him.

“Please,” says Halvorsen, taking the bottle, though he knows that it will be weary, stale, flat, unprofitable. No surprises there. It is Efes Pilsen, the terrible Turkish beer. Halvorsen would have preferred a Carlsberg; but Copenhagen is a long way away. So he guzzles it, wincing a little, and even has a second one. Warm and weary, yes. Stale. Flat. And definitely unprofitable.

The nights are always strangely cool here, even in summer, with a sharp autumnal edge on them, as though the sun’s intense heat has burned a hole in the atmosphere by day and the place is as airless as the moon after dark. Halvorsen sits apart from the others, reads, broods, sips raki, soaks his sore leg. The archaeologists’ compound consists of two whitewashed cinderblock storage buildings, a work-shed, and six little tents down by the sandy beach where they sleep. Most of the Turkish workmen make their camps for the night on the shallow slopes just back of the dig, covering themselves with leafy branches or threadbare blankets, though some go home on donkeyback to their village five or six miles up the road.

Halvorsen’s assistants—two women, three men, this year—sit outside their tents, waiting for him to go inside and fall asleep. During the season they have coupled off in various spasmodic patterns, as usual, but they try to hide that from him as though he were some sort of chaperone for them. For most of the summer, Halvorsen is aware, Jane Sparmann has been sharing the tent of Bruce Feld of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Chicago girl, Elaine Harris, has been shifting her affections between Martin Altman of Michigan State and the other boy—Riley, O’Reilly, Halvorsen can never remember which—from that university in Ohio. Let them have their fun, Halvorsen thinks: what they do at night is no business of his. But still they wait for him; and at last, though he isn’t sleepy yet, he rises and waves goodnight and limps into his tent.

His body aches, his mind is terribly alert. He stretches out on his cot and prays in the clammy darkness for sleep to take him.

Instead the night-voice, that insinuating, tickling voice in his head that has been so insistently frequent of late, comes to him again and says:

—Here. I want you to see this. This is the Palace of the Triple Queen.

Every word is perfectly distinct. He has never heard the voice with such clarity before.

And this time the words are followed by an image. Halvorsen beholds on the screen of his mind the facade of a many-columned three-terraced structure that might almost be Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir al-Bahri, except that the colonnades fold back upon themselves in topologically implausible ways, as if they were pivoting into some adjacent dimension, and the glowing bas-reliefs along the pediment are utterly alien in style, a procession of slender angular figures interlocking and bending out of focus in the same incomprehensible twisting way. Behind the columns of the topmost terrace lurks some filmy, shadow-cloaked being, barely perceptible except as huge eyes and a ripple of shimmering light, whose frail silvery form nevertheless emanates immense strength and power.

“Who are you?” Halvorsen asks. “What do you want with me?”

—And this, this is the courtyard of the Tribunal of the People in the time of the Second Mandala.

Halvorsen sees a sort of marble beehive, fifty or sixty hexagonal tanks out of each of which rises the face of a huge-eyed hairless figure, more or less human in general outline. They are submerged from their shoulders down in a radiant luminous fluid. Halvorsen is given to understand that these creatures are a single entity in fifty bodies, that in their own era they exerted some kind of high governmental function, that they spent lifetimes of unimaginable length standing in these six-sided pools of nutrients.

—And what I show you now, says the voice, are the ruins of the building known as the Concord of Worlds, which also is of the time of the Second Mandala, and above it the outlying precincts of the City of Brass, constructed thirty cycles later.

Scenes of confused splendor flood his mind. Marble pillars, shining metal slabs inscribed in unknown languages, obelisks of chalcedony, all strewn about as though by a giant’s hand; and, overlying them with a casual disdain, the streets of some rigidly geometrical later city, gleaming with a cruel metallic sheen.

“This is madness,” Halvorsen mutters. He sits up, gropes in the darkness for his sleeping-pills. “Leave me alone, will you? Get out of my mind.”

—I mean no harm.

“Tell me who you are, then.”

—A friend. A colleague.

“I want to know your name.”

—It would mean nothing to you.

This is a new development, actually to be holding a conversation of sorts with this phantom: with himself, to be more accurate. It seems to mark a dismaying advance in his mental deterioration and he finds it terrifying. Halvorsen begins to tremble.

“What do you want with me?” he demands. Shouting out loud, now. Careful, he thinks. The others will hear you and come running, and the secret will be out. Poor old coot has lost his mind. He will beg them to cover it up, and they will promise, but of course gossip travels so quickly in academic circles—

—I want to offer you—to offer you—

Sputter. Hiss. Static on the line. Then silence.

“Come on, damn you, finish your sentence!”

Nothing. Nothing. Halvorsen feels like weeping. He finds a pill. Looks for the water pitcher, finds the raki bottle instead. What the hell. He washes the pill down with a shot of straight raki. Getting suicidal now? he asks himself. The Turkish whiskey burns his throat. Almost at once he feels groggy. He wonders, as the drug and the raki hit him simultaneously, whether he will live to see morning.

But of course he does. After breakfast everyone assembles, Jane Sparmann calls the roll of workmen, a new day’s toil begins. Sweat, dust, sunscreen, bug repellent. And the tools of the trade: picks, shovels, sifting screens, brushes, tape-measures, envelopes, tags, dust-goggles, sketch-pads, cameras. Jane continues to work in the Greek-era trench; Bruce and Martin will be photographing the Minoan level, this season’s central focus, which now has begun to emerge from its overburden; the other two have projects of their own in the Byzantine strata. And Halvorsen painfully ascends the hill for another attempt at unearthing some trace of his long-sought prehistoric civilization.

Business as usual, yes. Another day under the dazzling sun. That fierce light bleaches all color out of everything. Nor is there much in the way of sound: even the surf makes merely a faint snuffling noise here. Two dark puffs of dust to the east are the only blemishes on the brilliant dome of the sky. A stork appears from somewhere and hovers for a long while, wings scarcely moving, surveying the busy archaeologists skeptically from aloft.

Halvorsen, down on his knees, nose to the ground, reaches the end of the brick wall, jabs a probing-fork into the soil, feels the change in texture. It was around here somewhere that the handful of scraggly, badly eroded artifacts of apparent Neolithic origin that had lured him into this project in the first place had been exposed by the storm: a crude bull’s-head in baked clay, a fragment of a double-axe amulet of distinctly un-Minoan style, a painted snippet of what he is convinced was a mother-goddess amulet. Year after year he has cut his way toward this point—delayed for two whole seasons by the discovery of the Hittite wall—and now, almost afraid of the answers he is about to get, he is ready to strike downward into the hill to see what lies five or ten meters beneath the surface. He will need the workmen to do that for him, he realizes. But he will be over them like a hawk, watching every shovelful they lift.

This afternoon—maybe tomorrow—

An unexpected interruption comes just then. From the east, a throbbing sputtering sound, a cloud of dust, a dirt bike chugging down the rough little road that leads to the site. The workmen wave at him from below, calling out, “Müdür Bey! Müdür Bey!” A messenger has arrived, bringing him a letter from Ankara. Perturbed, Halvorsen makes his way uneasily down from his hilltop. The envelope, soiled and creased, bears the insignia of the Ministry of Education. His fingers quiver a little as he opens it: the Department of Antiquities of the Ministry of Education has jurisdiction over all archaeological digs. Some change must have occurred; and in Turkey all change involving the bureaucracy is change for the worse.

There’s been a change, yes. But perhaps not a problem. Halvorsen scans the letter, purple typescript on manila stock, translating quickly. Hikmet Aytul, the Department of Antiquities official who has charge of all archaeological work in this part of the country—Hikmet Pasha, Halvorsen calls him, because he is so vast and self-important—has resigned. The new superintendent of excavations is a certain Selim Erbek, an assistant curator of a provincial museum further north along the coast. He is making the rounds of his new responsibilities and intends to pay a visit to Halvorsen’s dig in the next two or three days.

“Trouble?” Bruce Feld asks.

Halvorsen shrugs. “I’m not sure. Bureaucratic reshuffling. Hikmet Pasha’s out, somebody named Selim Erbek’s in. He’ll be dropping in to get acquainted with us later in the week.”

“Should we take any special action?” Jane Sparmann wants to know.

“You mean, hide yesterday’s coins?” Halvorsen laughs. “No, no, we play by the rules here. When Selim Bey gets here, we show him everything we’ve found. Such as it is.” He has already debated, briefly and silently, whether he ought to get started on his own penetration of the hill before the new man arrives. Significant finds might produce unpredictable reactions; it might be wiser to take a reading on this Selim Erbek before plunging in. But Halvorsen rejects the idea. He is here to dig and, if possible, find. No sense wasting time trying to outguess the inscrutable bureaucrats.

After lunch he picks Ibrahim, Ayhan, and Zeki as his workmen and finally begins peeling back the hill, after years of anticipation. Halvorsen has worked with these three men over many seasons and trusts them totally, though he watches them closely all the same. They dig carefully and well, using their picks with surgical delicacy, running their fingers through the clods of earth in search of tiny overlooked artifacts before letting the wheelbarrow man carry the sifted dirt away. But there is nothing to find. This part of the hill, despite the fact that a few anomalous artifacts had been found in one corner of it after that monster storm, seems in general never to have felt the imprint of human use. Wherever you dig, around this site, you turn up something, be it Turkish, Byzantine, Greek, Roman, Minoan, whatever. Except here. Halvorsen has magically located the one corner of the place that nobody in the last ten thousand years has seen fit to occupy. It is the utter opposite of his expectations.

Still, there’s always tomorrow.

“Paydos! Paydos!” comes the call, finally, at dusk. Another day gone, less than nothing to show for it.

Lying in the darkness of his tent, Halvorsen waits for the voice to come, and soon enough it is with him.

—I will show you more, if you allow it.

“Go on. Anything you like.”

Halvorsen strives to be calm. He wants to attain numbness in the face of this absurdity. He knows that he must accept the fact of his own unfolding insanity the way he accepts the fact that his left leg will never function properly again.

—These are the ruins of Costa Stambool.

Into Halvorsen’s mind springs the horrific sight of vast destruction seen at a great distance, an enormous field of horror, a barren and gritty tumble of dreary gray fragments and drab threadbare shards that would make a trash-midden look like a meadow, and all of it strewn incoherently about in a willy-nilly chaotic way. He has spent his life among ruins, but this one is a ruin among ruins, the omega of omegas. Some terrible catastrophe has taken place here.

But then the focus shifts. He is able to see the zone of devastation at closer range, and suddenly it appears far from hideous. Even at its perimeter, flickers of magic and wonder dance over the porous, limy soil of its surface: sprites and visitations, singing wordlessly to him of Earth’s immense history and of futures already past, drift upward from the broken edge-tilted slabs and caper temptingly about him. A shimmer of delicate golden green iridescence that had not been visible a moment ago rises above everything and surrounds it.

—This was the City of Cities.

The broken shards are coming to life. The city of Costa Stambool begins to rise into view like a whale breaching the surface of the sea, or like a vast subterranean tower emerging from its hiding-place in the bowels of the earth. It is an irresistible force as it heaves itself out of the rubble and climbs with a roaring rush to a height Halvorsen can barely calculate.

It is less a city than a single enormous building, incredibly massive at its base and tapering to a narrow, impossibly lofty summit; and it is skinless, wholly without walls, its exterior peeled away on all sides to reveal the layered intricacies of its teeming core. Halvorsen can see a myriad inhabitants moving about within, following the patterns of their daily lives from level to level, from street to street, from room to room.

Bizarrely, the building seems to be standing on edge, its floors at right angles to the ground. But how can that be? It makes no sense. Then Halvorsen realizes that he is being granted a double perspective: somehow he is able to see the interior of the great structure from the side and top at once, a four-dimensional view, piercing downward and upward and backward and forward through the thousands or perhaps even millions of years of the city’s existence. That puts him at ease. He understands how one reads the multifarious layers of a long-occupied site.

The voice in his mind guides him along.

—The walls you see down there, glowing with scarlet phosphorescence, are the oldest levels. On top of these are the structures of the Second Mandala, and then the Third. Here you will recognize the Concord of Worlds and the City of Brass. This is Glissade, the pleasure-city of the Later Third. Here is the palace of the Triple Queen; here, the courtyard of the Emperor of All; down here, the cells of the Tribunal of the People.

Everything is as perfect as the day it was built; and yet simultaneously every layer reveals signs of the destruction wrought by builders of later eras, and over everything else are the brutal marks of some climactic onslaught of vandals: the work, Halvorsen is told, of the bestial invaders who at the dawn of the climactic Fourth Mandala brought fire and death to this place.

In awe Halvorsen tours the temples of unknown gods and the palaces of dynasties yet unborn but already forgotten. He stares at a vast marble slab proclaiming some empire’s grandeur in an incomprehensible script. He enters the Library of Old Stambool, and sees iron-bound chests overflowing with what he understands to be books, though they look more like rubies and emeralds. The guiding voice never ceases, identifying for him the Market of All Wonders, the Gymnasium, the Field of Combat, the Tower of the Winds.

Halvorsen has never seen anything like it. He has never so much as imagined anything like it. It is Rome and Babylon and Byzantium and Thebes all at once, raised to the fiftieth power. In this single crushing vision Halvorsen feels that he has experienced an entire great civilization, that he has been buried beneath the totality of its immensity.

Then it is gone. As suddenly as it erupted from the ground, the great building subsides into it again, not with a crash but a sigh, a gentle cadence of descent. It falls like a feather on the wind, shrinking down on itself, and within moments Halvorsen sees nothing but the gray field of rubble again.

After a time he says, “Very impressive. I didn’t know I had such powers of invention.”

—They are not inventions. They are the reality of our age, which I freely make available to you.

“And who are you, may I ask?”

—I will tell you. I am an inhabitant of the Fifth Mandala, which is the last epoch of the world you call Earth, very close to the end of all things.

Halvorsen shivers. The lunacy deepens and deepens.

“You live in the future and are reaching back across time to talk to me?”

—The very distant future, yes.

Halvorsen contemplates that for a moment.

Then he says, “Why? What do you want from me?”

—Simply to give you an opportunity to see my world. And to beg you to allow me to see yours. A trade, my time for your time: your body for mine, our minds to change places. I want that very much. I want it more than life itself.

By day none of what he has heard or seen in the night seems real. There is only the brown sandy site, and the unrelenting red blaze of the sun, and the blue sea, and the different blue of the sky’s rigid vault. From the white tents come his young assistants. The workmen have already breakfasted and are waiting for their assignments. “Gün aydin,” they say, grinning, showing big white crooked teeth. “Good morning.” For them this job is a bonanza, the best pay they will ever see. They love it. “Gün aydin, gün aydin, gün aydin.”

The morning’s work begins. Sunscreen, bug repellent, sweat, dust. Picks, shovels, brushes, tape-measures.

So the madness seems to overtake him, he thinks, only by night. Halvorsen wonders about that. Perhaps the power of his quest for understanding the buried past, here in the remorseless brightness of the day, drives off these phantoms of the imaginary future. Or perhaps it is that the monkish solitude and close atmosphere of his dark, stifling little tent invite hallucinations, especially to a tired man who tends to drink too much raki when he is alone. Either way, he is grateful to leave it behind, the craziness, as he stomps toward this new day’s work.

He believes passionately in archaeology as metaphysics. Without true knowledge of the past, how can one comprehend the present, how can one begin to triangulate the future? Of course true true knowledge is impossible, but we can attempt partial truths: we can skin the earth’s surface looking for clues, we can sift and sort, we can postulate. Halvorsen has spent most of his life doing this. What has it gained him? He can recognize the varying soils of differing layers of occupation. He can name the Emperors of Rome from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus, remembering even to include Quintillus and Florianus. He has—what? Five years left? Ten?—to master all the rest of it, to solve all the pieces of the riddle that he has arrogated to himself. Then he will be gone. He will join the vastness of the past, and the work will belong to others. But for the moment it is his responsibility. And so the work goes on, today for him, tomorrow for the Jane Sparmanns, the Bruce Felds. Will they see it as he does? Or will it merely be a job for them, a highway toward the comforts of tenure? How can you be an archaeologist at all, except out of love, an insatiable desire for the truth, the willingness to give yourself up to quests that may all too easily become obsessions?

Halvorsen’s obsessive notion is that Asia Minor and not Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. Fertile, with easy access to the Mediterranean, rich in mineral ores, forests, grasslands for grazing, a reasonably benign climate, the peninsula seems to him to have been an ideal site for the transition from Neolithic life to the splendors of the Bronze Age. The flow of conceptualization could only have been down out of Anatolia’s rocky spine, he is convinced: to Sumerian Iraq on one side of the cultural watershed, to proto-Minoan Crete on the other, and onward also to Egypt in the south. But there is no proof. There is no proof. Mere smudges and traces remain, where he needs walls and pillars, inscribed tablets, potsherds, idols, weapons. Time has erased it all here in Anatolia, or at least has erased what he needs to provide a foundation for his bold thesis, leaving only confusion and conjecture.

Still, he is certain that this is where it all began. The Çatal Hüyük findings tell him that, the engraved pebbles in the Karain Cave, the rock paintings of Beldibi: this is where the first canto of the great epic was written. But where is the proof? He knows that he is working from a priori hypotheses, always a great peril for a scientist. This sort of thing is the antithesis of the scientific method. He has allowed himself to seem to be a fanatic, a nut, a Schliemann, an Evans, obsessed with obfuscatory special pleading in defense of his idée fixe. Schliemann and Evans, at least, eventually delivered the goods. But he has nothing to show, and soon they will be laughing at him in the halls of academe, if that has not begun already.

Still, he digs on. What else can he do?

It’s a long day. The new trench gets deeper and longer and it’s still absolutely virgin. Thinking incorrectly that he has spotted something significant jutting from its side, Halvorsen jumps eagerly down into it and wrenches his bad leg so severely that he almost bursts into tears, though they are tears of rage rather than pain. Halvorsen is a big, strapping man whose physical endurance was legendary in the profession, and now he is little more than a cripple. If he could, he would have the leg cut off and replaced with something made of steel and plastic.

The raki helps a little. But only a little.

Lying on his back and massaging the throbbing leg with his left hand with the raki bottle in his right one, Halvorsen says into the dense clinging darkness, “How did you find me? And why?” He is somewhat tipsy. More than somewhat, maybe.

There is no answer.

“Come on, speak up! Have you been in touch with others before me? Twenty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred thousand different minds, every era from First Dynasty Egypt to the fortieth century? Looking for someone, anyone, who would go for your deal?”

Silence, still.

“Sure you did. You’ve got a million-year lifespan, right? All the time in the world to cast your line. This fish, that one, this. And now you have me on the hook. You play me. Trade bodies with me, you say, come see the marvels of the far future. You think I’m tempted, don’t you? Don’t you? But I’m not. Why should I be? Don’t I have enough on my plate right here? You think I want to start over, at my age, learning a whole new archaeology? You suppose I need to worry about identifying the strata that signify the fucking Second Mandala?”

No answer. He knows that he is losing control. He never uses obscenities except under extreme stress.

“Well, go fish somewhere else,” Halvorsen says. “I reject your deal. I piss on your crazy deal. I stay here, you stay there, the way God intended it to be. I go on digging in the dirt of Turkey until my brains are completely fried and you sit there amidst all your fucking post-historic apocalyptic miracles, okay? Costa Stambool! You can take Costa Stambool and—”

At last the voice out of distant time breaks its silence.

—Is your refusal a final one?

And, almost in the same moment, another voice from closer at hand, from just outside his tent, in fact:

“Dr. Halvorsen? Are you all right, Dr. Halvorsen?”

Bruce Feld’s voice.

My God, Halvorsen thinks. I’m bellowing and ranting at the top of my lungs, and now they all finally know that I’ve gone nuts.

“I’m—fine,” he says. “Just singing, a little. Am I too loud?”

“If you need anything, Dr. Halvorsen—”

“Maybe another bottle of raki, that’s all.” He laughs raucously. “No, no, just joking. I’m fine, really. Sorry if I disturbed you.” Let them think I’m drunk; better than thinking I’m crazy. “Good night, Bruce. I’ll try to keep it down.”

And then, again:

—Is your refusal final?

“Yes! No. Wait. I have to consider this thing a little, all right? All right?”

Silence.

“God damn it, I need some time to think!—Hey, are you still there?”

Silence.

Gone, Halvorsen thinks. He has given his answer, and the being from the far end of time has broken off the contact, and that is that. Even at this moment the offer is being made to someone of the thirtieth century A.D., or perhaps the thirtieth century B.C., or any of a million other years along the time-line between prehistory and the Fifth Mandala of Costa Stambool. A trade, my time for your time: your body for mine, our minds to change places.

“Listen,” Halvorsen says piteously, “I’m still thinking it over, do you know what I mean? Although I have to tell you, in all honesty, you’d be getting a bum deal. I’m not in really good physical condition. But I want to discuss this proposition of yours a little further before I give you a definitive answer, anyway.”

Nothing. Nothing. An agony of regret.

But then, suddenly:

—Let us discuss, then. What else would you like to know?

The promised visit of the new superintendent of excavations does not occur on the second day after the receipt of the letter from the Ministry of Education, nor on the third. Halvorsen is unsurprised by that. Time moves differently in different cultures; he lives on the Turkish calendar here.

The work is now going so badly that he actually has begun to regard his nightly bouts of madness as comic relief. His leg has swollen, practically immobilizing him; it is so difficult for him to get around now that he is unable to reach his excavation site at the top of the hill, short of being hoisted up there with a sling and pulley. So he supervises fretfully from below. But that makes no difference, because Ibrahim, Ayhan, and Zeki are still digging through virgin soil. Elsewhere all around the site, nice little things are turning up for the others: Riley and Harris have found some bits of Byzantine mosaic in association with coins of the Emperor Heraclius, Feld and Altman have struck an interesting layer of early Minoan sherds, Jane Sparmann has found a cache of glass and terra-cotta beads that may indicate the presence of a previously unsuspected zone of late Greek occupation. The hilltop work, though, is plainly a bust. Hittites, or somebody who built walls in Hittite style, undoubtedly had had a fortress up there four or maybe five thousand years ago, but what Halvorsen is after is some sign of civilization two or three thousand years older than that—some deposit that will convincingly link this coastal outpost to the known Neolithic settlements far to the east at Çatal Hüyük—and he has not had the slightest luck. The three anomalous artifacts that that storm had laid bare remain perplexing enigmas, tantalizing, inexplicable.

He consoles himself with conversations in the darkness. The visions of the Fifth Mandala grow ever more baroquely detailed.

Halvorsen, who still believes that he is spinning these fantasies within the walls of his own tortured mind, is bemused by the discovery that he has such lavish qualities of imagination within himself. He has thought of himself all along as a prosaic drudge, a plodding digger in musty, dusty ancient realms. Evidently there is more to him than that, a rich vein of fabulist locked away somewhere. The realization makes him uneasy; it seems to call into question the integrity of his scholarly findings.

He wants to know about the inhabitants of the remote eon of which his informant is a denizen.

—There are very few of us. I may be the only one.

“You aren’t sure?”

—Contact is very difficult.

“It’s easier for you to speak with someone who lived a million years in your past than it is to pick up the phone and call someone who lives around the corner from you?”

Apparently so. There has been a great cataclysm, an invasion of some sort, a climactic battle: the last and ultimately futile stand of the human race, or rather the evolved and vastly superior successors to the human race, against an inexorable enemy so terrible that its nature seems beyond the abilities of Halvorsen’s informant to communicate. This, it seems, occurred as the closing act of the epoch known as the Fourth Mandala, when humanity, after having attained a supreme, essentially god-like height, was thrust down irreparably into the dust. Now only a few lurkers remain, scuttling through the heaped-up ruins of previous glorious civilizations, waiting for their final hours to arrive. Halvorsen gets the impression that they are not even creatures of flesh and blood, these last few humans, but some kind of metallic mechanisms, low spherical beetle-like housings, virtually indestructible, in which the souls of the remaining inhabitants of Earth have taken refuge.

Some resonant chord in Halvorsen’s Nordic soul is struck by the revelation that there will be a Ragnarok after all, a Götterdämmerung: that all gods must have their twilight, even the supernal beings of humanity’s final epoch. He is saddened and exalted by it all at once. They were beings of a magnificence and power beyond comprehension, a race of glorious heroes, demigods and more than demigods, and yet they fell, even they. Will fall. It is the myth of myths, the ultimate saga. Odin and Thor and Heimdall and Tyr and all the rest of the Aesir will die in the Fimbulwinter of the world, when Fenrir the Wolf breaks his chains and the Midgard Serpent rises and the fire-demons of Muspelheim come riding forth upon the world. So it has been, over and over, and so it must and will be, to the end of time, even into the days of the great Mandalas yet to come.

“Why come here, though?” Halvorsen asks. “We’re only smelly primitives, hardly more than apes. We live in ignoble times. Why not just stay where you are, up there in the grand and glorious final act of the human drama, and wait for the curtain to come down?”

—The curtain has already come down, and it happens that I have lived on beyond it. Where is the nobility in that? I want to close the circle; I want to return to the starting point. Come: take my body. Explore my world, which to you will be full of wonders beyond belief. There will be much for you to study here: our immense Past is your immeasurable future. Spend a million years, two million, as long as you like, roaming the ruins of Costa Stambool. And let me take your place in your own era.

“It won’t be a fair trade,” Halvorsen warns again. “You won’t be getting as good as you give.”

—Let me be the judge of that.

“No. Listen to me. I need to have you realize what you’d be getting. Not only are we mortal—do you really understand what that means, to be mortal?—but I’m not even an especially good specimen of my race. I’m getting to be old, as old goes among us, and I feel very tired and my leg, if you know what a leg is, was badly damaged in an accident last year and I can barely hobble around. Besides which, I’ve painted myself into a corner professionally and I’m about to become a laughing stock. You’d be walking into a miserable situation. The way I feel now, even the end of the world would be preferable to the mess I’m in.”

—Is this a refusal of my offer, or an acceptance?

Halvorsen is baffled for a moment by that. Then he understands, and he begins to laugh.

But of course he is aware that the game he is playing with himself, out there along the borders of sanity, is a dangerous one; and he is glad when sleep at last frees him of these fantastical colloquies. When morning comes, he knows, he must rid his mind of all such nonsense and turn his full attention to the trench on the hill. And either find in it the things that he hopes will be there, or else abandon this site at last, confess his defeat, and make his choice between letting himself be pensioned off and humbly petitioning the Turks to allow him to hunt for traces of extreme Anatolian antiquity someplace else. But he ought not to go on diverting himself with these wishful and fundamentally unhealthy dreams of an escape to the Fifth Mandala.

And eventually morning comes, bringing the usual blast of dry heat, the usual clouds of little black flies, and the usual breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, processed cheese, canned sardines, and powdered coffee. Morning also brings, a couple of hours later, the Department of Antiquities’ new superintendent of excavations for this district, Selim Erbek: Selim Bey, as Halvorsen calls him, since in Turkey it’s always a good idea to bestow formal honorific titles on anyone who holds any sort of power over you.

Not that Selim Bey seems particularly intimidating. He is very young, thirty at most, a slender man, almost slight, with sleek black hair. He is clean-shaven except for a narrow mustache and is wearing khaki slacks and a thin green shirt already stained with sweat. And—Halvorsen finds this very strange—Selim Bey’s demeanor, right from the start, is extraordinarily diffident, almost withdrawn. His voice is almost inaudible and he can barely bring himself to make contact with Halvorsen. The contrast with Hikmet Pasha, his big-bellied, swaggering predecessor, could not be more marked.

Halvorsen offers him breakfast. Selim Bey shakes him off.

“May we speak?” he asks softly, almost timidly.

What the hell is this? Halvorsen wonders. “Of course,” he says.

“The two of us, only. Man to man, apart from the others.”

Of his assistants, only Jane Sparmann is within hearing range. Does Selim Bey want privacy, or is he simply uncomfortable around women? Halvorsen shrugs and signals to Jane that she should return to her dig. Selim Bey smiles faintly, a quick crinkling of the corner of his mouth. This is all quite odd, Halvorsen thinks.

He says, “Shall we begin with a tour of the site?”

“You may show me later. We must have our talk first,” says Selim Bey.

“Yes. Certainly.”

The slender little man gestures from the shoreline to the top of the hill. “You have not found, I take it, any additional Neolithic artifacts here, is that correct?”

“Not as yet, no. I’ve only recently begun trenching along the original find site—the proto-Hittite wall up there needed a careful excavation first, you see—and although the work thus far hasn’t been especially rewarding, there’s every reason to expect that—”

“No,” says Selim Bey. “There is no reason to expect anything.”

“Sorry. I don’t follow what you’re saying.”

Selim Bey shifts his weight from one foot to the other. His gaze rests on Halvorsen’s left cheekbone. His prominent Adam’s apple moves up and down like an adolescent’s. He seems about to burst into tears.

He says, after a little while, “I must tell you that the previous superintendent of excavations, Hikmet Bey, did not in fact resign. Hikmet Bey was dismissed.”

“Ah?”

“There were many reasons for this,” says Selim Bey quietly, digging the tip of his boot into the sand as an embarrassed child might do. “His behavior toward his superiors on certain occasions—his failure to file certain reports in a timely way—his excessive drinking—even his handling, I am sorry to say, of his official financial responsibilities. It is a very unfortunate story and I regret to be telling you of such deplorable things. He needs help, that man. We must all hope that he finds it.”

“Of course,” says Halvorsen piously. “The poor man.” He has to choke back laughter. The fat old tyrant, unseated at last! Caught with his hand in the till, no doubt. Pocketing the fees that the tourists pay to get into the museum at Bodrum and pissing the money away on raki and little boys.

“The reason I tell you this,” Selim Bey says, “is that examination of Hikmet Bey’s records, such as they were, brought forth certain revelations that it is necessary to share with you, Dr. Halvorsen. They concern the Neolithic artifacts that were found at this site after the great storms of some winters ago.”

“Yes?” Halvorsen says. He feels some pressure in his chest.

“A small clay bull’s head, a double-axe amulet, a female figurine, all in the Çatal Hüyük style.”

“Yes? Yes?”

“I deeply regret to say, Dr. Halvorsen, that it appears that these were authentic Çatal Hüyük artifacts, which Hikmet Bey obtained at their proper site many hundreds of kilometers from here through illegitimate channels and planted on this hill so that they would be discovered here by a shepherd boy and eventually brought to your attention.”

Halvorsen makes a husky sound, not quite a word.

Selim Bey rushes onward. “Hikmet Bey knew of your theories, of course. He thought it would be a proud thing for Turkey if they could be proven to be sound. He is correct about that. And so he sought to entice you to return to our land and carry out researches in his area of supervision. But the method that he used to attract your attention was very wrong. I am extremely sorry to inform you of this, and on behalf of my government I wish to offer our profound apologies for this unfortunate if well-meaning deception, for which no justification can possibly be found that can in any way negate the tremendous injury that has been done to you. Again, my deepest apologies, Dr. Halvorsen.”

The young man takes half a step back, as if he expects Halvorsen to strike him. But Halvorsen simply stares. He is without words. His mouth opens and closes.

A hoax. A plant. His head is swimming.

“Pardonnez-moi,” he says finally, unable for the moment to remember how to say “Excuse me” in Turkish. He lurches forward, sending Selim Bey skittering out of his way like a frightened gazelle, and stumbles like a wounded ox down the path that leads to the tent colony along the beach. He moves at a terrible speed, heedless of his injured leg, virtually unaware that he has legs at all: he might have been moving on wheels.

“Dr. Halvorsen? Dr. Halvorsen?” voices call from behind him.

He enters his tent.

I am extremely sorry to inform…I wish to offer our profound apologies…no justification can possibly be found…the tremendous injury that has been done to you…

Right. Right. Right.

The raki provides a kind of quick palliative. He takes a deep pull straight from the bottle, exhales, takes another, takes one more. Good.

Then he kicks off his boots and stretches out on his cot, facing upward. The day’s work is well along, out there on the dig, but he can’t bring himself to return to it. There is no way that he can face the others, now, after what he has just learned.

The impact of Selim Bey’s words is still sinking in. But there is no escaping the fact of his destruction. His theory is empty; he has wasted his time and expended the last of his professional capital on a foolish quest spurred by fraudulent clues.

As the lunch hour nears and Halvorsen still has not emerged from his tent, Feld and Martin Altman and Jane Sparmann come to him to see if he is all right. Even without knowing what it is that Selim Bey has told him, they evidently have guessed that it was highly upsetting news of some sort.

He tries to bluff it through. “There were some little questions about our permit application,” he tells them. “Trivial stuff, nothing to worry about. The usual bureaucratic nonsense.”

“If we can help in any way, sir—”

“No need. No need at all.”

Halvorsen realizes, from the way they are looking at him, that they don’t believe a word he has said. They must be able to see the outward manifestations of the shock wave that has coursed through his body, the visible signs of his inner demolition. They can have no doubt now that he has heard something shattering from this morning’s visitor and that he is struggling to conceal it from them. There is a look of deep concern on their faces, but also, so it seems to him, sympathy verging on pity.

That is more than he can bear. He will not let them patronize him. Feld makes one more stammering offer of assistance, and Halvorsen replies brusquely that it is not necessary, that everything is all right, that he can handle the problem himself. His tone is so blunt that they are startled, and even a little angered, maybe, at this rejection of their solicitude. But he has left them no choice but to go. Jane Sparmann is the last to leave, hovering at the door of his tent an extra moment, searching for the right words but unable to articulate them. Then she too withdraws.

So, then. He is alone with his anguish. And the central issue remains. His occupation is gone. He has made himself something pitiable in the eyes of his colleagues, and that is intolerable.

Contemplating his options now in the face of this disaster, he sees that he really has none at all. Except one, and that is an even greater foolishness than the one that has brought him to this sorry shipwreck on the Turkish shore.

Nevertheless Halvorsen voices it, more out of rage than conviction.

He stares at the roof of the tent. “All right,” he says savagely. “It’s daytime here, now, but maybe you can hear me anyway. Are you there? Are you listening? I call your bluff. The offer is accepted. You can take over my life back here, and I’ll take over yours. Come and get me, if you can. Get me right now.”

Nothing happens. Of course not, Halvorsen thinks. What madness.

He remains motionless, listening to the wind. He hears voices outside, but no words, only faint, indistinct sounds. Perhaps that’s the wind too. He feels the faintest of tremors in the tips of his fingers, and perhaps the twitch of a muscle in his cheek, and a certain mild and quickly passing queasiness in the pit of his stomach. That is the raki, he thinks.

“Well?” he says. “No deal, eh? No, I didn’t really think there would be. You were just a fucking hallucination, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

What else could it have been? he wonders. What else but an old man’s lunatic fantasies? Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season, nothing more. It was shameful to have made the attempt, even in bitter jest. And now he must get up and go back outside, and formally accept the apologies that Selim Bey has come here to deliver, and explain to the others what has happened, and then go on to pick up the pieces of his life somehow, after all. Yes. Yes. Somehow. He will have to be strong in the face of the humiliation that will be his, but there is no choice. Up, then.

He rises to go outside.

But he discovers as he sets about the process of rising from the cot that he is no longer lying on it, nor is he in his tent, and that in fact he has been utterly changed: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. His aging, aching body is gone, and he is a gleaming metallic sphere that moves in a wondrously frictionless way, as if by magic; and when he emerges into the open air from the airless vaulted place in which he has awakened, he enters into a realm of mighty silence, and it is the apocalyptic glories of the Fifth Mandala that he sees under the thin yellow light of evening, the immense tumbled many-layered ruins of the great City of Cities, Costa Stambool, at the end of time.

DEATH DO US PART

My book for 1993-94 was the relatively short novel The Mountains of Majipoor, which I finished so early in the rainy season that there was time to do a short story or two afterward before I shut the fiction factory down for its traditional spring recess. So I wrote this one in February, 1994, tacking a couple of new twists on the old notion of the quasi-immortal who falls in love with someone of normal lifespan. Ellen Datlow bought it for Omni, but it never saw print there, because Omni’s owner, some months later, decided to transfer his magazine to the mysterious on-line world of the Internet. I was tardy in exploring that world myself, and back there in the 1990’s anything “published” there might just as well have been published on Mars, so far as I was concerned. The on-line version of Omni did indeed make the story available to its cyberspace following, finally, in December of 1996, though I never saw it there. (It was 1998 before I finally got myself wired up.) Technically that’s its first publication. But in my own reactionary way I still consider print media as the only real place of publication for fiction, and to my outmoded way of thinking “Death Do Us Part” made its publishing debut in the August, 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. As a concession to the realities of the twenty-first century I’ve given the Omni use of the story priority in the copyright acknowledgments at the front of this book, though.

——————

It was her first, his seventh. She was thirty-two, he was three hundred and sixty-three: the good old April/September number. They honeymooned in Venice, Nairobi, the Malaysia Pleasure Dome, and one of the posh L-5 resorts, a shimmering glassy sphere with round-the-clock sunlight and waterfalls that tumbled like cascades of diamonds, and then they came home to his lovely sky-house suspended on tremulous guy-wires a thousand meters above the Pacific to begin the everyday part of their life together.

Her friends couldn’t get over it. “He’s ten times your age!” they would exclaim. “How could you possibly want anybody that old?” Marilisa admitted that marrying Leo was more of a lark for her than anything else. An impulsive thing; a sudden impetuous leap. Marriages weren’t forever, after all—just thirty or forty years and then you moved along. But Leo was sweet and kind and actually quite sexy. And he had wanted her so much. He genuinely did seem to love her. Why should his age be an issue? He didn’t appear to be any older than thirty-five or so. These days you could look as young as you liked. Leo did his Process faithfully and punctually, twice each decade, and it kept him as dashing and vigorous as a boy.

There were little drawbacks, of course. Once upon a time, long, long ago, he had been a friend of Marilisa’s great-grandmother: they might even have been lovers. She wasn’t going to ask. Such things sometimes happened and you simply had to work your way around them. And then also he had an ex-wife on the scene, Number Three, Katrin, two hundred and forty-seven years old and not looking a day over thirty. She was constantly hovering about. Leo still had warm feelings for her. “A wonderfully dear woman, a good and loyal friend,” he would say. “When you get to know her you’ll be as fond of her as I am.” That one was hard, all right. What was almost as bad, he had children three times Marilisa’s age and more. One of them—the next-to-youngest, Fyodor—had an insufferable and presumptuous way of winking and sniggering at her, that hundred-year-old son of a bitch. “I want you to meet our father’s newest toy,” Fyodor said of her, once, when yet another of Leo’s centenarian sons, previously unsuspected by Marilisa, turned up. “We get to play with her when he’s tired of her.” Someday Marilisa was going to pay him back for that.

Still and all, she had no serious complaints. Leo was an ideal first husband: wise, warm, loving, attentive, generous. She felt nothing but the greatest tenderness for him. And then too he was so immeasurably experienced in the ways of the world. If being married to him was a little like being married to Abraham Lincoln or Augustus Caesar, well, so be it: they had been great men, and so was Leo. He was endlessly fascinating. He was like seven husbands rolled into one. She had no regrets, none at all, not really.

In the spring of ’87 they go to Capri for their first anniversary. Their hotel is a reconstructed Roman villa on the southern slope of Monte Tiberio: alabaster walls frescoed in black and red, a brilliantly colored mosaic of sea-creatures in the marble bathtub, a broad travertine terrace that looks out over the sea. They stand together in the darkness, staring at the awesome sparkle of the stars. A crescent moon slashes across the night. His arm is around her; her head rests against his breast. Though she is a tall woman, Marilisa is barely heart-high to him.

“Tomorrow at sunrise,” he says, “we’ll see the Blue Grotto. And then in the afternoon we’ll hike down below here to the Cave of the Mater Magna. I always get a shiver when I’m there. Thinking about the ancient islanders who worshipped their goddess under that cliff, somewhere back in the Pleistocene. Their rites and rituals, the offerings they made to her.”

“Is that when you first came here?” she asks, keeping it light and sly. “Somewhere back in the Pleistocene?”

“A little later than that, really. The Renaissance, I think it was. Leonardo and I traveled down together from Florence—”

“You and Leonardo, you were just like that.”

“Like that, yes. But not like that, if you take my meaning.”

“And Cosimo de’ Medici. Another one from the good old days. Cosimo gave such great parties, right?”

“That was Lorenzo,” he says. “Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo’s grandson. Much more fun than the old man. You would have adored him.”

“I almost think you’re serious when you talk like that.”

“I’m always serious. Even when I’m not.” His arm tightens around her. He leans forward and down, and buries a kiss in her thick dark hair. “I love you,” he whispers.

“I love you,” she says. “You’re the best first husband a girl could want.”

“You’re the finest last wife a man could ever desire.”

The words skewer her. Last wife? Is he expecting to die in the next ten or twenty or thirty years? He is old—ancient—but nobody has any idea yet where the limits of Process lie. Five hundred years? A thousand? Who can say? No one able to afford the treatments has died a natural death yet, in the four hundred years since Process was invented. Why, then, does he speak so knowingly of her as his last wife? He may live long enough to have seven, ten, fifty wives after her.

Marilisa is silent a long while.

Then she asks him, quietly, uncertainly, “I don’t understand why you said that.”

“Said what?”

“The thing about my being your last wife.”

He hesitates just a moment. “But why would I ever want another, now that I have you?”

“Am I so utterly perfect?”

“I love you.”

“You loved Tedesca and Thane and Iavilda too,” she says. “And Miaule and Katrin.” She is counting on her fingers in the darkness. One wife missing from the list. “And—Syantha. See, I know all their names. You must have loved them but the marriages ended anyway. They have to end. No matter how much you love a person, you can’t keep a marriage going forever.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do. Everybody knows it.”

“I would like this marriage never to end,” he tells her. “I’d like it to go on and on and on. To continue to the end of time. Is that all right? Is such a sentiment permissible, do you think?”

“What a romantic you are, Leo!”

“What else can I be but romantic, tonight? This place; the spring night; the moon, the stars, the sea; the fragrance of the flowers in the air. Our anniversary. I love you. Nothing will ever end for us. Nothing.”

“Can that really be so?” she asks.

“Of course. Forever and ever, as it is this moment.”

She thinks from time to time of the men she will marry after she and Leo have gone their separate ways. For she knows that she will. Perhaps she’ll stay with Leo for ten years, perhaps for fifty; but ultimately, despite all his assurances to the contrary, one or the other of them will want to move on. No one stays married forever. Fifteen, twenty years, that’s the usual. Sixty or seventy, tops.

She’ll marry a great athlete next, she decides. And then a philosopher; and then a political leader; and then stay single for a few decades, just to clear her palate, so to speak, an intermezzo in her life, and when she wearies of that she’ll find someone entirely different, a simple rugged man who likes to hunt, to work in the fields with his hands, and then a yachtsman with whom she’ll sail the world, and then maybe when she’s about three hundred she’ll marry a boy, an innocent of eighteen or nineteen who hasn’t even had his first Prep yet, and then—then—

A childish game. It always brings her to tears, eventually. The unknown husbands that wait for her in the misty future are vague, chilly phantoms, fantasies, frightening, inimical. They are like swords that will inevitably fall between her and Leo, and she hates them for that.

The thought of having the same husband for all the vast expanse of time that is the rest of her life, is a little disturbing—it gives her a sense of walls closing in, and closing and closing and closing—but the thought of leaving Leo is even worse. Or of his leaving her. Maybe she isn’t truly in love with him, at any rate not as she imagines love at its deepest to be, but she is happy with him. She wants to stay with him. She can’t really envision parting from him and moving on to someone else.

But of course she knows that she will. Everybody does, in the fullness of time.

Everybody.

Leo is a sand-painter. Sand-painting is his fifteenth or twentieth career. He has been an architect, an archaeologist, a space-habitats developer, a professional gambler, an astronomer, and a number of other disparate and dazzling things. He reinvents himself every decade or two. That’s as necessary to him as Process itself. Making money is never an issue, since he lives on the compounding interest of investments set aside centuries ago. But the fresh challenge—ah, yes, always the fresh challenge—!

Marilisa hasn’t entered on any career path yet. It’s much too soon. She is, after all, still in her first life, too young for Process, merely in the Prep stage yet. Just a child, really. She has dabbled in ceramics, written some poetry, composed a little music. Lately she has begun to think about studying economics or perhaps Spanish literature. No doubt her actual choice of a path to follow will be very far from any of these. But there’s time to decide. Oh, is there ever time!

Just after the turn of the year she and Leo go to Antibes to attend the unveiling of Leo’s newest work, commissioned by Lucien Nicolas, a French industrialist. Leo and Lucien Nicolas were schoolmates, eons ago. At the airport they embrace warmly, almost endlessly, like brothers long separated. They even look a little alike, two full-faced square-jawed dark-haired men with wide-flanged noses and strong, prominent lips.

“My wife Marilisa,” Leo says finally.

“How marvelous,” says Lucien Nicolas. “How superb.” He kisses the tips of his fingers to her.

Nicolas lives in a lofty villa overlooking the Mediterranean, surrounded by a lush garden in which the red spikes of aloes and the yellow blooms of acacias stand out dazzlingly against a palisade of towering palms. The weather, this January day, is mild and pleasant, with a light drizzle falling. The industrialist has invited a splendid international roster of guests to attend the unveiling of the painting; diplomats and jurists, poets and playwrights, dancers and opera singers, physicists and astronauts and mentalists and sculptors and seers. Leo introduces Marilisa to them all. In the antechamber to the agate dining hall she listens, bemused, to the swirl of conversations in half a dozen languages. The talk ranges across continents, decades, generations. It seems to her that she hears from a distance the names of several of Leo’s former wives invoked—Syantha, Tedesca, Katrin?—but possibly she is mistaken.

Dinner is an overindulgent feast of delicacies. Squat animated servitors bring the food on glistening covered trays of some exotic metal that shimmers diffractively. After every third course a cool ray of blue light descends from a ceiling aperture and a secondary red radiance rises from the floor: they meet in the vicinity of the great slab of black diamond that is the table, and a faint whiff of burning carbon trickles into the air, and then the diners are hungry all over again, ready for the next delight.

The meal is a symphony of flavors and textures. The balance is perfect between sweet and tart, warm and cool, spicy and bland. A pink meat is followed by a white one, and then by fruit, then cheese, and meat again, a different kind, and finer cheeses. A dozen wines or more are served. An occasional course is still alive, moving slowly about its plate; Marilisa takes her cue from Leo, conquers any squeamishness, traps and consumes her little wriggling victims with pleasure. Now and then the underlying dish is meant to be eaten along with its contents, as she discovers by lagging just a moment behind the other guests and imitating their behavior.

After dinner comes the unveiling of the painting, in the atrium below the dining-hall. The guests gather along the balcony of the dining-hall and the atrium roof is retracted.

Leo’s paintings are huge rectangular constructions made of fine sparkling sand of many colors, laid out within a high border of molten copper. The surfaces of each work are two-dimensional, but the cloudy hint of a third dimension is always visible, and even that is only the tip of an underlying multidimensional manifold that vanishes at mysterious angles into the fabric of the piece. Down in those churning sandy depths lie wells of color with their roots embedded in the hidden mechanisms that control the piece. These wells constantly contribute streams of minute glittering particles to the patterns at the surface, in accordance with the changing signals from below. There is unending alteration; none of Leo’s pieces is ever the same two hours running.

A ripple of astonishment breaks forth as the painting is revealed, and then a rising burst of applause. The pattern is one of interlaced spirals in gentle pastels, curvilinear traceries in pink and blue and pale green, with thin black circles surrounding them and frail white lines radiating outward in groups of three to the vivid turquoise borders of the sand. Leo’s friends swarm around him to congratulate him. They even congratulate Marilisa. “He is a master—an absolute master!” She basks in his triumph.

Later in the evening she returns to the balcony to see if she can detect the first changes in the pattern. The changes, usually, are minute and subtle ones, requiring a discriminating eye, but even in her short while with Leo she has learned to discern the tiniest of alterations.

This time, though, no expertise is required. In little more than an hour the lovely surface has been significantly transformed. A thick, jagged black line has abruptly sprung into being, descending like a dark scar from upper right to lower left. Marilisa has never seen such a thing happen before. It is like a wound in the painting: a mutilation. It draws a little involuntary cry of shock from her.

Others gather. “What does it mean?” they ask. “What is he saying?”

From someone in African tribal dress, someone who nevertheless is plainly not African, comes an interpretation: “We see the foretelling of schism, the evocation of a transformation of the era. The dark line moves in brutal strokes through the center of our stability-point. There, do you see, the pink lines and the blue? And then it drops down into the unknown dominion beyond the painting’s eastern border, the realm of the mythic, the grand apocalyptic.”

Leo is summoned. He is calm. But Leo is always calm. He shrugs away the urgent questions: the painting, he says, is its own meaning, not subject to literal analysis. It is what it is, nothing more. A stochastic formula governs the changes in his works. All is random. The jagged black line is simply a jagged black line.

Music comes from another room. New servitors appear, creatures with three metal legs and one telescoping arm, offering brandies and liqueurs. The guests murmur and laugh. “A master,” they tell Marilisa once again. “An absolute master!”

She likes to ask him about the far-away past—the quaint and remote twenty-third century, the brusque and dynamic twenty-fourth. He is like some great heroic statue rising up out of the mists of time, embodying in himself first-hand knowledge of eras that are mere legends to her.

“Tell me how people dressed, back then,” she begs him. “What sorts of things they said, the games they played, where they liked to go on their holidays. And the buildings, the architecture: how did things look? Make me feel what it was like: the sounds, the smells, the whole flavor of the long-ago times.”

He laughs. “It gets pretty jumbled, you know. The longer you live, the more muddled-up your mind becomes.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that at all! I think you remember every bit of it. Tell me about your father and mother.”

“My father and my mother—” He pronounces the words musingly, as though they are newly minted concepts for him. “My father—he was tall, even taller than I am—a mathematician, he was, or maybe a composer, something abstruse like that—”

“And his eyes? What kind of eyes did he have?”

“His eyes—I don’t know, his eyes were unusual, but I can’t tell you how—an odd color, or very penetrating, maybe—there was something about his eyes—” His voice trails off.

“And your mother?”

“My mother. Yes.” He is staring into the past and it seems as if he sees nothing but haze and smoke there. “My mother. I just don’t know what to tell you. She’s dead, you realize. A long time, now. Hundreds of years. They both died before Process. It was all such a long time ago, Marilisa.”

His discomfort is only too apparent.

“All right,” she says. “We don’t have to talk about them. But tell me about the clothing, at least. What you wore when you were a young man. Whether people liked darker colors then. Or the food, the favorite dishes. Anything. The shape of ordinary things. How they were different.”

Obligingly he tries to bring the distant past to life for her. Images come through, though, however blurry, however indistinct. The strangeness, the alien textures of the long ago. Whoever said the past is another country was right; and Leo is a native of that country. He speaks of obsolete vehicles, styles, ideas, flavors. She works hard at comprehending his words, she eagerly snatches concrete meanings from his clusters of hazy impressions. Somehow the past seems as important to her as the future, or even more so. The past is where Leo has lived so very much of his life. His gigantic past stretches before her like an endless pathless plain. She needs to learn her way across it; she needs to find her bearings, the points of her compass, or she will be lost.

It is time for Leo to undergo Process once more. He goes every five years and remains at the clinic for eleven days. She would like to accompany him, but guests are not allowed, not even spouses. The procedures are difficult and delicate. The patients are in a vulnerable state while undergoing treatment.

So off he goes without her to be made young again. Elegant homeostatic techniques of automatic bioenergetic correction will extend his exemption from sagging flesh and spreading waistline and blurry eyesight and graying hair and hardening arteries for another term.

Marilisa has no idea what Process is actually like. She imagines him sitting patiently upright day after day in some bizarre womb-like tank, his body entirely covered in a thick mass of some sort of warm, quivering purplish gel, only his head protruding, while the age-poisons are extracted from him by an elaborate array of intricate pipettes and tubes, and the glorious fluids of new youthfulness are pumped into him. But of course she is only imagining. For all she knows, the whole thing is done with a single injection, like the Prep that she undergoes every couple of years to keep her in good trim until she is old enough for Process.

While Leo is away, his son Fyodor pays her an uninvited visit. Fyodor is the child of Miaule, the fifth wife. The marriage to Miaule was Leo’s briefest one, only eight years. Marilisa has never asked why. She knows nothing substantial about Leo’s previous marriages and prefers to keep it that way.

“Your father’s not here,” she says immediately, when she finds Fyodor’s flitter docked to the harbor of their sky-house.

“I’m not here to visit him. I’m here to see you.” He is a compact, blockily built man with a low center of gravity, nothing at all in appearance like his rangy father. His sly sidewise smile is insinuating, possessive, maddening. “We don’t know each other as well as we should, Marilisa. You’re my stepmother, after all.”

“What does that have to do with anything? You have half a dozen stepmothers.” Was that true? Could the wives before Miaule be regarded as his stepmothers, strictly speaking?

“You’re the newest one. The most mysterious one.”

“There’s nothing mysterious about me at all. I’m terribly uninteresting.”

“Not to my father, apparently.” A vicious sparkle enters Fyodor’s eyes. “Are you and he going to have children?”

The suggestion startles her. She and Leo have never talked about that; she has never so much as given it a thought.

Angrily she says, “I don’t think that that’s any of your—”

“He’ll want to. He always does.”

“Then we will. Twenty years from now, maybe. Or fifty. Whenever it seems appropriate. Right now we’re quite content just with each other.” He has found an entirely new level on which to unsettle her, and Marilisa is infuriated even more with him for that. She turns away from him. “If you’ll excuse me, Fyodor, I have things to—”

“Wait.” His hand darts out, encircles her wrist, seizes it a little too tightly, then relaxes to a gentler, almost affectionate grip. “You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this. Come stay with me for a few days while he’s at the clinic.”

She glowers at him. “Don’t be absurd.”

“I’m simply being hospitable, mother.”

“I’m sure he’d be very amused to hear that.”

“He’s always found what I do highly amusing. Come. Pack your things and let’s go. Don’t you think you owe yourself a little amusement too?”

Not bothering to conceal her anger and loathing, Marilisa says, “What exactly are you up to, Fyodor? Are you looking for vengeance? Trying to get even with him for something?”

“Vengeance? Vengeance?” Fyodor seems genuinely puzzled. “Why would I want that? I mean, after all, what is he to me?”

“Your father, for one thing.”

“Well, yes. I’ll grant you that much. But what of it? All of that happened such a long time ago.” He laughs. He sounds almost jolly. “You’re such an old-fashioned kind of girl, Marilisa!”

A couple of hours after she succeeds in getting rid of Fyodor, she has another unexpected and unwanted visitor: Katrin. At least Katrin has the grace to call while she is still over Nevada to say that she would like to drop in. Marilisa is afraid to refuse. She knows that Leo wants some sort of relationship to develop between them. Quite likely he has instigated this very visit. If she turns Katrin away, Leo will find out, and he will be hurt. The last thing Marilisa would want to do is to hurt Leo.

It is impossible for her to get used to Katrin’s beauty: that sublime agelessness, which looks so unreal precisely because it is real. She genuinely seems to be only thirty, golden-haired and shining in the first dewy bloom of youth. Katrin was Leo’s wife for forty years. Estil and Liss, the two children they had together, are almost two hundred years old. The immensity of Katrin’s history with Leo looms over her like some great monolithic slab.

“I talked to Leo this morning at the clinic,” Katrin announces. “He’s doing very well.”

“You talked to him? But I thought that nobody was allowed—”

“Oh, my dear, I’ve taken forty turns through that place! I know everybody there only too well. When I call, they put me right through. Leo sends his warmest love.”

“Thank you.”

“He loves you terribly, you know. Perhaps more than is really good for him. You’re the great love of his life, Marilisa.”

Marilisa feels a surge of irritation, and allows it to reach the surface. “Oh, Katrin, be serious with me! How could I ever believe something like that?” And what does she mean, Perhaps more than is really good for him?

“You should believe it. You must, in fact. I’ve had many long talks with him about you. He adores you. He’d do anything for you. It’s never been like this for him before. I have absolute proof of that. Not with me, not with Tedesca, not with Thane, not with—”

She recites the whole rest of the list. Syantha, Miaule, Iavilda, while Marilisa ticks each one off in her mind. They could do it together in a kind of choral speaking, the litany of wives’ names, but Marilisa remains grimly silent. She is weary of that list of names. She hates the idea that Katrin talks with Leo about her; she hates the idea that Katrin still talks with Leo at all. But she must accept it, apparently. Katrin bustles about the house, admiring this, exclaiming rapturously over that. To celebrate Leo’s imminent return she has brought a gift, a tiny artifact, a greenish little bronze sculpture recovered from the sea off Greece, so encrusted by marine growths that it is hard to make out what it represents. A figurine of some sort, an archer, perhaps, holding a bow that has lost its string. Leo is a collector of small antiquities. Tiny fragments of the past are arrayed in elegant cases in every room of their house. Marilisa offers proper appreciation. “Leo will love it,” she tells Katrin. “It’s perfect for him.”

“Yes. I know.”

Yes. You do.

Marilisa offers drinks. They nibble at sweet dainty cakes and chat. Two pretty, young, well-to-do women idling away a pleasant afternoon, but one is two hundred years older than the other. For Marilisa it is like playing hostess to Cleopatra, or Helen of Troy.

Inevitably the conversation keeps circling back to Leo.

“The kindest man I’ve ever known,” says Katrin. “If he has a fault, I think, it’s that he’s too kind. Time and again, he’s let himself endure great pain for the sake of avoiding being unkind to some other person. He’s utterly incapable of disappointing other people, of letting anyone down in any way, of hurting anyone, regardless of the distress to himself, the damage, the pain. I’m speaking of emotional pain, of course.”

Marilisa doesn’t want to hear Katrin talk about Leo’s faults, or his virtues, or anything else. But she is a dutiful wife; she sees the visit through to its end, and embraces Katrin with something indistinguishable from warmth, and stands by the port watching Katrin’s flitter undock and go zipping off into the northern sky. Then, only then, she permits herself to cry. The conversation, following so soon upon Fyodor’s visit, has unnerved her. She sifts through it, seeking clues to the hidden truths that everyone but she seems to know. Leo’s alleged vast love for her. Leo’s unwillingness to injure others, heedless of the costs to himself. He loves you terribly, you know. Perhaps more than is really good for him. And suddenly she has the answer. Leo does love her, yes. Leo always loves his wives. But the marriage was fundamentally a mistake; she is much too young for him, callow, unformed; what he really needs is a woman like Katrin, ancient behind her beauty and infinitely, diabolically wise. The reality, she sees, is that he has grown bored already with his new young wife, he is in fact unhappy in the marriage, but he is far too kindhearted to break the truth to her, and so he inverts it, he talks of a marriage that will endure forever and ever. And confides in Katrin, unburdening himself of his misery to her.

If any of this is true, Marilisa thinks, then I should leave him. I can’t ask him to suffer on and on indefinitely with a wife who can’t give him what he needs.

She wonders what effect all this crying has had on her face, and activates a mirror in front of her. Her eyes are red and puffy, yes. But what’s this? A line, in the corner of her eye? The beginning of age-wrinkles? These doubts and conflicts are suddenly aging her: can it be? And this? A gray hair? She tugs it out and stares at it; but as she holds it at one angle or another it seems just as dark as all the rest. Illusions. An overactive imagination, nothing more. Damn Katrin! Damn her!

Even so, she goes for a quick gerontological exam two days before Leo is due to come home from the clinic. It is still six months until the scheduled date of her next Prep injection, but perhaps a few signs of age are beginning to crop up prematurely. Prep will arrest the onset of aging but it won’t halt it altogether, the way Process will do; and it is occasionally the case, so she has heard, for people in the immediate pre-Process age group to sprout a few lines on their faces, a few gray hairs, while they are waiting to receive the full treatment that will render them ageless forever.

The doctor is unwilling to accelerate her Prep schedule, but he does confirm that a few little changes are cropping up, and sends her downstairs for some fast cosmetic repairs. “It won’t get any worse, will it?” she asks him, and he laughs and assures her that everything can be fixed, everything, all evidence that she is in fact closer now to her fortieth birthday than she is to her thirtieth swiftly and painlessly and confidentially eradicated. But she hates the idea that she is actually aging, ever so slightly, while all about her are people much older than she—her husband, his many former wives, his swarm of children—whose appearance is frozen forever in perfect unassailable youthfulness. If only she could start Process now and be done with it! But she is still too young. Her somatotype report is unanswerable; the treatment will not only be ineffective at this stage in her cellular development, it might actually be injurious. She will have to wait. And wait and wait and wait.

Then Leo comes back, refreshed, invigorated, revitalized. Marilisa’s been around people fresh from Process many times before—her parents, her grandparents, her great-grandparents—and knows what to expect; but even so she finds it hard to keep up with him. He’s exhaustingly cheerful, almost frighteningly ardent, full of high talk and ambitious plans. He shows her the schematics for six new paintings, a decade’s worth of work conceived all at once. He proposes that they give a party for three hundred people. He suggests that they take a grand tour for their next anniversary—it will be their fifth—to see the wonders of the world, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the floor of the Mindanao Trench. Or a tour of the moon—the asteroid belt—

“Stop!” she cries, feeling breathless. “You’re going too fast!”

“A weekend in Paris, at least,” he says.

“Paris. All right. Paris.”

They will leave next week. Just before they go, she has lunch with a friend from her single days, Loisa, a pre-Process woman like herself who is married to Ted, who is also pre-Process by just a few years. Loisa has had affairs with a couple of older men, men in their nineties and early hundreds, so perhaps she understands the other side of things as well.

“I don’t understand why he married me,” Marilisa says. “I must seem like a child to him. He’s forgotten more things than I’ve ever known, and he still knows plenty. What can he possibly see in me?”

“You give him back his youth,” Loisa says. “That’s what all of them want. They’re like vampires, sucking the vitality out of the young.”

“That’s nonsense and you know it. Process gives him back his youth. He doesn’t need a young wife to do that for him. I can provide him with the illusion of being young, maybe, but Process gives him the real thing.”

“Process jazzes them up, and then they need confirmation that it’s genuine. Which only someone like you can give. They don’t want to go to bed with some old hag a thousand years old. She may look gorgeous on the outside but she’s corroded within, full of a million memories, loaded with all the hate and poison and vindictiveness that you store up over a life that long, and he can feel it all ticking away inside her and he doesn’t want it. Whereas you—all fresh and new—”

“No. No. It isn’t like that at all. The older women are the interesting ones. We just seem empty.”

“All right. If that’s what you want to believe.”

“And yet he wants me. He tells me he loves me. He tells one of his old ex-wives that I’m the great love of his life. I don’t understand it.”

“Well, neither do I,” says Loisa, and they leave it at that.

In the bathroom mirror, after lunch, Marilisa finds new lines in her forehead, new wisps of gray at her temples. She has them taken care of before Paris. Paris is no city to look old in.

In Paris they visit the Louvre and take the boat ride along the Seine and eat at little Latin Quarter bistros and buy ancient objets d’art in the galleries of St.-Germain-des-Prés. She has never been to Paris before, though of course he has, so often that he has lost count. It is very beautiful but strikes her as somehow fossilized, a museum exhibit rather than a living city, despite all the life she sees going on around her, the animated discussions in the cafés, the bustling restaurants, the crowds in the Metro. Nothing must have changed here in five hundred years. It is all static—frozen—lifeless. As though the entire place has been through Process.

Leo seems to sense her gathering restlessness, and she sees a darkening in his own mood in response. On the third day, in front of one of the rows of ancient bookstalls along the river, he says, “It’s me, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“The reason why you’re so glum. It can’t be the city, so it has to be me. Us. Do you want to leave, Marilisa?”

“Leave Paris? So soon?”

“Leave me, I mean. Perhaps the whole thing has been just a big mistake. I don’t want to hold you against your will. If you’ve started to feel that I’m too old for you, that what you really need is a much younger man, I wouldn’t for a moment stand in your way.”

Is this how it happens? Is this how his marriages end, with him sadly, lovingly, putting words in your mouth?

“No,” she says. “I love you, Leo. Younger men don’t interest me. The thought of leaving you has never crossed my mind.”

“I’ll survive, you know, if you tell me that you want out.”

“I don’t want out.”

“I wish I felt completely sure of that.”

She is getting annoyed with him, now. “I wish you did too. You’re being silly, Leo. Leaving you is the last thing in the world I want to do. And Paris is the last place in the world where I would want my marriage to break up. I love you. I want to be your wife forever and ever.”

“Well, then.” He smiles and draws her to him; they embrace; they kiss. She hears a patter of light applause. People are watching them. People have been listening to them and are pleased at the outcome of their negotiations. Paris! Ah, Paris!

When they return home, though, he is called away almost immediately to Barcelona to repair one of his paintings, which has developed some technical problem and is undergoing rapid disagreeable metamorphosis. The work will take three or four days; and Marilisa, unwilling to put herself through the fatigue of a second European trip so soon, tells him to go without her. That seems to be some sort of cue for Fyodor to show up, scarcely hours after Leo’s departure. How does he know so unerringly when to find her alone?

His pretense is that he has brought an artifact for Leo’s collection, an ugly little idol, squat and frog-faced, covered with lumps of brown oxidation. She takes it from him brusquely and sets it on a randomly chosen shelf, and says, mechanically, “Thank you very much. Leo will be pleased. I’ll tell him you were here.”

“Such charm. Such hospitality.”

“I’m being as polite as I can. I didn’t invite you.”

“Come on, Marilisa. Let’s get going.”

“Going? Where? What for?”

“We can have plenty of fun together and you damned well know it. Aren’t you tired of being such a loyal little wife? Politely sliding through the motions of your preposterous little marriage with your incredibly ancient husband?”

His eyes are shining strangely. His face is flushed.

She says softly, “You’re crazy, aren’t you?”

“Oh, no, not crazy at all. Not as nice as my father, maybe, but perfectly sane. I see you rusting away here like one of the artifacts in his collection and I want to give you a little excitement in your life before it’s too late. A touch of the wild side, do you know what I mean, Marilisa? Places and things he can’t show you, that he can’t even imagine. He’s old. He doesn’t know anything about the world we live in today. Jesus, why do I have to spell it out for you? Just drop everything and come away with me. You won’t regret it.” He leans forward, smiling into her face, utterly sure of himself, plainly confident now that his blunt unceasing campaign of bald invitation will at last be crowned with success.

His audacity astounds her. But she is mystified, too.

“Before it’s too late, you said. Too late for what?”

“You know.”

“Do I?”

Fyodor seems exasperated by what he takes to be her willful obtuseness. His mouth opens and closes like a shutting trap; a muscle quivers in his cheek; something seems to be cracking within him, some carefully guarded bastion of self-control. He stares at her in a new way—angrily? Contemptuously?—and says, “Before it’s too late for anybody to want you. Before you get old and saggy and shriveled. Before you get so withered and ancient-looking that nobody would touch you.”

Surely he is out of his mind. Surely. “Nobody has to get that way any more, Fyodor.”

“Not if they undergo Process, no. But you—you, Marilisa—” He smiles sadly, shakes his head, turns his hands palms upward in a gesture of hopeless regret.

She peers at him, bewildered. “What can you possibly be talking about?”

For the first time in her memory Fyodor’s cool cocky aplomb vanishes. He blinks and gapes. “So you still haven’t found out. He actually did keep you in the dark all this time. You’re a null, Marilisa! A short-timer! Process won’t work for you! The one-in-ten-thousand shot, that’s you, the inherent somatic unreceptivity. Christ, what a bastard he is, to hide it from you like this! You’ve got eighty, maybe ninety years and that’s it. Getting older and older, wrinkled and bent and ugly, and then you’ll die, the way everybody in the world used to. So you don’t have forever and a day to get your fun, like the rest of us. You have to grab it right now, fast, while you’re still young. He made us all swear never to say a word to you, that he was going to be the one to tell you the truth in his own good time, but why should I give a damn about that? We aren’t children. You have a right to know what you really are. Fuck him, is what I say. Fuck him!” Fyodor’s face is crimson now. His eyes are rigid and eerily bright with a weird fervor. “You think I’m making this up? Why would I make up something like this?”

It is like being in an earthquake. The floor seems to heave. She has never been so close to the presence of pure evil before. With the tightest control she can manage she says, “You’d make it up because you’re a lying miserable bastard, Fyodor, full of hatred and anger and pus. And if you think—But I don’t need to listen to you any more. Just get out of here!”

“It’s true. Everybody knows it, the whole family! Ask Katrin! She’s the one I heard it from first. Christ, ask Leo! Ask Leo!”

“Out,” she says, flicking her hand at him as though he is vermin. “Now. Get the hell out. Out.”

She promises herself that she will say nothing to Leo about the monstrous fantastic tale that has come pouring out of his horrid son, or even about his clumsy, idiotic attempt at seduction—it’s all too shameful, too disgusting, too repulsive, and she wants to spare him the knowledge of Fyodor’s various perfidies—but of course it all comes blurting from her within an hour after Leo is back from Barcelona. Fyodor is intolerable, she says. Fyodor’s behavior has been too bizarre and outrageous to conceal. Fyodor has come here unasked and spewed a torrent of cruel fantastic nonsense in a grotesque attempt at bludgeoning her into bed.

Leo says gravely, “What kind of nonsense?” and she tells him in a quick unpunctuated burst and watches his smooth taut face collapse into weary jowls, watches him seem to age a thousand years in the course of half a minute. He stands there looking at her, aghast; and then she understands that it has to be true, every terrible word of what Fyodor has said. She is one of those, the miserable statistical few of whom everybody has heard, but only at second or third hand. The treatments will not work on her. She will grow old and then she will die. They have tested her and they know the truth, but the whole bunch of them have conspired to keep it from her, the doctors at the clinic, Leo’s sons and daughters and wives, her own family, everyone. All of it Leo’s doing. Using his influence all over the place, his enormous accrued power, to shelter her in her ignorance.

“You knew from the start?” she asks, finally. “All along?”

“Almost. I knew very early. The clinic called me and told me, not long after we got engaged.”

“My God. Why did you marry me, then?”

“Because I loved you.”

“Because you loved me.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“I wish I knew what that meant,” she says. “If you loved me, how could you hide a thing like this from me? How could you let me build my life around a lie?”

Leo says, after a moment, “I wanted you to have the good years, untainted by what would come later. There was time for you to discover the truth later. But for now—while you were still young—the clothes, the jewelry, the traveling, all the joy of being beautiful and young—why ruin it for you? Why darken it with the knowledge of what would be coming?”

“So you made everybody go along with the lie? The people at the clinic. Even my own family, for God’s sake!”

“Yes.”

“And all the Prep treatments I’ve been taking—just a stupid pointless charade, right? Accomplishing nothing. Leading nowhere.”

“Yes. Yes.”

She begins to tremble. She understands the true depths of his compassion now, and she is appalled. He has married her out of charity. No man her own age would have wanted her, because the developing signs of bodily deterioration in the years just ahead would surely horrify him; but Leo is beyond all that, he is willing to overlook her unfortunate little somatic defect and give her a few decades of happiness before she has to die. And then he will proceed with the rest of his life, the hundreds or thousands of years yet to come, serene in the knowledge of having allowed the tragically doomed Marilisa the happy illusion of having been a member of the ageless elite for a little while. It is stunning. It is horrifying. There is no way that she can bear it.

“Marilisa—”

He reaches for her, but she turns away. Runs. Flees.

It was three years before he found her. She was living in London, then, a little flat in the Bayswater Road, and in just those three years her face had changed so much, the little erosions of the transition between youth and middle age, that it was impossible for him entirely to conceal his instant reaction. He, of course, had not changed in the slightest way. He stood in the doorway, practically filling it, trying to plaster some sort of façade over his all-too-visible dismay, trying to show her the familiar Leo smile, trying to make the old Leo-like warmth glow in his eyes. Then after a moment he extended his arms toward her. She stayed where she was.

“You shouldn’t have tracked me down,” she says.

“I love you,” he tells her. “Come home with me.”

“It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair to you. My getting old, and you always so young.”

“To hell with that. I want you back, Marilisa. I love you and I always will.”

“You love me?” she says. “Even though—?”

“Even though. For better, for worse.”

She knows the rest of the passage—for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health—and where it goes from there. But there is nothing more she can say. She wants to smile gently and thank him for all his kindness and close the door, but instead she stands there and stands there and stands there, neither inviting him in nor shutting him out, with a roaring sound in her ears as all the million years of mortal history rise up around her like mountains.

THE MARTIAN INVASION JOURNALS OF HENRY JAMES

Kevin Anderson and I were having dinner one night late in 1994—he wanted me to provide him with some technical information about the business aspect of a writing career—and at the end of the meal he asked me, changing the subject completely, whether I’d be interested in doing a story for an anthology he was about to edit. “I very much doubt it,” I replied, perhaps a trifle coolly. I was still working on my novel Starborne and was looking forward to an extended holiday from writing once I finished it. And short-story writing had become such a pain in the neck for me, anyway. Kevin persisted. He mentioned the theme: H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds retold as eye-witness accounts from the viewpoints of other great writers of the era (Kipling, Verne, Tolstoy, Mark Twain.) I perked up. He mentioned the fee, a very generous one. Very generous. Sometimes even a pain in the neck can be worthwhile. “Can I have Henry James?” I asked.

I might have asked for Joseph Conrad, I suppose. He was a friend of Wells’s and lived nearby at the time Wells was writing War of the Worlds. But I’ve already done plenty of Conrad-channeling (the novel Downward to the Earth, which was a replay of “Heart of Darkness” set on another world, the novella “The Secret Sharer” that’s loosely based on his story of the same name, and a section of my novel Hot Sky at Midnight that tangentially re-explores a theme out of Lord Jim.) And Wells, at the turn of the century, had another friend and neighbor whose writing, very different from Conrad’s in all ways, I also admired greatly. The notion of retelling Wells’s tale of Martian invaders as if the invasion had been experienced at first hand by pudgy, timid Henry James was too good to resist.

I didn’t resist at all. I’ve rarely had so much fun writing a story.

Omni purchased magazine rights, but very shortly afterward that publication vanished into cyberspace, where I wasn’t spending much time back then, so I had no idea whether they used it or not in their short-lived electronic edition—though bibliographical sources tell me that they did, in May, 1996. In any case the story’s first appearance in print was in Kevin Anderson’s The War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, published in June, 1996.

——————

Editor’s Note:

Of all the treasures contained in the coffin-shaped wooden sea chest at Harvard’s Widener Library in which those of Henry James’s notebooks and journals that survived his death were preserved and in the associated James archive at Harvard, only James’s account of his bizarre encounter with the Martian invaders in the summer of 1900 has gone unpublished until now. The rest of the material the box contained—the diaries and datebooks, the notes for unfinished novels, the variant drafts of his late plays, and so forth—has long since been made available to James scholars, first in the form of selections under the editorship of F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1947), and then a generation later in the magisterial full text edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1987.)

Despite the superb latter volume’s assertions, in its title and subtitle, of being “complete,” “authoritative,” and “definitive,” one brief text was indeed omitted from it, which was, of course, the invasion journal. Edel and Powers are in no way to be faulted for this, since they could not have been aware of the existence of the Martian papers, which had (apparently accidentally) been sequestered long ago among a group of documents at Harvard associated with the life of James’s sister Alice (1848-1892) and had either gone unnoticed by the biographers of Alice James or else, since the diary had obviously been composed some years after her death, had been dismissed by them as irrelevant to their research. It may also be that they found the little notebook simply illegible, for James had suffered severely from writer’s cramp from the winter of 1896-97 onward; his handwriting by 1900 had become quite erratic, and many of the (largely pencilled) entries in the Martian notebook are extremely challenging even to a reader experienced in Henry James’s hand, set down as they were in great haste under intensely strange circumstances.

The text is contained in a pocket diary book, four and a half inches by six, bound in a green leatherette cover. It appears that James used such books, in those years, in which to jot notes that he would later transcribe into his permanent notebook (Houghton Journal VI, 26 October 1896 to 10 February 1909); but this is the only one of its kind that has survived. The first entry is undated, but can be specifically identified as belonging to mid-May of 1900 by its references to James’s visit to London in that month. At that time James made his home at Lamb House in the pleasant Sussex town of Rye, about seventy miles southeast of London. After an absence of nearly two years he had made a brief trip to the capital in March 1900, at which time, he wrote, he was greeted by his friends “almost as if I had returned from African or Asian exile.” After seventeen days he went home to Lamb House, but he returned to London in May, having suddenly shaven off, a few days before, the beard that he had worn since the 1860’s, because it had begun to turn white and offended his vanity. (James was then fifty-seven.) From internal evidence, then, we can date the first entry in the Martian journals to the period between May 15 and May 25, 1900.

[Undated] Stepped clean-shaven from the train at Charing Cross. Felt clean and light and eerily young: I could have been forty. A miraculous transformation, so simply achieved! Alas, the sad truth of it is that it will always be I, never any younger even without the beard; but this is a good way to greet the new century nevertheless.

Called on Helena De Kay. Gratifying surprise and expressions of pleasure over my rejuvenated physiognomy. Clemens is there, that is, “Mark Twain.” He has aged greatly in the three years since our last meeting. “The twentieth century is a stranger to me,” he sadly declares. His health is bad: has been to Sweden for a cure. Not clear what ails him, physically, at least. He is a dark and troubled soul in any case. His best work is behind him and plainly he knows it. I pray whatever God there be that that is not to be my fate.

To the club in the evening. Tomorrow a full day, the galleries, the booksellers, the customary dismaying conference with the publishers. (The war in South Africa is depressing all trade, publishing particularly badly hit, though I should think people would read more novels at a time of such tension.) Luncheon and dinner engagements, of course, the usual hosts, no doubt the usual guests. And so on and on the next day and the next and the next. I yearn already for little restful, red-roofed, uncomplicated Rye.

June 7, LH [Lamb House, Rye]: Home again at long last. London tires me: that is the truth of things. I have lost the habit of it, je crois. How I yearned, all the while I was there, for cabless days and dinnerless nights! And of course there is work to do. The Sacred Fount is now finished and ready to go to the agent. A fine flight into the high fantastic, I think—fanciful, fantastic, but very close and sustained. Writing in the first person makes me uneasy—it lends itself so readily to garrulity, to a fluidity of self-revelation—but there is no questioning that such a structure was essential to this tale.

What is to be next? There is of course the great Project, the fine and major thing, which perhaps I mean to call The Ambassadors. Am I ready to begin it? It will call for the most supreme effort, though I think the reward will be commensurate. A masterpiece, dare I say? I might do well to set down one more sketch of it before commencing. But not immediately. There is powerful temptation to be dilatory: I find a note here from Wells, who suggests that I bicycle over to Sandgate and indulge in a bit of conversation with him. Indeed it has been a while, and I am terribly fond of him. Wells first, yes, and some serious thought about my ambassadors after that.

June 14, Sandgate. I am at Wells’s this fine bright Thursday, very warm even for June. The bicycle ride in such heat across Romney Marsh to this grand new villa of his on the Kentish coast left me quite wilted, but Wells’s robust hospitality has quickly restored me.

What a vigorous man Wells is! Not that you would know it to look at him; his health is much improved since his great sickly time two years ago, but he is nonetheless such a flimsy little wisp of a man, with those short legs, that high squeaky voice, his somewhat absurd moustaches. And yet the mind of the man burns like a sun within that frail body! The energy comes forth in that stream of books, the marvelous fantastic tales, the time-machine story and the one about Dr. Moreau’s bestial monsters and the one that I think is my favorite, the pitiful narrative of the invisible man. Now he wants to write the story of a journey to the Moon, among innumerable other projects, all of which he will probably fulfill. But of course there is much more to Wells than these outlandish if amusing fables: his recent book, Love and Mr. Lewisham, is not at all a scientific romance but rather quite the searching analysis of matters of love and power. Even so Wells is not just a novelist (a mere novelist, I came close to saying!); he is a seer, a prophet, he genuinely wishes to transform the world according to his great plan for it. I doubt very much that he will have the chance, but I wish him well. It is a trifle exhausting to listen to him go on and on about the new century and the miracles that it will bring, but it is enthralling as well. And of course behind his scientific optimism lurks a dark vision, quite contradictory, of the inherent nature of mankind. He is a fascinating man, a raw, elemental force. I wish he paid more attention to matters of literary style; but, then, he wishes that I would pay less. I dare say each of us is both right and wrong about the other.

We spoke sadly of our poor friend and neighbor, Crane [Stephen Crane, the American novelist], whose untimely death last week we both lament. His short life was chaotic and his disregard for his own health was virtually criminal; but The Red Badge of Courage, I believe, will surely long outlive him. I wonder what other magnificent works were still in him when he died.

We talk of paying calls the next day on some of our other literary friends who live nearby, Conrad, perhaps, or young Hueffer, or even Kipling up at Burwash. What a den of novelists these few counties possess!

A fine dinner and splendid talk afterward.

Early to bed for me; Wells, I suppose, will stay awake far into the night, writing, writing, writing.

June 15, Spade House, Sandgate. In mid-morning after a generous late breakfast Wells is just at the point of composing a note to Conrad proposing an impromptu visit—Conrad is still despondently toiling at his interminable Lord Jim and no doubt would welcome an interruption, Wells says—when a young fellow whom Wells knows comes riding up, all out of breath, with news that a falling star has been seen crossing the skies in the night, rushing high overhead, inscribing a line of flame visible from Winchester eastward, and that—no doubt as a consequence of that event—something strange has dropped from the heavens and landed in Wells’s old town of Woking, over Surrey way. It is a tangible thunderbolt, a meteor, some kind of shaft flung by the hand of Zeus, at any rate.

So, instanter, all is up with our visit to Conrad. Wells’s scientific curiosity takes full hold of him. He must go to Woking this very moment to inspect this gift of the gods; and, willy-nilly, I am to accompany him. “You must come, you must!” he cries, voice disappearing upward into an octave extraordinary even for him. I ask him why, and he will only say that there will be revelations of an earthshaking kind, of planetary dimensions. “To what are you fantastically alluding?” I demand, but he will only smile enigmatically. And, shortly afterward, off we go.

June 15, much later, Woking. Utterly extraordinary! We make the lengthy journey over from Sandgate by pony carriage, Wells and I, two literary gentleman out for an excursion on this bright and extravagantly warm morning in late spring. I am garbed as though for a bicycle journey, my usual knickerbockers and my exiguous jacket of black and white stripes and my peaked cap; I feel ill at ease in these regalia but I have brought nothing else with me suitable for this outing. We arrive at Woking by late afternoon and plunge at once into—what other word can I use?—into madness.

The object from on high, we immediately learn, landed with an evidently violent impact in the common between Woking, Horsell, and Ottershaw, burying itself deep in the ground. The heat and fury of its impact have hurled sand and gravel in every direction and set the surrounding heather ablaze, though the fires were quickly enough extinguished. But what has fallen is no meteorite. The top of an immense metallic cylinder, perhaps thirty yards across, can be seen protruding from the pit.

Early this morning Ogilvy, the astronomer, hastened to inspect the site; and, he tells us now, he was able despite the heat emanating from the cylinder’s surface to get close enough to perceive that the top of the thing had begun to rotate—as though, so he declares, there were creatures within attempting to get out!

“What we have here is a visitation from the denizens of Mars, I would hazard,” says Wells without hesitation, in a tone of amazing calmness and assurance.

“Exactly so!” cries Ogilvy. “Exactly so!”

These are both men of science, and I am but a littérateur. I stare in bewilderment from one to the other. “How can you be so certain?” I ask them, finally.

To which Wells replies, “The peculiar bursts of light we have observed on the face of that world in recent years have aroused much curiosity, as I am sure you are aware. And then, some time ago, the sight of jets of flame leaping up night after night from the red planet, as if some great gun were being repeatedly fired—in direct consequence of which, let me propose, there eventually came the streak of light in the sky late last night, which I noticed from my study window—betokening, I would argue, the arrival here of this projectile—why, what else can it all mean, James, other than that travelers from our neighbor world lie embedded here before us on Horsell Common!”

“It can be nothing else,” Ogilvy cries enthusiastically. “Travelers from Mars! But are they suffering, I wonder? Has their passage through our atmosphere engendered heat too great for them to endure?”

A flush of sorrow and compassion rushes through me at that. It awes and flusters me to think that the red planet holds sentient life, and that an intrepid band of Martians has ventured to cross the great sea of space that separates their world from ours. To have come such an immense and to me unimaginable distance—only to perish in the attempt—! Can it be, as Ogilvy suggests, that this brave interplanetary venture will end in tragedy for the brave voyagers? I am racked briefly by the deepest concern.

How ironic, I suppose, in view of the dark and violent later events of this day, that I should expend such pity upon our visitors. But we could tell nothing, then, nor for some little while thereafter. Crowds of curiosity seekers came and went, as they have done all day; workmen with digging tools now began to attempt to excavate the cylinder, which had cooled considerably since the morning; their attempts to complete the unscrewing of the top were wholly unsuccessful. Wells could not take his eyes from the pit. He seemed utterly possessed by a fierce joy that had been kindled in him by the possibility that the cylinder held actual Martians. It was, he told me several times, almost as though one of his own scientific fantasy books were turning to reality before his eyes; and Wells confessed that he had indeed sketched out the outline of a novel about an invasion from Mars, intending to write it some two or three years hence, but of course now that scheme has been overtaken by actual events and he shall have to abandon it. He evidences little regret at this; he appears wholly delighted, precisely as a small boy might be, that the Martians are here. I dare say that he would have regarded the intrusion of a furious horde of dinosaurs into the Surrey countryside with equal pleasure.

But I must admit that I am somewhat excited as well. Travelers from Mars! How extraordinary! Quel phénomène! And what vistas open to the mind of the intrepid seeker after novelty! I have traveled somewhat myself, of course, to the Continent, at least, if not to Africa or China, but I have not ruled such farther journeys completely out, and now the prospect of an even farther one becomes possible. To make the Grand Tour of Mars! To see its great monuments and temples, and perhaps have an audience at the court of the Great Martian Cham! It is a beguiling thought, if not a completely serious one. See, see, I am becoming a fantasist worthy of Wells!

(Later. The hour of sunset.) The cylinder is open. To our immense awe we find ourselves staring at a Martian. Did I expect them to be essentially human in form? Well, then, I was foolish in my expectations. What we see is a bulky ungainly thing; two huge eyes, great as saucers; tentacles of some sort; a strange quivering mouth—yes, yes, an alien being senza dubbio, preternaturally other.

Wells, unexpectedly, is appalled. “Disgusting…dreadful,” he mutters. “That oily skin! Those frightful eyes! What a hideous devil it is!” Where has his scientific objectivity gone? For my part I am altogether fascinated. I tell him that I see rare beauty in the Martian’s strangeness, not the beauty of a Greek vase or of a ceiling by Tiepolo, of course, but beauty of a distinct kind all the same. In this, I think, my perceptions are the superior of Wells’s. There is beauty in the squirming octopus dangling from the hand of some grinning fisherman at the shore of Capri; there is beauty in the terrifiant bas-reliefs of winged bulls from the palaces of Nineveh; and there is beauty of a sort, I maintain, in this Martian also.

He laughs heartily. “You are ever the esthete, eh, James!”

I suppose that I am. But I will not retreat from my appreciation of the strange being who—struggling, it seems, against the unfamiliar conditions of our world—is moving about slowly and clumsily at the edge of its cylinder.

The creature drops back out of sight. The twilight is deepening to darkness. An hour passes, and nothing occurs. Wells suggests we seek dinner, and I heartily agree.

(Later still.) Horror! Just past eight, while Wells and I were dining, a delegation bearing a white flag of peace approached the pit, so we have learned—evidently in the desire to demonstrate to the Martians that we are intelligent and friendly beings. Ogilvy was in the group, and Stent, the Astronomer Royal, and some poor journalist who had arrived to report on the event. There came suddenly a blinding flash of flame from the pit, and another and another, and the whole delegation met with a terrible instant death, forty souls in all. The fiery beam also ignited adjacent trees and brought down a portion of a nearby house; and all those who had survived the massacre fled the scene in the wildest of terror.

“So they are monsters,” Wells ejaculates fiercely, “and this is war between the worlds!”

“No, no,” I protest, though I too am stunned by the dire news. “They are far from home—frightened, discomforted—it is a tragic misunderstanding and nothing more.”

Wells gives me a condescending glance. That one withering look places our relationship, otherwise so cordial, in its proper context. He is the hardheaded man of realities who has clawed his way up from poverty and ignorance; I am the moneyed and comfortable and overly gentle literary artist, the connoisseur of the life of the leisured classes. And then too, not for the first time, I have failed to seize the immediate horrific implications of a situation whilst concentrating on peripheral pretty responses. To brusque and self-confident Wells, in his heart of hearts, I surely must appear as something charming but effete.

I think that Wells greatly underestimates the strength of my fibre, but this is no moment to debate the point.

“Shall we pay a call on your unhappy friends from Mars, and see if they receive us more amiably?” he suggests.

I cannot tell whether he is sincere. It is always necessary to allow for Wells’s insatiable scientific curiosity.

“By all means, if that is what you wish,” I bravely say, and wait for his response. But in fact he is not serious; he has no desire to share the fate of Ogilvy and Stent; and, since it is too late now to return to Sandgate this night, we take lodgings at an inn he knows here in Woking. Clearly Wells is torn, I see, between his conviction that the Martians are here to do evil and his powerful desire to learn all that a human mind can possibly learn about these beings from an unknown world.

June 16, Woking and points east. Perhaps the most ghastly day of my life.

Just as well we made no attempt last evening to revisit the pit. Those who did—there were some such foolhardy ones—did not return, for the heat-ray was seen to flash more than once in the darkness. Great hammering noises came from the pit all night, and occasional puffs of greenish-white smoke. Devil’s work, to be sure. Just after midnight a second falling star could be seen in the northwest sky. The invasion, and there is no doubt now that that is what it is, proceeds apace.

In the morning several companies of soldiers took possession of the entire common and much of the area surrounding it. No one may approach the site and indeed the military have ordered an evacuation of part of Horsell. It is a hot, close day and we have, of course, no changes of clothing with us. Rye and dear old Lamb House seem now to be half a world away. In the night I began to yearn terribly for home, but Wells’s determination to remain here and observe the unfolding events was manifest from the time of our awakening. I was unwilling to be rebuked for my timidity, nor could I very well take his pony carriage and go off with it whilst leaving him behind, and so I resolved to see it all out at his side.

But would there be any unfolding events to observe? The morning and afternoon were dull and wearying. Wells was an endless fount of scientific speculation—he was convinced that the greater gravitational pull of Earth would keep the Martians from moving about freely on our world, and that conceivably they might drown in our thicker atmosphere, et cetera, and that was interesting to me at first and then considerably less so as he went on with it. Unasked, he lectured me interminably on the subject of Mars, its topography, its climate, its seasons, its bleak and forlorn landscape. Wells is an irrepressible lecturer: there is no halting him once he has the bit between his teeth.

In mid-afternoon we heard the sound of distant gunfire to the north: evidently attempts were being made to destroy the second cylinder before it could open. But at Woking all remained in a nerve-wracking stasis the whole day, until, abruptly, at six in the evening there came an explosion from the common, and gunfire, and a fierce shaking and a crashing that brought into my mind the force of the eruption of Vesuvius as it must have been on the day of the doom of Pompeii. We looked out and saw treetops breaking into flame like struck matches; buildings began to collapse as though the breath of a giant had been angrily expended upon them; and fires sprang up all about. The Martians had begun to destroy Woking.

“Come,” Wells said. He had quickly concluded that it was suicidal folly to remain here any longer, and certainly I would not disagree. We hastened to the pony carriage; he seized the reins; and off we went to the east, with black smoke rising behind us and the sounds of rifles and machine guns providing incongruous contrapuntal rhythms as we made our way on this humid spring evening through this most pleasant of green countrysides.

We traveled without incident as far as Leatherhead; all was tranquil; it was next to impossible to believe that behind us lay a dreadful scene of death and destruction. Wells’s wife has cousins at Leatherhead, and they, listening gravely and with obvious skepticism to our wild tales of Martians with heat-rays laying waste to Woking, gave us supper and evidently expected that we would be guests for the night, it now being nearly ten; but no, Wells had taken it into his head to drive all night, going on by way of Maidstone or perhaps Tunbridge Wells down into Sussex to deliver me to Rye, and thence homeward for him to Sandgate. It was lunacy, but in the frenzy of the moment I agreed to his plan, wishing at this point quickly to put as much distance between the invaders and myself as could be managed.

And so we took our hasty leave of Leatherhead. Glancing back, we saw a fearsome scarlet glow on the western horizon, and huge clots of black smoke. And, as we drove onward, there came a horrid splash of green light overhead, which we both knew must be the third falling star, bringing with it the next contingent of Martians.

Nevertheless I believed myself to be safe. I have known little if any physical danger in my life and it has a certain unreal quality to me; I cannot ever easily accept it as impinging on my existence. Therefore it came as a great astonishment and a near unhinging of my inner stability when, sometime past midnight, with thunder sounding in the distance and the air portending imminent rain, the pony abruptly whinnied and reared in terror, and a moment later we beheld a titanic metal creature, perhaps one hundred feet high, striding through the young forest before us on three great metal legs, smashing aside all that lay in its way.

“Quickly!” Wells cried, and seized me by the wrist in an iron grasp and tumbled me out of the cart, down into the grass by the side of the road, just as the poor pony swung round in its fright and bolted off, cart and all, into the woods. The beast traveled no more than a dozen yards before it became fouled amidst low-lying branches and tumbled over, breaking the cart to splinters and, I am afraid, snapping its own neck in the fall. Wells and I lay huddled beneath a shrub as the colossal three-legged metal engine passed high above us. Then came a second one, following in its track, setting up a monstrous outcry as it strode along. “Aloo! Aloo!” it called, and from its predecessor came back an acknowledging “Aloo!”

“The Martians have built war machines for themselves,” Wells murmured. “That was the hammering we heard in the pit. And now these two are going to greet the companions who have just arrived aboard the third cylinder.”

How I admired his cool analytical mind just then! For the thunderstorm had reached us, and we suddenly now were being wholly drenched, and muddied as well, and it was late at night and our cart was smashed and our pony was dead, the two of us alone out here in a deserted countryside at the mercy of marauding metal monsters, and even then Wells was capable of so cool an assessment of the events exploding all around us.

I have no idea how long we remained where we were. Perhaps we even dozed a little. No more Martians did we see. A great calmness came over me as the rain went on and on and I came to understand that I could not possibly get any wetter. At length the storm moved away; Wells aroused me and announced that we were not far from Epsom, where perhaps we might find shelter if the Martians had not already devastated it; and so, drenched to the bone, we set out on foot in the darkness. Wells prattled all the while, about the parchedness of Mars and how intensely interested the Martians must be in the phenomenon of water falling from the skies. I replied somewhat curtly that it was not a phenomenon of such great interest to me, the rain now showing signs of returning. In fact I doubted I should survive this soaking. Already I was beginning to feel unwell. But I drew on unsuspected reservoirs of strength and kept pace with the indomitable Wells as we endlessly walked. To me this excursion was like a dream, and not a pleasing one. We tottered on Epsomward all through the dreadful night, arriving with the dawn.

June 20? 21? 22? Epsom.

My doubt as to today’s date is trivial in regard to my doubt over everything else. It seems that I have been in a delirium of fever for at least a week, perhaps more, and the world has tottered all about me in that time.

Wells believes that today is Thursday, the 21st of June, 1900. Our innkeeper passionately insists it is a day earlier than that. His daughter thinks we have reached Saturday or even Sunday. If we had today’s newspaper we should be able to settle the question easily enough, but there are no newspapers. Nor can we wire Greenwich to learn whether the summer solstice has yet occurred, for the Observatory no doubt has been abandoned, as has all the rest of London. Civilization, it appears, has collapsed utterly in this single week. All days are Sundays now: nothing stirs, there is no edifying life.

I too collapsed utterly within an hour or two of the end of our night’s march to Epsom, lost in a dizzying rhapsody of fatigue and exposure. Wells has nursed me devotedly. Apparently I have had nearly all of his meager ration of food. There are five of us here, the innkeeper and his wife and daughter and us, safely barricaded, so we hope, against the Martian killing machines and the lethal black gas that they have been disseminating. Somehow this town, this inn, this little island within England where we lie concealed, has escaped the general destruction—thus far. But now comes word that our sanctuary may soon be violated; and what shall we do, Wells and I? Proceeding eastward to our homes along the coast is impossible: the Martians have devastated everything in that direction. “We must to London,” Wells insists. “The great city stands empty. Only there will we find food enough to continue, and places to hide from them.”

It is a source of wonder and mystery to me that all has fallen apart so swiftly, that—in southern England, at least—the comfortable structures of the society I knew have evaporated entirely, within a week, vanishing with the speed of snowflakes after a spring storm.

What has happened? This has happened:

Cylinders laden with Martians have continued daily to arrive from the void. The creatures emerge; they assemble their gigantic transporting carriages; the mechanical colossi go back and forth upon the land, spreading chaos and death with their heat-rays, their clouds of poisonous black vapor, and any number of other devices of deviltry. Whole towns have been charred; whole regiments have been dropped in their tracks; whole counties have been abandoned. The government, the military, all has disintegrated. Our leaders have vanished in a hundred directions. Her Majesty and the Members of Parliament and the entire authority-wielding apparatus of the state now seem as mythical as the knights of the Round Table. We have been thrown back into a state of nature, every man for himself.

In London, so our hosts have told us, all remained ignorantly calm through Sunday last, until news came to the capital from the south of the terror and destruction there, the giant invulnerable spiderlike machines, the fires, the suffocating poisonous gas. Evidently a ring of devastation had been laid down on a great arc south of the Thames from Windsor and Staines over through Reigate, at least, and on past Maidstone to Deal and Broadstairs on the Kentish coast. Surely they were closing the net on London, and on Monday morning the populace of that great city commenced to flee in all directions. A few of those who came this way, hoping to reach friends or kin in Kent or East Sussex—there were many thousands—told Wells and the innkeeper of the furious frantic exodus, the great mobs streaming northward, and those other desperate mobs flooding eastward to the Essex shore, as the methodical Martians advanced on London, exterminating all in their path. The loss of life, in that mad rush, must have been unthinkably great.

“And we have had no Martians here?” I asked Wells.

“On occasion, yes,” he replied casually, as though I had asked him about cricket matches or rainstorms. “A few of their great machines passed through earlier in the week, bound on deadly business elsewhere, no doubt; we called no attention to ourselves, and they took no notice of us. We have been quite fortunate, James.”

The landlord’s daughter, though—a wild boyish girl of fourteen or fifteen—has been out boldly roving these last few days, and reports increasing numbers of Martians going to and fro to the immediate south and east of us. She says that everything is burned and ruined as far as she went in the directions of Banstead and Leatherhead, and some sort of red weed, no doubt of Martian origin, is weirdly spreading across the land. It is only a matter of time, Wells believes, before they come into Epsom again, and this time, like the randomly striking godlike beings that they seem to be, they may take it into their minds to hurl this place into ruin as well. We must be off, he says; we must to London, where we will be invisible in the vastness of the place.

“And should we not make an attempt to reach our homes, instead?” I ask.

“There is no hope of that, none,” says Wells. “The Martians will have closed the entire coast, to prevent an attack through the Strait of Dover by our maritime forces. Even if we survived the journey to the coast, we should find nothing there, James, nothing but ash and rubble. To London, my friend: that is where we must go, now that you are sturdy again.”

There is no arguing with Wells. It would be like arguing with a typhoon.

June 23, let us say. En route to London.

How strange this once-familiar landscape seems! I feel almost as though I have been transported to Mars and my old familiar life has been left behind on some other star.

We are just outside Wimbledon. Everything is scorched and blackened to our rear; everything seems scorched and blackened ahead of us. We have seen things too terrible to relate, signs of the mass death that must have been inflicted here. Yet all is quiet now. The weather continues fiercely hot and largely dry, and the red Martian weed, doubtless finding conditions similar to those at home, has spread everywhere. It reminds me of the enormous cactus plants one sees in southern Italy, but for its somber brick-red hue and the great luxuriance of its habit of growth: it is red, red, red, as far as the eye can see. A dreamlike transformation, somber and depressing in its morbid implications, and of course terrifying. I am certain I will never see my home again, which saddens me. It seems pure insanity to me to be going on into London, despite all the seemingly cogent reasons Wells expresses.

And yet, and yet! Behind the terror and the sadness, how wonderfully exhilarating all this is, really! Shameful of me to say so, but I confess it only to my notebook: this is the great adventure of my life, the wondrous powerful action in which I have ever longed to be involved. At last I am fully living! My heart weeps for the destruction I see all about me, for the fall of civilization itself, but yet—I will not deny it—I am invigorated far beyond my considerable years by the constant peril, by the demands placed upon my formerly coddled body, above all, by the sheer strangeness of everything within my ken. If I survive this journey and live to make my escape to some unblighted land I shall dine out on these events forever.

We are traveling, to my supreme astonishment, by motorcar. Wells found one at a house adjacent to the inn, fully stocked with petrol, and he is driving the noisy thing, very slowly but with great perseverance, with all the skill of an expert chauffeur. He steers around obstacles capably; he handles sharp and frightening turns in the road with supreme aplomb. It was only after we had been on the road for over an hour that he remarked to me, in an offhand way, “Do you know, James, I have never driven one of these machines before. But there’s nothing at all to it, really! Nothing!” Wells is extraordinary. He has offered to give me a chance at the wheel; but no, no, I think I shall let him be the driver on this journey.

(Later.) An astonishing incident, somewhere between Wimbledon and London, unforgettably strange.

Wells sees the cupola of a Martian walking machine rising above the treetops not far ahead of us, and brings the motorcar to a halt while we contemplate the situation. The alien engine stands completely still, minute after minute; perhaps it has no tenant, or possibly even its occupant was destroyed in some rare successful attempt at a counterattack. Wells proposes daringly but characteristically that we go up to it on foot and take a close look at it, after which, since we are so close to London and ought not to be drawing the Martians’ attention to ourselves as we enter a city which presumably they occupy, we should abandon our motorcar and slip into the capital on foot, like the furtive fugitives that we are.

Naturally I think it’s rash to go anywhere near the Martian machine. But Wells will not be gainsaid. And so we warily advance, until we are no more than twenty yards from it; whereupon we discover an amazing sight. The Martians ride in a kind of cabin or basket high up above the great legs of their machines. But this one had dismounted and descended somehow to the ground, where it stands fully exposed in a little open space by the side of a small stream just beyond its mechanical carrier, peering reflectively toward the water for all the world as though it were considering passing the next hour with a bit of angling.

The Martian was globular in form, a mere ambulatory head without body—or a body without head, if you will—a yard or more in diameter, limbless, with an array of many whiplike tentacles grouped in two bunches by its mouth. As we breathlessly watched, the creature leaned ponderously forward and dipped a few of these tentacles into the stream, holding them there a long while in evident satisfaction, as though it were a Frenchman and this was a river of the finest claret passing before it, which could somehow be enjoyed and appreciated in this fashion. We could not take our eyes from the spectacle. I saw Wells glance toward a jagged rock of some size lying nearby, as though he had it in mind to attempt some brutal act of heroism against the alien as it stood with its back to us; but I shook my head, more out of an unwillingness to see him take life than out of fear of the consequences of such an attack, and he let the rock be.

How long did this interlude go on? I could not say. We were rooted, fascinated, by our encounter with the other. Then the Martian turned—with the greatest difficulty—and trained its huge dark eyes on us. Wells and I exchanged wary glances. Should we finally flee? The Martian seemed to carry no weapons; but who knew what powers of the mind it might bring to bear on us? Yet it simply studied us, dispassionately, as one might study a badger or a mole that has wandered out of the woods. It was a magical moment, of a sort: beings of two disparate worlds face-to-face (so to speak) and eye-to-eye, and no hostile action taken on either side.

The Martian then uttered a kind of clicking noise, which we took to be a threat, or a warning. “Time for us to be going,” Wells said, and we backed hastily out of the clearing. The clicking sound, we saw, had notified the Martian’s transport mechanism that it wished to be reseated in the cupola, and a kind of cable quickly came down, gathered it up, and raised it to its lofty perch. Now the Martian was in full possession of its armaments again, and I was convinced that my last moments had arrived. But no; no. The thing evinced no interest in murdering us. Perhaps it too had felt the magic of our little encounter; or it may be that we were deemed too insignificant to be worth slaughtering. In any event the great machine lumbered into life and went striding off toward the west, leaving Wells and me gaping slack-jawed at each other like two men who had just experienced the company of some basilisk or chimera or banshee and had lived to tell the tale.

The following day, whichever one that may be. We are in London, having entered the metropolis from the south by way of the Vauxhall Bridge after a journey on foot that makes my old trampings in Provence and the Campagna and the one long ago over the Alps into Italy seem like the merest trifling strolls. And yet I feel little weariness, for all my hunger and the extreme physical effort of these days past. It is the strange exhilaration, still, that drives me onward, muddied and tattered though I am, and with my banished beard, alas, re-emerging in all its dread whiteness.

Here in the greatest of cities the full extent of the catastrophe comes home with overwhelming impact. There is no one here. We could not be more alone were we on Crusoe’s island. The desolation is magnified by the richness of the amenities all about us, the grand hotels, the splendid town-houses, the rich shops, the theaters. Those still remain: but whom do they serve? We see a few corpses lying about here and there, no doubt those who failed to heed the warning to flee; the murderous black powder, apparently no longer lethal, covers much of the city like a horrid dark snowfall; there is some sign of looting, but not really very much, so quickly did everyone flee. The stillness is profound. It is the stillness of Pompeii, the stillness of Agamemnon’s Mycenae. But those are bleached ruins; London has the look of a vibrant city, yet, except that there is no one here.

So far as we can see, Wells and I are the only living things, but for birds, and stray cats and dogs. Not even the Martians are in evidence: they must be extending their conquests elsewhere, meaning to return in leisure when the job is done. We help ourselves to food in the fine shops of Belgravia, whose doors stand mostly open; we even dare to refresh ourselves, guiltlessly, with a bottle of three-guinea Chambertin, after much effort on Wells’s part in extracting the cork; and then we plunge onward past Buckingham Palace—empty, empty!—into the strangely bleak precincts of Mayfair and Piccadilly.

Like some revenant wandering through a dream-world I revisit the London I loved. Now it is Wells who feels the outsider, and I who am at home. Here are my first lodgings at Bolton St., in Piccadilly; here are the clubs where I so often dined, pre-eminent among them for me the Reform Club, my dear refuge and sanctuary in the city, where when still young I was to meet Gladstone and Tennyson and Schliemann of Troy. What would Schliemann make of London now? I invite Wells to admire my little pied-à-terre at the Reform, but the building is sealed and we move on. The city is ours. Perhaps we will go to Kensington, where I can show him my chaste and secluded flat at De Vere Mansions with its pretty view of the park; but no, no, we turn the other way, through the terrifying silence, the tragic solitude. Wells wishes to ascertain whether the British Museum is open. So it is up Charing Cross Road for us, and into Bloomsbury, and yes, amazingly, the museum door stands ajar. We can, if we wish, help ourselves to the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone and the Portland Vase. But to what avail? Everything is meaningless now. Wells stations himself before some battered pharaoh in the hall of Egyptian sculpture and cries out, in what I suppose he thinks is a mighty and terrible voice, “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

What, I wonder, shall we do? Wander London at will, until the Martians come and slay us as they have slain the others? There is a certain wonderful frisson to be had from being the last men in London; but in truth it is terrible, terrible, terrible. What is the worth of having survived, when civilization has perished?

Cold sausages and stale beer in a pub just off Russell Square. The red weed, we see, is encroaching everywhere in London as it is in the countryside. Wells is loquacious; talks of his impoverished youth, his early ambitions, his ferociously self-imposed education, his gradual accretion of achievement and his ultimate great triumph as popular novelist and philosopher. He has a high opinion of his intellect, but there is nothing offensive in the way he voices it, for his self-approbation is well earned. He is a remarkable man. I could have done worse for a companion in this apocalypse. Imagine being here with poor gloomy tormented Conrad, for example!

A terrifying moment toward nightfall. We have drifted down toward Covent Garden; I turn toward Wells, who has been walking a pace or two behind me peering into shop windows, and suggest that we appropriate lodgings for ourselves at the Savoy or the Ritz. No Wells! He has vanished like his own Invisible Man!

“Wells?” I cry. “Wells, where are you?”

Silence. Calma come la tomba. Has he plunged unsuspecting into some unguarded abyss of the street? Or perhaps been snatched away by some silent machine of the Martians? How am I to survive without him in this dead city? It is Wells who has the knack of breaking into food shops and such, Wells who will meet all the practical challenges of our strange life here: not I.

“Wells!” I call again. There is panic in my voice, I fear.

But I am alone. He is utterly gone. What shall I do? Five minutes go by; ten, fifteen. Logic dictates that I remain right on this spot until he reappears, for how else shall we find each other in this huge city? But night is coming; I am suddenly afraid; I am weary and unutterably sad; I see my death looming before me now. I will go to the Savoy. Yes. Yes. I begin to walk, and then to run, as my terror mounts, along Southampton Street.

Then I am at the Strand, at last. There is the hotel; and there is Wells, arms folded, calmly waiting outside it for me.

“I thought you would come here,” he says.

“Where have you been? Is this some prank, Wells?” I hotly demand.

“I called to you to follow me. You must not have heard me. Come: I must show you something, James.”

“Now? For the love of God, Wells, I’m ready to drop!” But he will hear no protests, of course. He has me by the wrist; he drags me away from the hotel, back toward Covent Garden, over to little Henrietta Street. And there, pushed up against the facade of a shabby old building—Number 14, Henrietta Street—is the wreckage of some Martian machine, a kind of low motorcar with metallic tentacles, that has smashed itself in a wild career through the street. A dead Martian is visible through the shattered window of the passenger carriage. We stare awhile in awe. “Do you see?” he asks, as though I could not. “They are not wholly invulnerable, it seems!” To which I agree, thinking only of finding a place where I can lie down; and then he allows us to withdraw, and we go to the hotel, which stands open to us, and ensconce ourselves in the most lavish suites we can find. I sleep as though I have not slept in months.

A day later yet. It is beyond all belief, but the war is over, and we are, miraculously, free of the Martian terror!

Wells and I discovered, in the morning, a second motionless Martian machine standing like a sentinel at the approach to the Waterloo Bridge. Creeping fearlessly up to it, we saw that its backmost leg was frozen in flexed position, so that the thing was balanced only on two; with one good shove we might have been able to push the whole unstable mechanism over. Of the Martian in its cabin we could see no sign.

All during the day we roamed London, searching out the Martians. I felt strangely tranquil. Perhaps it was only my extreme fatigue; but certainly we were accustomed now to the desolation, to the tangles of the red weed, the packs of newly wild dogs.

Between the Strand and Grosvenor Square we came upon three more Martian machines: dead, dead, all dead. Then we heard a strange sound, emanating from the vicinity of the Marble Arch: “Ulla, ulla, ulla,” it was, a mysterious sobbing howl. In the general silence that sound had tremendous power. It drew us; instead of fleeing, as sane men should have done, we approached. “Ulla, ulla!” A short distance down the Bayswater Road we saw a towering Martian fighting machine looming above Hyde Park: the sound was coming from it. A signal of distress? A call to its distant cohorts, if any yet lived? Hands clapped to our ears—for the cry was deafening—we drew nearer still; and, suddenly, it stopped. There seemed an emphatic permanence to that stoppage. We waited. The sound did not begin anew.

“Dead,” Wells said. “The last of them, I suspect. Crying a requiem for its race.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What our guns could not do, the lowly germs of Earth have achieved—I’ll wager a year’s earnings on that! Do you think, James, that the Martians had any way of defending themselves against our microbes? I have been waiting for this! I knew it would happen!”

Did he? He had never said a word.

July 7, Lamb House. How sweet to be home!

And so it has ended, the long nightmare of the interplanetary war. Wells and I found, all over London, the wrecked and useless vehicles of the Martians, with their dead occupants trapped within. Dead, all dead, every invader. And as we walked about, other human beings came forth from hiding places, and we embraced one another in wild congratulation.

Wells’s hypothesis was correct, as we all have learned by now. The Martians have perished in mid-conquest, victims of our terrestrial bacteria. No one has seen a living one anywhere in the past two weeks. We fugitive humans have returned to our homes; the wheels of civilization have begun to turn once more.

We are safe, yes—and yet we are not. Whether the Martians will return, fortified now against our microorganisms and ready to bend us once more to their wishes, we cannot say. But it is clear now to me that the little sense of security that we of Earth feel, most especially we inhabitants of England in the sixty-third year of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, is a pathetic illusion. Our world is no impregnable fortress. We stand open to the unpredictable sky. If Martians can come one day, Venusians may come another, or Jovians, or warlike beings from some wholly unknown star. The events of these weeks have been marvelous and terrible, and without shame I admit having derived great rewards even from my fear and my exertions; but we must all be aware now that we are at great risk of a reprise of these dark happenings. We have learned, now, that we are far from being the masters of the cosmos, as we like to suppose. It is a bitter lesson to be given at the outset of this glorious new century.

I discussed these points with Wells when he called here yesterday. He was in complete agreement.

And, as he was taking his leave, I went on, somewhat hesitantly, to express to him the other thought that had been forming in my mind all this past week. “You said once,” I began, “that you had had some scheme in mind, even before the coming of the Martians, for writing a novel of interplanetary invasion. Is that still your intent now that fantasy has become fact, Wells?”

He allowed that it was.

“But it would not now be,” I said, “your usual kind of fantastic fiction, would it? It would be more in the line of reportage, would you not say? An account of the responses of certain persons to the true and actual extreme event?”

“Of course it would, of necessity,” he said. I smiled expressively and said nothing. And then, quickly divining my meaning, he added: “But of course I would yield, cher maître, if it were your intention to—”

“It is,” I said serenely.

He was quite graceful about it, all in all. And so I will set to work tomorrow. The Ambassadors may perhaps be the grandest and finest of my novels, but it will have to wait another year or two, I suppose, for there is something much more urgent that must be written first.

[James’s notebooks indicate that he did not actually begin work on his classic novel of interplanetary conflict, The War of the Worlds, until the 28th of July, 1900. The book was finished by the 17th of November, unusually quickly for James, and after serialization in The Atlantic Monthly (August-December, 1901) was published in England by Macmillan and Company in March 1902 and in the United States by Harper & Brothers one month later. It has remained his most popular book ever since and has on three occasions been adapted for motion pictures. Wells never did write an account of his experiences during the Martian invasion, though those experiences did, of course, have a profound influence on his life and work thereafter.

—The Editor.]

CROSSING INTO THE EMPIRE

An odd history is involved with this one. I had just finished the Henry James story; and here it was still only January of 1995, my rainy-season novel well behind me, the weather bad, time on my hands. Another short story seemed like a good idea, and, as was usual at such times, my thoughts turned to Playboy. I came up with a really lovely alternative-history background, a city that is not quite Byzantine Constantinople but has some resonances with it, and, since Playboy is published in Chicago, I interwove Chicago background into it. And sent it off to Playboy fiction editor Alice Turner, who accepted it with pleasing promptitude.

It was always gratifying to sell a story to Alice; but at the very time that she was saying yes to this one, I heard from Janet Berliner, whom I had known years before as Janet Gluckman when she lived in California. She was working with the magician David Copperfield on an anthology of stories of miracles and wonders: did I care to participate? And it struck me that I had just written the perfect David Copperfield story. He is famous, after all, for astonishing disappearance illusions—he will disappear an entire jet airplane, for example, or even the complete Statue of Liberty. Pretty impressive, but what about a whole city? That might be beyond even his skills. But not mine: I had just caused the mighty capital of a great empire to vanish from its moorings and reappear in modern-day Chicago. I wanted that story to be in his book.

But I had just sold it to Playboy, which had long been my favorite story market. Withdrawing a story that Alice Turner had accepted was, well, one of the two most disagreeable kinds of withdrawal I could imagine. While I was pondering what to do, though, a second story leaped unbidden into my mind—the story that follows this one. And in an astonishingly few number of days it was written. “Listen,” I told Alice, “I’ve just had another story come out of nowhere, and I see another place where I think ‘Crossing into the Empire’ would fit. Suppose I send you the new story and if you like it you can buy that one in place of ‘Crossing’ and send ‘Crossing’ back to me, okay?”

It was a strange way for a writer to do business, but Alice and I had never had a very orthodox editor-writer relationship. I sent her “The Second Shield,” she liked it well enough to buy it, and I was free to offer “Crossing into the Empire” for the Copperfield book, Beyond Imagination, where it duly appeared in December, 1996. If you had told me, forty years ago, that I would sell two stories to Playboy the same week and then would pull one of them back to offer to someone else I would have had a very hard time believing you. But, then, there’s a lot that has happened to me over the past forty years that my younger self would have difficulty believing.

——————

Mulreany is still asleep when the Empire makes its midyear reappearance, a bit ahead of schedule. It was due to show up in Chicago on the afternoon of June 24, somewhere between five and six o’clock, and here it is only eight goddamned o’clock in the morning on the twenty-third and the phone is squalling and it’s Anderson on the line to say, “Well, I can’t exactly tell you why, boss, but it’s back here already, over on the Near West Side. The eastern border runs along Blue Island Avenue, and up as far north as the Eisenhower Expressway, practically. Duplessis says that this time it’s going to be a fifty-two-hour visitation, plus or minus ninety minutes.”

Dazzling summer sunlight floods Mulreany’s bedroom, high up above the lake. He hates being awake at this hour. Blinking, grimacing, he says, “If Duplessis missed the time of arrival by a day and a half, how the hell can he be so sure about the visitation length? Sometimes I think Duplessis is full of shit.—Which Empire is it, anyway? What are the towers in the Forum like?”

“The big square pointy-topped pink one is there, with two slender ones flanking it, dark stone, golden domes,” Anderson says.

“Basil III, most likely.”

“You’re the man who’d know, boss. How soon do we go across?”

“It’s eight in the morning, Stu.”

“Jesus, we’ve only got the fifty-two hours, and then there won’t be another chance until Christmas. Fifty-one and a half, by now. Everything’s packed and ready to go whenever you are.”

“Come get me at half past nine.”

“What about nine sharp?” Anderson says hopefully.

“I need some time to shower and get my costume on, if that’s all right with you,” Mulreany says. “Half past nine.”

It’s the Empire of Basil III this time, no question about that. What has arrived is the capital city from the waterfront all the way back to the Walls of Artabanus and even a little strip of the Byzantine Quarter beyond—the entire magnificent metropolis, that great antique city of a hundred palaces and five hundred temples and mosques, green parks and leafy promenades, shining stone obelisks and eye-dazzling colonnades. The Caspian Sea side of the city lines up precisely along South Blue Island Avenue, with the wharves and piers of the city harbor high and dry, jutting from the eastern side of the street. The longest piers reach a couple of blocks beyond Blue Island where it crosses Polk, stretching almost to the southbound lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway, which seems to be the absolute boundary of the materialization zone. A bunch of fishing boats and what looks like an imperial barge have been taken along for the ride this time, and sit forlornly beached right at the zone’s flickering edge, cut neatly in half, their sterns visible here in Chicago but their bows still back in the twelfth century. The whole interface line is bright with the customary shimmering glow. You could walk around the outside edge of the interface and find yourself in the Near West Side, which has been intruded upon but not harmed. Or you could go straight ahead into that glowing field of light and step across the boundary into the capital of the Empire.

One glance and Mulreany has no doubt that the version of the capital that has arrived on this trip is the twelfth-century one. The two golden-domed towers of black basalt that Basil III erected to mark the twentieth anniversary of his accession are visible high above the Forum on either side of the pink marble Tower of Nicholas IX, but there’s no sign of the gigantic hexagonal Cathedral of All the Gods that Basil’s nephew and successor, Simeon II, will eventually build on what is presently the site of the camel market. So Mulreany can date the manifestation of the Empire that he is looking at now very precisely to the period between 1150 and 1185. Which is good news, not only because that was one of the richest periods of the Empire’s long history, making today’s trading possibilities especially promising, but also because the Empire of the time of Basil III turns up here more often than that of any other era, and Mulreany knows his way around Basil’s capital almost like a native. Considering the risks involved, he prefers to be in familiar territory when he’s doing business over there.

The usual enormous crowd is lined up along the interface, gawking goggle-eyed at the medieval city across the way. “You’d think the dopey bastards had never seen the Empire get here before,” Mulreany mutters, as he and Anderson clamber out of the limo and head for the police barricade. The usual murmuring goes up from the onlookers at the sight of them in their working clothes. Mulreany, as the front man in this enterprise, has outfitted himself elegantly in a tight-sleeved, close-fitting knee-length tunic of green silk piped with scarlet brocade, turquoise hose, and soft leather boots in the Persian style. On his head he wears a stiff and lofty pyramid-shaped hat of Turkish design, on his left hip a long curving dagger in an elaborately chased silver sheath. Anderson, as befits his lesser status, is more simply garbed in an old-fashioned flowing tunic of pale muslin, baggy blue trousers, and sandals; his headgear is a white bonnet tied by a red ribbon. These are the clothes of a merchant of late imperial times and his amanuensis, nothing unusual over there, but pretty gaudy stuff to see on a Chicago street, and they draw plenty of attention.

Duplessis, Schmidt, and Kulikowski wait by the barricade, gabbing with a couple of the cops. Schmidt has a short woolen tunic on, like the porter he is supposed to be; he is toting the trading merchandise, two bulging burlap bags. Neither Duplessis nor Kulikowski is in costume. They won’t be going across. They’re antiquities dealers; what they do is peddle the goodies that Mulreany and his two assistants bring back from their ventures into the Empire. They don’t ever put their own necks on the line over there.

Duplessis is fidgeting around, the way he always does, looking at his watch every ten seconds or so. “About time you got here, Mike,” he tells Mulreany. “The clock is ticking-ticking-ticking.”

“Ticking so fast the Empire showed up a day and a half early, didn’t it?” Mulreany says sourly. “You screwed up the calculation a little, eh?”

“Christ, man! It’s never all that precise and you know it. We’ve got a lot of complicated factors to take into account. The equinoctial precession—the whole sidereal element—the problem of topological displacement—listen, Mike, I do my best. It gets here every six months, give or take a couple of days, that’s all we can figure. There’s no way I can tell you to the split second when it’s going to—”

“What about the calculation of when it leaves again? Suppose you miss that one by a factor of a couple of days too?”

“No,” Duplessis says. “No chance. The math’s perfectly clear: this is a two-day visitation. Look, stop worrying, Mike. You sneak across, you do your business, you come back late tomorrow afternoon. You’re just grouchy because you don’t like getting up this early.”

“And you ought to start moving,” Kulikowski tells him. “Waxman and Gross went across an hour ago. There’s Davidson about to cross over down by Roosevelt, and here comes McNeill.”

Mulreany nods. Competitors, yes, moving in on all sides. The Empire’s already been in for a couple of hours; most of the licensed crossers are probably there by now. But what the hell: there’s plenty for everybody. “You got the coins?” he asks.

Kulikowski hands Mulreany a jingling velvet purse: some walking-around money. He shakes a few of the coins out into his palm. The Emperor Basil’s broad big-nosed face looks up at him from the shiny obverse of a gold nomisma. There are a couple of little silver argentei from the time of Casimir and a few thick, impressive copper sesterces showing the hooded profile of Empress Juliana.

Impatiently Kulikowski says, “What do you think, Mike, I’d give you the wrong ones? Nothing there’s later than Basil III. Nothing earlier than the Peloponnesian Dynasty.” Passing false money, or obsolete money that has been withdrawn from circulation by imperial decree, is a serious mercantile crime over there, punishable by mutilation for the first offense, by death for the second. There are no decrees about passing money of emperors yet to be born, naturally. But that would be stupid as well as dangerous.

“Come on, Mike,” Duplessis says. “Time’s wasting. Go on in.”

“How long did you say can I stay?”

“Like I told you. Almost until sundown tomorrow.”

“That long? You sure?”

“You think it does me any good if you get stranded over there?” Duplessis says. “Trust me. I tell you you’ve got until sundown, you’ve got until sundown. Go on, now. Will you get going, for Christ’s sake?”

There’s no need for Mulreany to show his transit license. The police know all the licensed border-crossers. Only about two dozen people have the right combination of skills—the knowledge of the Empire’s language and customs, the knack of doing business in a medieval country, the willingness to take the risks involved in making the crossing. The risks are big, and crossers don’t always come back. The Empire’s official attitude toward the merchants who come over from Chicago is that they are sorcerers of some kind, and the penalty for sorcery is public beheading, so you have to keep a low profile as you do your business. Then, too, there’s the chance of catching some archaic disease that’s unknown and incurable in the modern era, or simply screwing up your timing and getting stuck over there in the Empire when it pops back to its own period of history. There are other odd little one-in-a-thousand glitch possibilities also. You have to have the intellectual equipment of a college professor plus the gall of a bank robber to make a successful living as a crosser.

The easiest place to enter today, according to Kulikowski, is the corner of Blue Island and Taylor. The imperial city is only about four feet above Chicago street level there, and Kulikowski has brought along a plank that he sets up as a little bridge to carry them up the slight grade. Mulreany leads the way; Anderson follows, and Schmidt brings up the rear, toting the two bags of trade goods. As they pass through the eerie yellow glow of the interface Mulreany glances back at Duplessis and Kulikowski, who are beginning to fade from view. He grins, winks, gives them the upturned thumb. Another couple of steps and Chicago disappears altogether, nothing visible now to the rear except the golden flicker, opaque when seen from this side, that marks the border of the materialization zone. They are in the Empire, now. Halfway across the planet and nine centuries ago in time, waltzing once more into the glittering capital city of the powerful realm that was the great rival of the Byzantines and the Turks for the domination of the medieval world.

Can of corn, he tells himself.

In today, out tomorrow, another ten or twenty million bucks’ worth of highly desirable and readily salable treasures in the bag.

The imperial barge—its back half, anyway—is just on their left as they come up the ramp. Its hull bears the royal crest and part of an inscription testifying to the greatness of the Emperor. Lounging alongside it with their backs to the interface glow are half a dozen rough-looking members of the Bulgarian Guard, the Emperor’s crack private militia. Bad news right at the outset. They give Mulreany and his companions black menacing glances.

“Nasty bastards,” Anderson murmurs. “They going to be difficult, you think?”

“Nah. Just practicing looking tough,” says Mulreany. “We stay cool and we’ll be okay.” Staying cool means telling yourself that you are simply an innocent merchant from a distant land who happens to be here at this unusual time purely by coincidence, and never showing a smidgeon of uneasiness. “But keep close to your gun, all the same.”

“Right.” Anderson slips his hand under his tunic. Both he and Schmidt are armed. Mulreany isn’t. He never is.

He figures they’ll get past the guardsmen okay. The Bulgars are a wild and unpredictable bunch, but Mulreany knows that nobody over here wants to go out of his way to find trouble at a time when the weird golden light in the sky is shining, not even the Bulgars, because when the light appears and everything surrounding the capital disappears from the view of its inhabitants it means that the powers of sorcery are at work again. Events like this have been going on for eight hundred years in this city, and everyone understands by now that during one of the sorcery-times there’s a fair possibility that some stranger you try to hassle may come right back at you and hit you with very mighty mojo indeed. It’s been known to happen.

This is something like Mulreany’s twenty-fifth crossing—he doesn’t keep count, but he doesn’t miss an Empire appearance and he’s been a licensed crosser for about a dozen years—and he knows his way around town as well as anybody in the trade. The big boulevard that runs along the shore parallel to the wharves is the Street of the Eastern Sun, which leads to the Plaza of the Customs-Brokers, from which five long streets radiate into different parts of the city: the Street of Persians, the Street of Turks, the Street of Romans, the Street of Jews, and the Street of Thieves. There are no Jews to be found on the Street of Jews or anywhere else in the capital, not since the Edict of Thyarodes VII, but most of the best metalworkers and jewelers and ivory-carvers have shops in the quadrant between the Street of Jews and the Street of Thieves, so it’s in that section that Mulreany will make his headquarters while he’s here.

Plenty of citizens are milling around in the Plaza of the Customs-Brokers, which is one of the city’s big gathering places. Mulreany hears them chattering in a whole bouillabaisse of languages. Greek is the Empire’s official tongue, but Mulreany can also make out Latin, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, a Slavic dialect, and something that sounds a little like Swedish. Nobody is very upset by what has happened to the city. They’ve all had experience with this sort of thing before, and all of them are aware that it’s just a temporary thing: when the sky turns golden and the capital goes flying off into the land of sorcery, the thing to do is sit tight and wait for everything to get back to normal again, which it eventually will do.

He and Anderson and Schmidt slide smoothly into the crowd, trying to seem inconspicuous without conspicuously seeming to be trying to seem inconspicuous, and leave the plaza on the far side by way of the Street of Jews. There was a decent hotel seven or eight blocks up that way the last time he was here in the reign of Basil III, and though he doesn’t know whether the date of that visit, in Empire time, was five years ago or five years yet to come, he figures there’s a good chance the hotel will be there today. Things don’t change really fast in the medieval world, except when some invading horde comes in and rearranges the real estate, and that isn’t due to happen in this city for another couple of centuries.

The hotel is exactly where he remembers it. It’s not quite in a class with the Drake or the Ritz-Carlton: more like a big barn, in fact, since the ground floor is entirely given over to straw-strewn stables for the horses and camels and donkeys of the guests, and the actual guest rooms are upstairs, a series of small square chambers with stiff clammy mattresses placed right on the stone floors, and tiny windows that have actual glass in them, almost clear enough to see through. Nothing lavish, not even really very comfortable, but the place is reasonably clean, at least, with respectable lavatory facilities on every floor and a relatively insignificant population of bugs and ticks. A pleasant smell of spices from the bazaar next door, ginger and aniseed and nutmeg and cinnamon, maybe a little opium and hashish, too, drifts in and conceals other less savory aromas that might be wandering through the building. The place is okay. It’ll do for one night, anyway.

The innkeeper is a different one from last time, a gap-toothed red-haired Greek with only one eye, who gives Mulreany a leering smirk and says, “In town for the sorcery-trading, are you?”

“The what?” Mulreany asks, all innocence.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know, brother. What do you think that ring of witch-fire is, all around the city? Where do you think the Eastern Sea has gone, and the Genoese Quarter, and Persian Town, and everything else that lies just outside the city walls? It’s sorcery-time here again, my friend!”

“Is it, now?” Mulreany says, making no great show of interest. “I wouldn’t know. My cousins and I are here to deal in pots and pans, and perhaps do a little business in daggers and swords.” He colors his Greek with a broad, braying yokel accent, by way of emphasizing that he’s much too dumb to be a sorcerer.

But the innkeeper is annoyingly persistent. “Merely let me have one of those metal tubes that bring near what is far off,” he says, with a little wheedling movement of his big shoulders, “and my best rooms are yours for three weeks, and all your meals besides.”

He must mean a spyglass. Binoculars aren’t likely to do him much good. Even more broadly Mulreany says, “Pots, yes, my good brother. Pans, yes. But miraculous metal tubes, I must say ye nay. Such things are not our commodities, brother.”

The lone eye, ice-blue and bloodshot, bores nastily in on him. “Would a knife of many blades be among your commodities, then? A metal box of fire? A flask of the devil’s brandy?”

“I tell you, we be not sorcerers,” says Mulreany stolidly, letting just a bit of annoyance show. He shifts his weight slowly from leg to leg, a ponderous hayseed gesture. “We are but decent simple merchants in search of lodging in return for good coin, and if we cannot find it here, brother, we fain must seek it elsewhere.”

He starts to swing about to leave. The innkeeper hastily backs off from his wheedling, and Mulreany is able to strike a straightforward deal for a night’s lodging, three rooms for a couple of heavy copper sesterces, with tomorrow’s breakfast of rough bread, preserved lamb, and beer thrown in.

Wistfully the innkeeper says, “I was sure at last I had some sorcerers before me, who would favor me with some of the wondrous things that the high dukes possess.”

“You have sorcerers on the brain,” Mulreany tells him, as they start upstairs. “We are but simple folk, with none of the devil’s goods in our bags.”

Does the innkeeper believe him? Who knows? They all covet the illicit stuff the sorcerers bring, but only the very richest can afford it. Skepticism and greed still glitter in that single eye.

Well, Mulreany has told nothing but God’s truth: he is no sorcerer, just a merchant from a far land. But real sorcerers must have been at work here at some time in the past. What else could it have been but black magic, Mulreany figures, that set the city floating in time in the first place? The capital, he knows, has been adrift for most of its lengthy history. He himself, on various crossings, has entered versions of the city as early as that of the reign of Miklos, who was fourth century A.D., and as late as the somber time of Kartouf the Hapless, right at the end, just before the Mongol conquest in 1412. For Chicagoans, the periodic comings and goings of the city are just an interesting novelty, but for these people it must be a real nuisance to find themselves constantly floating around in time and space. Mulreany imagines that one of the imperial wizards must have accidentally put the hex on the place, long ago, some kind of wizardy experiment that misfired and set up a time-travel effect that won’t stop.

“Half past ten,” Mulreany announces. It’s more like noon, actually—the sun’s practically straight overhead, glinting behind the spooky light of the interface effects—but he’ll stay on Chicago time throughout the crossing. It’s simpler that way. If Duplessis is right the city is due to disappear back into its own era about eleven o’clock Thursday morning. Mulreany likes a twelve-to-fourteen-hour safety margin, which means heading back into Chicago by seven o’clock or so Wednesday night. “Let’s get to work,” he says.

The first stop is a jeweler’s shop three blocks east of the Street of Jews that belongs to a Turkish family named Suleimanyi. Mulreany has been doing satisfactory business with the Suleimanyis, on and off, for something like a century Empire time, beginning with Mehmet Suleimanyi early in Basil III’s reign and continuing with his grandfather Ahmet, who ran the shop fifty years earlier in the time of the Emperor Polifemas, and then with Mehmet’s son Ali, and with Ali’s grandson, also named Mehmet, during the reign of Simeon II. He does his best to conceal from the various Suleimanyis that he’s been coming to them out of chronological order, but he doubts that they would care anyway. What they care about is the profit they can turn on the highly desirable foreign goods he brings them. It’s a real meeting of common interests, every time.

Mulreany gets a blank look of nonrecognition from the man who opens the slitted door of the familiar shop for him. The Suleimanyis all look more or less alike—slender, swarthy hawk-nosed men with impressive curling mustachios—and Mulreany isn’t sure, as he enters, which one he’s encountering today. This one has the standard Suleimanyi features and appears to be about thirty. Mulreany assumes, pending further information, that it’s Mehmet the First or his son Ali, the main Suleimanyis of Basil’s reign, but perhaps he has showed up on this trip some point in time at which neither of them has met him before. So for all intents and purposes he is facing an absolute stranger. You get a lot of mismatches of this sort when you move back and forth across the time interface.

A tricky business. He has to decide whether to identify himself for what he really is or to fold his cards and try someplace else that seems safer. It calls for an act of faith: there’s always the chance that the man he approaches may figure that there’s more profit to be had in selling him out to the police as a sorcerer than in doing business with him. But the Suleimanyis have always been on the up-and-up and Mulreany has no reason to mistrust this one. So he takes a deep breath and offers a sweeping salaam and says, in classier Greek than he had used with the innkeeper, “I am Mulreany of Chicago, who once more returns bringing treasure from afar to offer my friend the inestimable master Suleimanyi.”

This is the moment of maximum danger. He searches Suleimanyi’s face for hints of incipient treachery.

But what he sees is a quick warm smile with nothing more sinister than balance-sheet calculations behind it: a flash of genuine mercantile pleasure. The jeweler eagerly beckons him into the shop, which is dark and musty, lit only by two immense wax tapers. Anderson and Schmidt come in behind him, Schmidt taking care to bolt the door. Suleimanyi snaps his fingers, and a small solemn boy of about ten appears out of the shadows, bearing an ornate flask and four shallow crystal bowls. The jeweler pours some sort of yellowish green brandy for them. “My late father often spoke of you, O Mulreany, and his father before him. It gives me great joy that you have returned to us. I am Selim, son of Ali.”

If Ali is dead, this must be very late in the long reign of Basil III. The little boy is probably Mehmet the Second, whom Mulreany will meet twenty or thirty years down the line in the time of Emperor Simeon. It makes him a little edgy to discover that he has landed here in the great Emperor Basil’s final years, because the Emperor apparently went a little crazy when he was very old, turning into something of a despot, and a lot of peculiar things were known to have occurred. But what the hell: they don’t plan to be dropping in for tea at the imperial palace.

Before any transactions can take place an elaborate ritual of sipping the fiery brandy and exchanging bland snippets of conversation must occur. Selim Suleimanyi politely inquires after the health of the monarch of Mulreany’s country and asks if it has been the case that unruly barbarians have been causing problems for them lately along their borders. Mulreany assures him that all is well in and around Chicago and that the Mayor is fine. He expresses the hope that the Empire’s far-flung armies are meeting with success in the distant lands where they currently campaign. This goes on and on, an interminable spinning of trivial talk. Mulreany has learned to be patient. There is no hurrying these bazaar guys. But finally Suleimanyi says, “Perhaps now you will show me the things you have brought with you.”

Mulreany has his own ritual for this. Schmidt opens one of the big burlap bags and holds it stolidly out; Mulreany gives instructions in English to Anderson; Anderson pulls items out of the bag and lays them out for Suleimanyi’s inspection.

Five Swiss Army knives come forth first. Then two nice pairs of Bausch & Lomb binoculars, and three cans of Coca-Cola.

“All right,” Mulreany orders. “Hold it there.”

He waits. Suleimanyi opens a chest beneath the table and draws out a beautiful ivory hunting horn encircled by three intricately engraved silver bands showing dogs, stags, and hunters. He rests it expectantly on his open palm and smiles.

“A couple of more Cokes,” Mulreany says. “And three bottles of Giorgio.” Suleimanyi’s smile grows broader. But still he doesn’t hand over the hunting horn.

“Plus two of the cigarette lighters,” says Mulreany.

Even that doesn’t seem to be enough. There is a long tense pause. “Take away one of the Swiss Army knives and pull out six ball point pens.”

The subtraction of the knife is intended as a signal to Suleimanyi that Mulreany is starting to reach the limits of his price. Suleimanyi understands. He picks up one of the binoculars, twiddles with its focus, peers through it. Binoculars have long been one of the most popular trading items for Mulreany, the magical tubes that bring far things close. “Another of these?” Suleimanyi says.

“In place of two knives, yes.”

“Done,” says Suleimanyi.

Now it’s the Turk’s turn. He produces an exquisite pendant of gold filigree inlaid with cloisonné enamel and hands it to Mulreany to be admired. Mulreany tells Anderson to bring out the Chanel No. 5, a bottle of Chivas, two more pairs of binoculars, and a packet of sewing needles. Suleimanyi appears pleased, but not pleased enough. “Give him a compass,” Mulreany orders.

Obviously Suleimanyi has never seen a compass before. He fingers the shiny steel case and says, “What is this?”

Mulreany indicates the needle. “This points north. Now turn toward the door. Do you see? The needle still points north.”

The jeweler grasps the principle, and its commercial value in a maritime nation, instantly. His eyes light up and he says, “One more of these and we have a deal.”

“Alas,” says Mulreany. “Compasses are great rarities. I can spare only one.” He signals Anderson to begin putting things away.

But Suleimanyi, grinning, pulls back his hand when Mulreany reaches for the compass. “It is sufficient, then, the one,” he says. “The pendant is yours.” He leans close. “This is witchcraft, this north-pointing device?”

“Not at all. A simple natural law at work.”

“Ah. Of course. You will bring me more of these?”

“On my very next visit,” Mulreany promises.

They move along, after Suleimanyi has treated them to the spicy tea that concludes every business transaction in the Empire. Mulreany doesn’t like to do all his trading at a single shop. He goes looking now for a place he remembers near the intersection of Baghdad Way and the Street of Thieves, a dealer in precious stones, but it isn’t there; what he finds instead, though, is even better, a Persian goldsmith’s place where—after more brandy, more chitchat—he warily lets it be known that he has unusual merchandise from far-off lands for sale, meets with a reassuring response, and exchanges some Swiss Army knives, binoculars, various sorts of perfume, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and a pair of roller skates for a fantastic necklace of interwoven gold chains studded with pearls, amethysts, and emeralds. Even at that the Persian evidently feels guilty about the one-sidedness of the deal, and while they are sipping the inevitable wrapping-up tea he presses a pair of exquisite earrings set with gaudy rubies on Mulreany as an unsolicited sweetener. “You will come back to me the next time,” he declares intensely. “I will have even finer things for you—you will see!”

“And we’ll have some gorgeous pruning shears for you,” Mulreany tells him. “Maybe even a sewing machine or two.”

“I await them with extraordinary zeal,” declares the Persian ebulliently, just as though he understands what Mulreany is talking about. “Such miraculous things have long been desired by me!”

The sincerity of his greed is obvious and comforting. Mulreany always counts on the cheerful self-interest of the bazaar dealers—and the covetousness of the local aristocrats to whom the bazaaris sell the merchandise that they buy from the sorcerers from Chicago—to preserve his neck. Sorcery is a capital offense here, sure, but the allure of big profits for the bazaaris and the insatiable hunger among the wealthy for exotic toys like Swiss Army knives and cigarette lighters causes everybody to wink at the laws. Almost everybody, anyway.

As they emerge from the Persian’s shop Schmidt says, “Hey, isn’t that our innkeeper down the block?”

“That son of a bitch,” Mulreany mutters. “Let’s hope not.” He follows Schmidt’s pointing finger and sees a burly red-haired man heading off in the opposite direction. The last thing he needs is for the innkeeper to spot the purported dealers in pots and pans doing business in the jewelry bazaar. But red hair isn’t all that uncommon in this city and in all likelihood the innkeeper is busy banging one of the chambermaids at this very moment. He’s glad Schmidt is on his toes, anyway.

They go onward now down the Street of Thieves and back past the Baths of Amozyas and the Obelisk of Suplicides into a district thick with astrologers and fortune-tellers, where they pause at a kebab stand for a late lunch of sausages and beer, and then, as the afternoon winds down, they go back into the bazaar quarter. Mulreany succeeds in locating, after following a couple of false trails, the shop of a bookseller he remembers, where a staff of shaven-headed Byzantine scribes produces illuminated manuscripts for sale to the nobility. The place doesn’t normally do off-the-shelf business, but Mulreany has been able on previous trips to persuade them to sell books that were awaiting pickup by the duke or prince who had commissioned them, and he turns the trick again this time too. He comes away with a gloriously illustrated vellum codex of the Iliad, with an astonishing binding of tooled ebony inlaid with gold and three rows of rubies, in exchange for some of their remaining knives, Coca-Cola, cigarette lighters, sunglasses, and whiskey, and another of the little pocket compasses. This is shaping up into one of the best buying trips in years.

“We ought to have brought a lot more compasses,” Anderson says, when they’re outside and looking around for their last deal of the day before heading back to the inn. “They don’t take up much space in the bag and they really turn everybody on.”

“Next trip,” says Mulreany. “I agree: they’re a natural.”

“I still can’t get over this entire business,” Schmidt says wonderingly. This is only his third time across. “That they’re willing to swap fabulous museum masterpieces like these for pocketknives and cans of Coke. And they’d go out of their minds over potato chips too, I bet.”

“But those things aren’t fabulous museum masterpieces to them,” Mulreany says. “They’re just routine luxury goods that it’s their everyday business to make and sell. Look at it from their point of view. We come in here with a sackful of miracles that they couldn’t duplicate in a hundred years. Five hundred. They can always take some more gold and some more emeralds and whack out another dozen necklaces. But where the hell are they going to get a pair of binoculars except from us? And Coke probably tastes like ambrosia to them. So it’s just as sweet a deal for them as it is for us, and—Hello, look who’s here!”

A stocky bearded man with coarse froggy features is waving at them from the other side of the street. He’s wearing a brocaded crimson robe worthy of an archbishop and a spectacular green tiara of stunning princely style, but the flat gap-toothed face looking out at them is pure Milwaukee. A taller man dressed in a porter’s simple costume stands behind him with a bag of merchandise slung over his shoulder. “Hey, Leo!” Mulreany calls. “How’s it going?” To Schmidt he explains, “That’s Leo Waxman. Used to carry the merchandise bags for me, five, six years ago. Now he’s a trader on his own account.” And, loudly, again, “Come on over, say hello, Leo! Meet the boys!”

Waxman, as he crosses the street, puts one finger to his lips. “Ixnay on the English, Mike,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Let’s stick to the Grik, okay, man? And not so much yelling.” He casts a shifty look down toward the end of the block, where a couple of the ubiquitous Bulgarian Guardsmen are lolling against the wall of a mosque.

“Something wrong?” Mulreany asks.

“Plenty. Don’t you know? The word is out that the Emperor has ordered a crackdown. He’s just told the imperial gendarmerie to pull in anybody caught dealing in sorcery-goods.”

“You sure about that? Why would he want to rock the boat?”

“Well, the old man’s crazy, isn’t he? Maybe he woke up this morning and decided it was time finally to enforce his own goddamned laws. All I know is that I’ve done a very nice day’s business and I’m going to call it a trip right here and now.”

“Sure,” Mulreany says. “If that’s what you want. But not me. The Emperor can issue any cockeyed order he likes, but that doesn’t mean anyone will pay attention. Too many people in this town get big benefits out of the trade we bring.”

“You’re going to stay?”

“Right. Till sundown tomorrow. There’s business to do here.”

“You’re welcome to it,” Waxman says. “I wish you a lot of joy of it. Me, I’m for dinner at Charlie Trotter’s tonight, and to hell with turning any more tricks here just now, thank you. Not if there’s a chance I’ll miss the last bus back to the Loop.” Waxman blows Mulreany a kiss, beckons to his porter, and starts off up the street.

“We really going to stay?” Schmidt asks, when Waxman has moved along.

Mulreany gives him a scornful look. “We’ve still got almost a bag and a half of goods to trade, don’t we?”

“But if this Waxman thinks that—”

“He was always a chicken-shit wimp,” Mulreany says. “Look, if they were really serious about their sorcery laws here, they’d have ways of reaching out and picking us up just like that. Go into the bazaar, ask the dealers who they got their Swiss Army knives from, and give them the old bamboo on the soles of the feet until they cough up our full descriptions. But that doesn’t happen. Nobody in his right mind would want to cut off the supply of magical nifties that we bring to town.”

“This Emperor isn’t in his right mind,” Anderson points out.

“But everybody else is. Let Waxman panic if he wants to. We finish our business and we clear out tomorrow afternoon as scheduled. You want to go home now, either of you, then go home, but if you do, this’ll be the last trip across you ever make.” It’s a point of pride for Mulreany to max out his trading opportunities, even if it means running along the edge occasionally. He has long since become a rich man just on the twelve and a half percent he gets from Duplessis and Kulikowski’s placements of the artifacts he supplies them with, but nevertheless he isn’t going to abort the trip simply because Leo Waxman has picked up some goofy rumor. He detests Waxman’s cowardice. The risks haven’t changed at all, so far as he can see. This job was always dangerous. But the merchants will protect him. It’s in their own best interest not to sell the golden geese to the imperial cops.

When they get back to the hotel, the innkeeper grins smarmily at them out of his cubicle next to the stable. “You sell a lot of pots and pans today?”

“Pretty good business, yes,” Mulreany allows.

An avid gleam shines in the lone eye. “Look, you sell me something, hear? I give you a dozen girls, I give you a barrel of fine wine, I give you any damn thing you want, but you let me have one of the magic things, you know what I mean?”

“Gods be my witness, we are but ordinary merchants and let there be an end on this foolishness!” Mulreany says testily, thickening his yokel accent almost to the point of incoherence. “Why do you plague us this way? Would you raise a false charge of sorcery down on innocent men?” The innkeeper raises his hands placatingly, but Mulreany sails right on: “By the gods, I will bring action against you for defaming us, do you not stop this! I will take you to the courts for these slanders! I will say that you knowingly give lodging to men you think are sorcerers, hoping to gain evil goods from them! I will—I will—”

He halts, huffing and puffing. The innkeeper, retreating fast, begs Mulreany’s forgiveness and vows never to suggest again that they are anything but what they claim to be. Would the good merchants care for some pleasant entertainment in their room tonight, very reasonable price? Yes, the good merchants would, as a matter of fact. For a single silver argenteus the size of a dime Mulreany is able to arrange a feast of apples and figs and melons, grilled fish, roasted lamb stuffed with minced doves and artichokes, and tangy resinated wine from Crete, along with a trio of Circassian dancing girls to serve them during the meal and service them afterward. It’s very late by the time he finally gets to sleep, and very early when half a dozen huge shaggy Bulgarian Guardsmen come bashing into his room and pounce on him.

The bastard has sold him to the Emperor, it seems. That must have been him in the bazaar at lunchtime, then, watching them go in and out of the fancy shops. Thwarted in his dreams of wangling a nice Swiss Army knife for himself, or at least a fifth of Courvoisier, he has whistled up the constables by way of getting even.

There’s no sign of Anderson and Schmidt. They must have wriggled through their windows at the first sound of intruders and scrambled down the drainpipe and at this moment are hightailing it for the interface, Chicago-bound. But for Mulreany there’s a cell waiting in the dungeon of the imperial palace.

He doesn’t get a very good look at the palace, just one awesome glimpse in the moment of his arrival: white marble walls inlaid with medallions of onyx and porphyry, delicate many-windowed towers of dizzying height, two vast courtyards lined by strips of immaculately tended shrubbery stretching off to left and right, with crystalline reflecting pools, narrow as daggers, running down their middles.

Then a thick smelly hood is pulled down over his head and for a long while he sees nothing further. They pick him up and haul him away down some long corridor. Eventually he hears the sound of a great door being swung back; and then he feels the bruising impact of being dropped like a sack of potatoes onto a stone floor. Mulreany remains weirdly calm. He’s furious, of course, but what good is getting into a lather? He’s too upset to let himself get upset. He’s a gone goose, and he knows it, and it pisses him off immensely, but there isn’t a damned thing he can do to save himself. Maybe they’ll burn him or maybe, if he’s lucky, he’ll be beheaded, but either way they can only do it to him once. And there’s no lawyer in town who can get him off and no court of appeals to complain to. His only salvation now is a miracle. But he doesn’t believe in miracles. The main thing he regrets is that a schmuck like Waxman is home free in Chicago right now, and he’s not.

He lies there for what feels like hours. They took his watch away when they tied his wrists together, and in any case he wouldn’t be able to see it with this hood on, but he knows that the day is moving along and in a matter of hours the interface between the Empire and Chicago is going to close. So even if they don’t behead him, he’s going to be stranded here, the dumbest fate a crosser can experience. The ropes that encircle his wrists start to chafe his skin, and he feels nauseated by the increasingly stale, moist air within the hood covering his face.

Eventually he dozes: sleeps, even. Then he wakes suddenly, muddleheaded, not knowing where he is at first, feeling a little feverish, and starving, besides; he’s been cooped up in here, he figures, twelve or eighteen hours, or even longer than that. The interface certainly has closed by now. Stranded. Stranded. You goddamned idiot, he thinks.

Footsteps, finally. People coming. A lot of them.

They pull him to his feet, yank the hood off, untie his wrists. He sees that he’s in a big square stone room with a high ceiling and no windows. On all sides of him stand guardsmen in terrific Arabian Nights uniforms: golden turbans, baggy scarlet pantaloons, purple silk sashes, blousy green tunics with great flaring shoulder pads. Each of them carries a scimitar big enough to cut an ox in half at a single stroke. Right before him is a trio of cold-eyed older men in the crimson robes of court officials.

They’ve brought him a hard crust of bread and some peppery gruel. He gobbles it as if it’s five-star-quality stuff. Then the chilliest-looking of the officials pokes him in the belly with an ornate wooden staff and says, “Where are you from?”

“Ireland,” Mulreany says, improvising quickly. Ireland’s a long way away. They probably don’t know much more about it here than they do about Mars.

The interrogator is unfazed. “Speak to me in the language of your country, then,” he says calmly.

Mulreany is utterly innocent of Gaelic. But he suspects that they are too. “Erin go bragh!” he says. “Sean Connery! Eamon de Valera! Up the rebels, macushlah!”

There are frowns, and then a lengthy whispered conference among the three officials. Mulreany is unable to catch a single word of it. Then the hood is roughly pulled down over his head and everybody leaves, and once more he is left alone for a long hungry time that feels like about a day and a half. Finally he hears footsteps again, and the same bunch returns, but this time they have with them a huge wild-eyed man with long, flowing yellow hair who is wearing rawhide leggings and a bulky woolen cloak fastened across the breast by a big metal brooch made of interlocked flaring loops. He looks very foreign indeed.

“Here is a countryman of yours,” the chilly-faced court official informs Mulreany. “Speak with him. Tell him where in Ireland you are from, and name your lineage.”

Mulreany, frowning, ponders what to do. After a time the newcomer unleashes a string of crackling gibberish, utterly incomprehensible to Mulreany, and folds his arms and waits for a reply.

“Shannon yer shillelagh, me leprechaun,” Mulreany offers earnestly, appealing to the Irishman with his eyes for mercy and understanding. “God bless St. Paddy! Faith and begorrah, is it known t’ye where they’d be selling the Guinness in this town?”

Looking not at all amused, the other says in thick-tongued Greek, “This man is no Irishman,” and goes stalking out.

They threaten him with torture if he won’t tell them where he really comes from. He’s cooked either way, it seems. Tell the truth and go to the block, or keep his mouth shut and have it opened for him by methods he’d rather not think about. But he knows his imperial law. The Emperor in person is the final court of appeal for all high crimes. Mulreany demands then and there to be taken before His Majesty for judgment.

“We will do that,” says the frosty-faced one. “As soon as you admit that you’re from Chicago.”

“What if I don’t?”

He makes disagreeable racking gestures.

“But you’ll take me to him if I do?”

“Most certainly we will. But only if you swear you are from Chicago. If you are not from Chicago, you die.”

If you are not from Chicago you die? It doesn’t make any sense. But what does he have to lose? One way they’ll rack him for sure, the other there’s at least a chance. It’s worth the gamble.

“I am from Chicago, yes,” Mulreany says.

They let him wash himself up and give him some more bread and gruel, and then they take him to the throne room, which is about nine miles long and six miles high, with dozens of the ferocious Arabian Nights guardsmen everywhere and cloth-of-gold on the walls and thick red carpeting on the floor. Two of the guardsmen shove him forward to the middle of the great room, and there, studying him with an intent frown as though he is looking at the Ambassador from Mars, is the Emperor Basil III.

Mulreany has never seen an emperor before. Or wanted to. He comes over twice a year, does his business, goes back where he came from. It’s merchants and craftsmen he comes here to see, not emperors. But there’s no doubt in his mind that this is His Nibs. The emperor is a trim, compact little man who looks to be about ninety-nine years old; his skin has the texture of fine vellum, and his expression is mild and benign, except for his eyes, which are dark and glossy and burn with the sort of fire that it takes to maintain yourself as absolute tyrant of a great empire for forty or fifty years. He is dressed surprisingly simply, in a white silk tunic and flaring green trousers, but there is a golden circlet on his brow and he wears on his chest a many-sided gold pendant, suspended from a heavy chain of the same metal, that bears the unmistakable crossed-thunderbolt symbol of the imperial dynasty inlaid upon it in lapis lazuli. Standing just to his right is a burly florid-looking man of about forty, imposing and almost regal of presence, garbed in an absurdly splendid black robe trimmed with ermine. Dangling from his hand, as casually as if it were a tennis racquet, is the great scepter of the realm, a thick rod of jade bound in gold, which, as Mulreany is aware, marks this man as the High Thekanotis of the Empire, that is to say, the prime minister, the grand vizier, the second-in-command.

There is a long, long, long silence. Then finally the Emperor says, in a thin, faint voice that seems to come from ten thousand miles away, “Well, are you a sorcerer or aren’t you?”

Mulreany draws a deep breath. “Not at all, Your Majesty. A merchant is what I am, nothing but a merchant.”

“Would you put your right hand on the holy altar and say that?”

“Absolutely, Your Majesty.”

“He denies that he is a sorcerer,” the Emperor says pleasantly to the High Thekanotis. “Make note of that.” There is another great silence. Then the Emperor gives Mulreany a quick lopsided smile and says, “Why does the sorcery-fire come so often and take the city away?”

“I don’t know,” Mulreany says. “It just does.”

“And when it does, people like you step through the sorcery-fires and move among us bringing the magical things to sell.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. That’s so.” Why pretend otherwise?

“Where do you come from?”

“Chicago,” Mulreany says. “Chicago, Illinois.”

“Chicago,” the Emperor repeats. “What do you know of this place?” he asks the High Thekanotis. The High Thekanotis scowls. Shrugs. It’s obvious that he finds this whole event irritating and is already eager to ship Mulreany off to the executioner. But the Emperor’s curiosity must be satisfied. “Tell me about your Chicago. Is it a great city?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“In what part of the world is it to be found?”

“America,” says Mulreany. “In northern Illinois.” What the hell, he has nothing to lose. “On the shore of Lake Michigan. We have Wisconsin to the north of us and Indiana to the east.”

“Ah,” the Emperor says, smiling as if that makes everything much clearer. “And what is this Chicago like? Describe it for me.”

“Well,” Mulreany says, “it has, oh, two or three million people. Maybe even more.” The Emperor blinks in surprise and the High Thekanotis glares with such ferocity that Mulreany wonders whether he has made a slip of the tongue and used the word for billion instead. But three million would be amazing enough, he decides. The imperial capital is one of the biggest cities of this era and its population is probably around half a million, tops. “We have some of the tallest buildings in the world, like the Sears Tower, which I think is 110 stories high, and the Marina Towers, which are pretty big too, and some others. We have great restaurants, any kind of food you might want. The Art Institute is a really fine museum and the Museum of Science and Industry is pretty special too.”

He pauses, wondering what else to say. As long as he keeps talking they aren’t going to cut his head off. Does the Emperor want to hear about the dinosaurs at the Field Museum? The Aquarium? The Planetarium? He might be impressed by some statistics about O’Hare Airport, but Mulreany isn’t sure he has the vocabulary for that. Then he notices that the Emperor is starting to look a little strange—turning pale, rocking weirdly back and forth on the balls of his feet. His eyes have taken on a really odd look, a mixture of profound cunning and utter wackiness.

“You must take me there,” the Emperor says, whispering fiercely. “When you return to your city, take me with you and show me everything. Everything.”

The High Thekanotis makes a choking sound and his florid face turns an even brighter red. Mulreany is aghast, too. No imperial citizen has ever come across into Chicago, not even one. They are all terrified of the sorcery-fire, and they have no way of seeing beyond the interface anyway to know that there’s another city out there.

But is the old man serious? The old man is crazy, Mulreany reminds himself.

“It would be an honor and a privilege, Your Majesty,” he says grandly, “to show you Chicago someday. I would greatly enjoy the opportunity.”

“Not someday,” says the Emperor Basil III. “Now.”

“Now,” Mulreany echoes. An unexpected twist. The Emperor doesn’t want to chop off the heads of the sorcerers he has sent his police to round up; the Emperor just wants one to give him a guided tour of Chicago. This afternoon, say. Mulreany smiles and bows. “Certainly, Your Majesty. Whatever Your Majesty wishes.” He wonders how the old Emperor would react to his first glimpse of the downtown skyscrapers. He wonders what sort of greeting Chicago would give the Emperor. The whole thing is nutty, of course. But for him it’s a plausible way out. He continues to smile. “We can leave immediately, if you desire, Your Majesty.”

The High Thekanotis seems about to have a stroke. His chest heaves, his face puffs up furiously, he brandishes the jade scepter like a battle-axe.

But it’s the Emperor who keels over instead. The excitement of the prospect of his trip across the line has done him in. He turns very pale and puts his hands to his chest and utters a little dry rasping sound, and his eyes roll up in his head, and he pitches forward head first so rapidly that two of the guardsmen are just barely able to catch him before he hits the stone floor.

The room goes berserk. The guardsmen start moaning and chanting; court officials come running in from all directions; the Emperor, who seems to be in the grip of some sort of seizure, arches his back, slaps his hands against the floor, stamps his feet, babbles wild nonsensical syllables.

Mulreany, watching in astonishment, feels the High Thekanotis’s powerful hand encircling his forearm.

“Go,” the grand vizier tells him. “Get yourself out of here, and never come back. Out now, before the Emperor returns to consciousness and sees you again. Now.” The vizier shakes his head. “Chicago! He would visit Chicago! Madness! Madness!”

Mulreany doesn’t need a second invitation. A couple of guardsmen grab him under the arms and hustle him from the room and down the hall and through the palace’s endless hallways and, at long last, out through an immense arch into the broad plaza in front of the building.

It’s the middle of the day. The fifty-two-hour visitation is long over; the gateway between the eras is shut.

Go, the High Thekanotis said. But where? Afghanistan?

And then, to his amazement, Mulreany sees the interface still glowing in the sky down at the eastern end of town. So there must have been another match-up with Chicago while he was in the imperial hoosegow. He can get across after all, back to good old Chi. The Loop, the Bears, the Water Tower, Charlie Trotter’s, everything. Sprinting as if six demons are on his tail, he rushes toward the waterfront, jostling people out of his way. He’ll be coming back empty-handed this trip, but at least he’ll be coming back.

He reaches the Street of the Eastern Sun. Rushes out onto one of the wharves, plunges joyously into the golden light of the interface.

And comes out in a lovely green forest, the biggest trees he’s ever seen this side of California. Everything is wonderfully silent. He hears the chirping of birds, the twittering of insects.

Oh, shit, he thinks. Where the hell is Chicago?

He looks back, bewildered. The interface line is gone, and so is the imperial capital. There’s nothing here but trees. Nothing. Nothing. He walks for half an hour, heading east into the sun, and still he sees only this tremendous virgin forest, until at last he stumbles forward out of the woods and discovers himself to be at the shore of a gigantic lake, and then the awful truth strikes him with the impact of a tidal wave.

Of course. It’s an era mismatch.

The interface must have closed right on schedule, and opened again a little while afterward, but this time the Empire had lined itself up against some other sector of the time stream very distant from his own. Just as the Empire that arrives in his Chicago is the one of Basil III sometimes and sometimes the one of Miklos and sometimes the one of Kartouf the Hapless, so too does the Empire of Basil’s time line itself up sometimes with Chicago-1990, and sometimes Chicago-1996, and sometimes Chicago-2013—

And sometimes, probably, the one of 1400 A.D. Or of 1400 B.C., not that it makes much difference. Before 1833, there wasn’t any city at all here beside Lake Michigan.

A mismatch, then. He has heard rumors of such things occurring. One of those little thousand-to-one glitches that hardly ever actually happen, and that you assume never will happen to you. But this one has. He’s known a few crossers who didn’t come back. Schmucks, he always figured. Now it’s his turn to be the schmuck. Mulreany wonders what it’s going to be like living on nuts and berries, and trying to kill a deer if he feels like having a little protein. It’s goddamned embarrassing, is what it is.

But he’s an optimist at heart. There’s cause for hope, right? Right? Sooner or later, he tells himself, the golden light will glow in the sky again behind him, and the Empire will return, and he’ll go through the interface to the glorious city beyond, and eventually, after skulking around in it for a while, waiting for the right Chicago to come along, he’ll go back across and find his way home.

Sooner or later, yes.

Or maybe not.

THE SECOND SHIELD

And this is the story that wandered up out of my unruly imagination while I was trying to puzzle my way out of the Copperfield-Playboy dilemma in February of 1995. I wrote it with a swiftness that surprised me in the early days of that month, Alice Turner bought it in her usual lightning-fast way, and it appeared in Playboy’s December 1995 issue.

It is, of course, full of all sorts of metaphorical stuff about the artist’s anguished struggles with his public and with himself, and I’m afraid that there are some distinctly autobiographical passages scattered here and there in it. If I were a literary critic, I would point to those passages here and analyze them closely. But I don’t have to do that. I wrote the story. Let somebody else look after the analysis.

——————

In the night, despite the unsettling trouble that was brewing with the client from Miami, the blustering and the importuning and the implied or even outright threats, Beckerman managed to dream satisfactorily after all. He dreamed a little freestanding staircase of alabaster and malachite that pivoted in the middle and went back down itself through some other dimension like something out of an Escher print; he dreamed an attenuated, one-legged bronze statuette with three skinny arms and a funny spiral topknot, Giacometti meets Dr. Seuss, so to speak. He dreamed a squat, puckery-skinned, cast-iron froggy thing with bulging ivory eyeballs that periodically opened its huge mouth and emitted little soprano squeaks. Everything a bit on the bizarre side, even for Beckerman; he had a tendency to go over the edge a little when things got tense. The three pieces were arrayed in a neat row by the side of his bed when he woke, just before noon. It was, he thought, a fine batch of work.

He didn’t take the time just yet to give the latest products a close inspection. His shower came first, and then breakfast—a whole grapefruit and half of another one, nearly a dozen sausages, a platter of scrambled eggs, half a loaf of bread, a couple of bottles of beer. He had woken drenched with sweat, as he always was these mornings: stinking acrid sweat, clammy and thick, the sweat of an artisan who has been going at it full throttle for many hours. Beckerman’s work took a lot out of him. He worked every bit as hard as any sculptor who hammered away at marble slabs or one who wrestled with heavy iron struts, except that he worked lying down with his eyes closed, and no actual physical labor was involved. Good productive dreams like these could burn up five or six pounds’ worth of energy in a single night. It was all Beckerman could do to keep his weight up, despite a constantly ravenous appetite. At best he was a slender man, but a busy season of work would reduce him to skin and bones, and his clothes would hang from his gaunt limbs like rags flapping in the wind.

After he washed and dressed and breakfasted, he checked out the new items, poking and prodding them, looking for blemishes and flaws, areas of insubstantiality, indications of early dissolution. None of Beckerman’s work was permanent—he was careful to point that out to potential buyers, very careful, which was why this Miami thing was so maddening and disturbing—but it was a matter of professional pride for him never to offer anything for sale that was likely to last for less than a year. It wasn’t always possible for him to predict a piece’s life span accurately—he always pointed that out to them, too—but he could usually pinpoint it within three months. Some exceptionally evanescent items were gone within hours, some survived for years. Most lasted 30 to 40 months. The record thus far was 11 years, five months, for a Daliesque melted watch made of copper and inlaid with precious stones, set in a silver basin filled with mercury. It was one of his finest pieces.

This group looked promising. The Escheresque staircase had a nice solid feel when he tapped it with his knuckle, and there were no soft places anywhere. Beckerman gave it three to five years. The goofy Giacometti, a lean, stripped-down thing of impressive tangibility and compaction, was a cinch for six or seven. Even the weakest of the three, the froggish thing (which had a hollow interior and some porous places on its surface and would therefore eventually begin to suffer molecular flyaway beginning from the inside out), looked good for at least two and a half years, maybe three.

He began running through the roster of possible purchasers. The frog would go to Michaelson, the cellular phone tycoon, at about 30 grand: Michaelson loved strange-looking things that made weird sounds, and the relatively short life span—the fact that the artifact would vanish into the air in a couple of years—wouldn’t an issue to an art collector who had made his fortune out of something as transient as phone calls. Michaelson had once even said he was willing to buy six-month items, and even shorter-lived ones than that, if Beckerman would only put them on the market, which he steadfastly refused to do.

Yes, Michaelson for the frog. The staircase he would offer, most likely, to Buddy Talbert, the leveraged-takeover man who had a weakness for mathematical trickery, dimensional twists, mind-dazzling stuff like that. And as for the Giacometti/Seuss, well—

The telephone rang.

Not many people had Beckerman’s number. “Yes?”

“Alvarez,” a quiet voice said.

Again. Beckerman began taking deep breaths. “Look, there’s no sense in you calling me. I told you I would phone just as soon as I had anything good to report.”

“You haven’t phoned, though.”

“I’m still coming up short.”

“Try harder, Beckerman.”

“You don’t seem willing to realize that these things aren’t subject to conscious control. They’re dreams, remember. Can you predetermine your dreams? Of course not. So why do you think I can?”

“The things I dream about aren’t sitting on the floor next to my bed when I wake up, either,” Alvarez said. “The way I dream has nothing to do with the way you dream. Mr. Apostolides is getting very impatient for his shield.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“Give me an estimate. Two weeks? Three?”

“How can I say? I try every night. I set my mind to it, last thing before I close my eyes, shield, shield, shield, shield. But I end up with different things instead. I can’t help it.”

“Focus your attention better, then.”

Beckerman’s forehead began to throb. “I’ve told you and I’ve told you: I could focus for a million years and I still wouldn’t be able to dream anything to order. Especially a complicated thing like that. The dream products are random creations of my subconscious mind. Why won’t you understand that?”

“Tell your subconscious mind to be less random. Mr. Apostolides paid a fortune for that shield, and he loved it very much, he was tremendously proud of possessing it. He was extremely disappointed when it faded away.”

“It lasted 16 months. I told you right at the outset it wasn’t good for more than a couple of years.”

“Sixteen months isn’t a couple of years. He feels cheated.”

“The estimates that I give people are never 100 percent accurate. They know that up front. And I’ve offered to refund—”

“He doesn’t want a refund. This isn’t a question of the money. He wants the shield on his wall. The patriotic pride, the sheer joy of possession—money can’t replace that. He wants a new one, just like the old. He feels very strongly about that. Very, very strongly. You have caused him great personal grief by giving him such a frustrating experience.”

“I’m sorry,” Beckerman said. “I want only to please my clients. He can have his pick of anything else that I—”

“The shield,” said Alvarez ominously. “The shield and nothing but the shield.”

“When and if I can.”

“Two weeks, Beckerman.”

“I simply can’t promise that.”

“Two weeks. You have given Mr. Apostolides deep emotional pain, Beckerman, and he can be extremely unpleasant to people who create anguish for him. Believe me, he can.”

“What are you telling me?” Beckerman demanded.

But he was talking to a dead phone.

The shield that Beckerman had made for Apostolides, had dreamed one humid spring night three years ago, was one of his supreme masterpieces, one of his two or three finest works. He regretted its evaporation even more, perhaps, than Apostolides did. But he couldn’t whip up another one, just like that, to replace it. He could only trust to luck, the random scoop of his dreaming mind. And meanwhile Alvarez was hounding him, chivying, bullying, fulminating, disturbing his peace of mind in a hundred different ways. Couldn’t he see that he was only making things worse?

Apostolides was a shipping magnate—Greek, of course—and he was mixed up in a lot of things besides shipping. His name was on the Forbes list of international billionaires and his fingers in all sorts of pies. His main residence, the one where he had so proudly displayed Beckerman’s wondrous shield, was on a private island in Biscayne Bay back of Miami, but there were homes in London and Majorca and South Africa and Thailand and Caracas, too, and business offices in Geneva, the Cayman Islands, Budapest, Kuwait, Singapore and one or two other places. Beckerman had never actually met or spoken with him. Not many people ever did, apparently. The artist’s dealings with Apostolides had been conducted entirely through the medium of Alvarez, who was some sort of agent.

Alvarez had tracked Beckerman down on the beach at the Halekulani in Waikiki, where he had gone for a week or two of tropical sunshine during one of San Diego’s rare spells of cool, wet winter weather. He was quietly sipping a daiquiri when Alvarez, a small smooth-faced man with rumpled sandy hair and a thin, graying goatee through which you could easily see his chin, came up to him and greeted him by name.

Warily Beckerman admitted that he was who he was.

“I have a commission for you,” Alvarez said.

Beckerman disliked and distrusted him instantly. The little man’s eyes were troublesomely shifty and hard, and there was something weirdly incongruous, here on this sunny beach in 80 degree weather, about the fact that he was dressed in an elegant, closely cut Armani suit of some glossy gray-green fabric—jacket and tie, no less, probably the only necktie being worn anywhere in Hawaii that day. It made him look not only out of place but in some way menacing. But Beckerman, however, made it a rule never to turn down the prospect of new business out of hand. After all these years of making money by pulling works of art out of thin air, he remained perversely afraid that all that prosperity would someday vanish, fading back to its mysterious source just as his sculptures inevitably did.

“I represent one of the world’s wealthiest men and greatest connoisseurs of art,” Alvarez said. “You would recognize his name immediately if I were to tell it to you,” which he proceeded almost immediately to do. Beckerman did indeed recognize the name of Pericles Apostolides, and he began to pay considerably more attention to Alvarez’s words. “Mr. Apostolides,” said Alvarez, “is, as perhaps you are aware, a student in the most intensely scholarly way of the heroic age of Greece, that is, the Mycenaean period, the time of the Trojan War. You may have heard of the Homeric theme park that he is constructing outside Nauplia, with its full-scale replica of Agamemnon’s Mycenae, and life-size virtual reality reenactments of the great moments of the Iliad and Odyssey, particularly the holographic simulations of Scylla and Charybdis and the blinding of Polyphemus, etc., etc.”

Beckerman had heard of the project. He thought it was tacky. But he went on listening.

Alvarez said, “Mr. Apostolides is aware of the quality of your work and has admired your splendid art in the collections of many of his friends. In recent months he was particularly keenly taken by the remarkable figure of a centaur in the possession of the Earl of Dorset and by the extraordinary Medusa owned by the Comte de Bourgogne. Mr. Apostolides has sent me here to inquire of you whether you would be willing to create something of a Homeric nature for him—not for the park, you understand, but for his personal and private gallery.”

“Mr. Apostolides must understand,” said Beckerman, “that I’m unable to work specifically to order—that is, he can’t simply design a piece and expect me to execute it literally. My medium is dreams, dreams made tangible, and dreams are by their nature unpredictable things. I can attempt to create what he wants, and perhaps it will approximate what he has in mind, but I can make no guarantees of specific pieces.”

“Understood.”

“Furthermore, Mr. Apostolides should realize that my work is quite costly.”

“That would hardly be a problem, Mr. Beckerman.”

“And finally, is Mr. Apostolides aware that the things I make are inherently impermanent? They will last a year or two, perhaps five or six in some cases, but almost never any longer than that. A man with his appreciation of ancient history may be unhappy to find he has commissioned something that has hardly any more substance than—well, than a dream.”

Furrows appeared in Alvarez’ smooth forehead.

“Are you sure about that? Isn’t there any kind of preservative that can apply to particularly choice pieces?”

“None whatever.”

“Mr. Apostolides is a powerfully retentive man. He is a builder, a keeper. He does not sell the securities he invests in, he does not deaccession the works of art that he collects.”

“In that case perhaps he should give this commission some further thought,” Beckerman said.

“He very much wants a piece of yours comparable to those he saw in the collections of the Earl of Dorset and the Comte de Bourgogne.”

“I would be extremely pleased to provide one. But the limitations on the durability of my work are not, I’m afraid, within my power to control.”

“I will explain this to him,” said Alvarez, and then turned swiftly and walked away.

He reappeared two nights later, while Beckerman was enjoying a peaceful solitary dinner, looking out over the moonlit Pacific, at the Halekulani’s elegant second-story open-air French restaurant. Taking a seat opposite Beckerman without being asked, Alvarez said, “How soon can you deliver?”

Beckerman had had an unusually productive autumn, to the point where by late November he had thought he might need to be hospitalized for exhaustion and general debilitation. By now he had recovered most of his loss of weight and was beginning to feel healthy again, but it had not been his plan to go back to work until the summer.

“July?” he said.

“Sooner,” said Alvarez.

“I can’t. I simply can’t.”

Alvarez named a price.

Beckerman, concealing his astonishment with some effort, said, “That would be quite adequate. But even so: My work is very demanding—physically demanding is what I mean, with effects on my health—and I’m not ready just now to produce anything new, especially of the quality that Mr. Apostolides undoubtedly expects.”

Alvarez raised the offer by half.

“I could manage something by May, perhaps,” said Beckerman. “No earlier.”

“If the difficulty is that prior commissions are in the way, would some additional financial consideration persuade you to make changes in your working schedule?”

“I have no other work waiting. The issue is entirely one of needing time to build up my strength.”

“March?”

“April 15 at the earliest,” Beckerman said.

“We will expect it at that time.”

“Mr. Apostolides is fully aware of the conditions?”

“Fully. It is his hope that you will produce something that is unusually long-lived for him.”

“I’ll certainly try.”

“Will there be preliminary sketches for him to see?”

Beckerman felt the tiniest tweak of uneasiness. “You just told me that Mr. Apostolides is fully aware of the conditions. One of the conditions, as I attempted to make clear before, is that I have no a priori ability to control the shape of the work that emerges, none at all. If he’s dissatisfied with what I produce, he will, of course, be under no obligation to purchase it. But I can’t give him anything like sketches.”

“I see,” said Alvarez thoughtfully.

“If he doesn’t entirely realize that at this point, please see to it that it is made totally clear to him?”

“Of course,” said Alvarez.

Which was the last that Beckerman heard or saw of Alvarez for some months. He spent ten more days in Honolulu, until he felt fit and rested; and then, tanned and relaxed and almost back up to his normal weight from the rich island cuisine, he returned to his studio in La Jolla and set about preparing himself for the Apostolides project.

Something Homeric, the man had said. Very well. Beckerman steeped himself in Homer: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Iliad again, reading this translation and that, returning to the poems again and again until the wrath of Achilles and the homeward journey of Odysseus seemed to be more real to him than anything going on in the world he actually inhabited. He made no attempt at purposeful selection of design, and no effort at directing his subliminal consciousness. That would be pointless, useless, even counterproductive.

After a while the dreams began. Not his special kind, not yet. Just ordinary dreams, anybody’s kind of dreams, but they were rooted, nearly all of them, in his Homeric readings. Images out of the two poems floated nightly through his mind, the faces of Agamemnon and Menelaus and Hector and Achilles, the loveliness of Helen and the tenderness of Andromache, the monsters and princesses encountered by Odysseus as he made his long way home, the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors. Before long Beckerman knew that he was at the threshold of readiness to work. He could feel it building up in him, the sense of apprehension, the tingling in his fingertips and the tightness along his shoulders, an almost sexual tension that could find its release only in a tumultuous night of wild outpouring of artistic force. Beckerman pumped up his strength in anticipation of that night by doubling his intake of food, loading himself with milk shakes, ice cream, steak, mountains of pasta in heavy sauces, bread, potatoes, anything calorific that might give him some reserve of energy against the coming ordeal.

And then he knew, getting into bed one night in the first week of April, that the time was at hand.

In the morning, after some of the most turbulent effort he had ever put forth, the shield was next to his bed, a great gleaming half-dome of metal that seemed to be aglow with the fire of its own inner light.

Beckerman recognized it instantly. There is no mistaking the shield of Achilles: Homer devotes many pages to a description of it, the five sturdy layers, the shining triple rim of dazzling metal, the splendid silver baldric, above all the extraordinary intricacy of the designs that the god Hephaestus had engraved upon its face when he fashioned that astonishing shield for the foremost of the Greek warriors.

Not that Beckerman’s version of the shield was a literal rendition of the one so lovingly depicted by Homer. He never could have duplicated every one of the myriad details. A poet might be able to describe in words what a god had forged in his smithy, but Beckerman was constrained by the finite limitations of the medium in which he worked, and the best he could do was something that approached in general outline the vast and complex thing Homer had imagined.

Still, it was a remarkable job, a top-level piece, perhaps his best one ever. The earth, the sea and the sky were there in the center of the shield’s face, and the sun and the moon, and more than a suggestion of the major constellations. In the next ring were images of bustling cities, with tiny but carefully sketched figures acting out the events of municipal life, weddings and public meetings and a battle between armies whose generals were robed in gold. Outside that was a scene of farmers in their fields, and one of a landowner and his servants at a feast, and a vineyard and herds of golden cattle with horns of tin. Around everything, at the rim, ran the mighty stream of the all-encompassing ocean.

He hadn’t shown everything that Homer had said was on the shield, but he had done plenty. Beckerman stared at the shield in awe and wonder, marveling that such a thing could have burst forth from his own sleeping mind in a single night. Surely it was the perfect thing for the Apostolides collection, well worth the staggering price and more, a masterpiece beyond even the billionaire’s own high expectations.

He called Alvarez in Miami. “I’ve got it,” he said. “The shield of Achilles. Book XVIII, the Iliad.”

“How does it look?”

“Terrific. Fantastic. If I say so myself.”

“Mr. Apostolides is very involved emotionally with Achilles, you know. I might even put it that he thinks of himself as a kind of modern-day Achilles, the invincible warrior, the all-conquering hero.”

“He’ll love it, then,” said Beckerman. “I guarantee it.”

Indeed he did. Apostolides paid Beckerman an unsolicited five-figure bonus, and gave the shield pride of place in what was apparently one of the finest private museums in the world. He flew his billionaire friends in from Majorca and the Grenadines and the Azores and Lanai to stand before it and admire it. He cherished that shield as though it were the Mona Lisa and the Apollo Belvedere and the David of Michelangelo all rolled into one. Which was the problem. In less than a year and a half it began to melt and sag, and then it was gone altogether, and suddenly Alvarez was on the phone to say, “He wants another one. He doesn’t care how much it costs, but he wants another shield just like that one.”

The days went by. Had Alvarez been serious about that two-week deadline, or was it simply a bluff? In either case, there was nothing Beckerman could do about it. He had been telling Alvarez the simple truth when he said that he had no conscious control over the form of the dream-objects he produced. He could give himself little hints at bedtime, yes, and that was often helpful in guiding the basic direction in which his dreaming mind would go; but that was about as much control as he had. Dreaming up a specific object was something he had never succeeded in doing.

He tried to go about the normal routines of his business. He set up appointments with the collectors to whom he intended to offer the three new pieces. He made arrangements to be interviewed by an important art magazine that had wanted for months to do a feature on his work. He met with his broker for the semiannual review of his stock portfolio.

“I could retire,” he told the broker, after he had gone over the portfolio and been apprised of the surprisingly strong gains it had made in the past six months. “I could sell all these stocks and put the money into municipal bonds and never do a night’s work again in my life.”

“Why would you want to do that?” the broker asked. “It isn’t as if the work takes up a lot of your time. Didn’t you once tell me that you actually produce your entire annual output in just six or seven nights?”

“Six or seven very strenuous and difficult nights, yes.”

“But you’re a great artist. Great artists don’t retire, no matter how wealthy they are. Did Picasso retire? Did Matisse? Monet was practically blind, and even richer than you are now, and he went on painting anyway, right to the end.”

“I am not Monet,” said Beckerman. “I am certainly not Picasso. I am Max Beckerman and I find my work increasingly demanding, too demanding, and it is becoming a great temptation to give it up altogether.”

“You don’t mean that, Max. You’ve just been working too hard lately, that’s all. Go to Hawaii again. Go to Majorca. You’ll feel better in a week or two.”

“Majorca,” Beckerman said bitterly. “Yes, sure, absolutely. I could go to Majorca.” He said it as if the broker had recommended a holiday in one of the suburbs of hell. Apostolides had a house on Majorca, didn’t he? Everywhere he turned, something reminded him of Apostolides.

He knew what was behind this sudden talk of retiring. It wasn’t fatigue. The broker was right: he really did work only six or seven nights a year, and, arduous as those nights were, he recovered quickly enough from each ordeal, and there were new masterpieces to show for it. If he gave up work entirely, his entire oeuvre would fade away in a few years, and then there would be nothing left to indicate that he had ever lived at all. He would be utterly forgotten, a wealthy nobody who once had been a great artist, a rich old man sitting quietly on some tropical beach waiting for the eventual end to arrive. The museums were full of Matisses, Picassos, Monets, and always would be; but the moment Max Beckerman stopped working was the moment he would begin his slide into oblivion. He couldn’t face that prospect. No, it was fear that had him thinking of retiring, of disappearing to some quiet and luxurious place where nobody would ever be able to find him again. Fear of Apostolides—of Alvarez, rather, because Apostolides was just a name to him, and Alvarez was a threatening voice on the telephone. The very rich, Beckerman knew, were utterly ruthless when they were thwarted. Run. Hide. Disappear. A villa in Monaco, an apartment in Zurich, a plantation in the Seychelles. He could afford to go anywhere.

Beckerman went nowhere. He was surprised to find himself unexpectedly gliding into a work mode again, much too soon after the last episode of creativity. He dreamed a small dinosaur-shaped animal the size of a large cat, and a perpetual-motion machine that energetically moved a complex arrangements of pistons through an elaborate pattern without pause even though it had no power source, and something that even he couldn’t identify, an abstract bunch of metallic squiggles, that to his relief melted away within a couple of hours. Good work, lots of it. But not the shield, no. Not the shield.

And then the two weeks were up.

“Beckerman?”

Alvarez, right on schedule. Beckerman hung up.

The phone rang again.

“Don’t do that,” Alvarez said. “Listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“What about the shield?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I’m very sorry.”

“You’ll be sorrier,” said Alvarez. “The client is getting extremely displeased now, extremely. Holding my feet to the fire, as a matter of fact. I was the one who brought you to his attention. Now he requires me to obtain a second shield from you for him. Dream him another shield, Beckerman.”

“I’m trying to. Believe me, I’m trying. The Iliad is the last thing I read every night before I close my eyes. I fill my head with Homer. Heroes, swords, shields. But what comes out? Little dinosaurs. Perpetual-motion machines. You see the problem?”

“I see the problem,” Alvarez said. “Do you?”

“Tell Mr. Apostolides that if he likes he can have my entire output for the next three years, free of charge, every single thing I produce. Only he must leave me alone on this thing of the shield.”

“What he really wants is the shield, Beckerman.”

“I can’t give it to him.”

“Nobody tells things like that to Pericles Apostolides.”

“One day the angel of death is going to come for Mr. Apostolides, just like he comes for everybody else, and the angel is going to say, ‘All right, Pericles, come along with me’. Is he going to look the angel in the eye and say that nobody tells things like that to Pericles Apostolides?”

“That’s not my problem, Beckerman. My problem is the shield. Your problem is the shield.”

“I’m doing the best I can. I can’t do better than that.”

“Two more weeks,” Alvarez said.

“And then?”

“Don’t ask. Just produce. Sweet dreams, Beckerman.”

He tried desperately to generate the shield. He lay rigid in his bed with his eyes closed, envisioning the shield as though hoping it would spring fully formed from his forehead while he was still awake. But it didn’t. Eventually he would drop off to sleep, and when he awoke in the middle of the following morning he could tell at once from the way he was trembling and the ferocious hunger he felt and the stink of sweat in the bedroom that he had worked during the night, and he would look eagerly at the floor beside his bed, and there would be something there, yes, a grinning ebony face with Picasso eyes, or a five-sided pyramid with a brilliant point of ruby light at its summit, or a formidable Wagnerian horned helmet that might very well have belonged to Wotan himself; but the shield of Achilles, no, no, never that.

He was exhausting himself in the effort, dreaming every night as though his life depended on it, which quite possibly it did, and accomplishing nothing. Beckerman was feverish all the time now, wild-eyed with weariness and fear. The effects of the energy drain were horrifyingly apparent—he had the Auschwitz look, he’d become a walking skeleton. He tried every remedy he knew to keep his strength. Steroids, glucose injections, four meals a day, round-the-clock pizza deliveries. Nothing worked for long. He was wasting away.

The telephone. Alvarez.

“Well, Beckerman?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m going to have to visit you in person, right?”

“What do you mean, visit me?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“Sit next to me while I sleep, and make me generate the shield?”

“That isn’t what I mean, no.”

“Don’t threaten me, Alvarez!”

“Who’s threatening? I just said I would come visiting.”

“Don’t even think of it. There was a contract that said the object I delivered was of its inherent nature impermanent, and that I could not be held responsible for its disappearance after a stipulated period of time. The stipulated minimum was twelve months. It’s in the contract, Alvarez. Which, as you know, Mr. Apostolides quite willingly signed.”

“You fulfilled that contract, yes. Mr. Apostolides now wants to enter into a second contract with you for a similar work of art. I’ll be coming soon to get your signature on it.”

“I never sign contracts that stipulate the design of a particular work.”

“You will this time.”

“Keep away from me, Alvarez!”

“Unfortunately, I can’t. I’ll be seeing you soon. And don’t try to run away. I’ll find you wherever you may be, Beckerman. You know that I will.”

Time was running out. Alvarez would be coming. The bell ringing downstairs, the voice on the intercom, and then the cold-eyed little man in the tight-fitting Armani suit, standing unsmilingly in the doorway, sadly shaking his head. And there would be no shield for Mr. Apostolides. Beckerman thought of a thousand different things he could do to protect himself, each one more implausible than the one before, and finally he thought of the thousand-and-first, which was not merely implausible but apparently impossible, and that was the one he resolved to try.

Never in his life had he been able to dream something to order. But that was what he intended to try now, with one last wild attempt born of desperation. Not the shield, no, plainly that was beyond his power. Not only was he trying to dream something at somebody else’s command, but he was trying to dream a piece that he had already created once, and apparently his mind was unwilling to go back over a track that it had already traversed. Everything he had ever made had been one of a kind.

But perhaps he could indeed by deliberate intent dream something to his own specifications that he had never dreamed before, something which would rescue him from his dilemma. It was worth a try, anyway.

That night he ate until he thought he would burst. He slept, and he dreamed. And even as he dreamed he felt a flood of sudden strange optimism, and what he found beside his bed the next morning exceeded all his expectations. It was crude, it was badly proportioned, it was almost laughable. It would never fool Alvarez even for a moment. But it was a rough approximation of what he had set out to dream, and that was new, that was unique in his entire experience of the phenomenon about which he had built his life.

He tried again the next night, and the next, ordering his dreaming mind to work with the material at hand and shape it toward perfection. The second night’s work brought no visible improvement over what he already had, but to his delight there was a distinct transformation a night later. When he awoke after one more night of work he realized that he had—in one paroxysm of despair over his dire predicament—produced precisely what he needed.

If only I could have managed to do the second shield this way, he thought. Then I could have managed to keep my life intact.

But this, at least, would give him a way of sidestepping the wrath of Apostolides and the vindictiveness of Alvarez.

He looked down at the haggard figure lying on the floor next to his bed and said, “Stand up.”

It shambled unsteadily to its feet.

“Stand straight,” Beckerman said. “Hold yourself like a man, will you?”

The figure attempted to improve its posture. It was, Beckerman saw, slightly lopsided, the left shoulder too narrow, the right leg a little short. Still, he was impressed with his own skill.

“Can you speak?” he asked.

“Yes. I can speak.”

The voice sounded rusty, and it seemed too high. But the faint European accent was a familiar one.

“Do you know who I am?”

“You are the artist Max Beckerman.”

“Yes. And who are you?”

A moment of silence.

“I am the artist Max Beckerman,” it said.

“Good. Good. We are both the artist Max Beckerman. Keep that in mind. Go to the closet, now. Find yourself some clothes, get yourself dressed.”

“I am hungry. I am in particular need of a shower.”

“Never mind any of that. Obey me. Get yourself dressed. And cover your body. Christ, you’re nothing but a skeleton with skin! I can’t stand looking at those ribs of yours. Cover yourself. Cover yourself!”

“What shall I wear?”

“Anything you like,” Beckerman said. “Whatever strikes your fancy.”

He went into the bathroom, took a quick shower. Then, ravenous, he grabbed up a loaf of bread and gnawed at it. The other Beckerman was dressed when he returned to the bedroom. It had chosen gray gabardine slacks, one of the good London shirts, and Beckerman’s favorite black shoes, the John Lobbs. Too bad about the shoes, he thought. But he could always have another pair run up for him.

What time was it right now, he wondered, in Zurich? Eight hours later, was it? Nine? Early evening, he figured. He picked up the phone and dialed Elise’s number.

Another miracle! She was there!

“Wer spricht, bitte?”

“It’s me, Max. Listen, I’ll be coming to stay with you for a little while, is that all right?”

“Max? Where are you, Max?”

“California, still. But I’ll be getting the next plane out. I’ll be there in 24 hours, maybe less. Can you manage that, Elise?”

“Of course! But why?”

“I’ll explain everything when I get there. Listen, I’ll phone you again from the airport in an hour or two, when I know which flight I’m on. You can meet me when I land, can’t you?”

“Natürlich, liebchen, natürlich! It’s just that it’s all such a surprise—”

“I know,” he said. “I love you, Elise.” He blew her a kiss and hung up. He called the airport next and then phoned his usual taxi service to arrange for a cab in 30 minutes.

The other Beckerman was still standing next to the bed.

“I am very hungry,” it said.

Beckerman gestured impatiently. “Eat. Eat all you like. You know where to find it.” He began to shovel things into his suitcase: a couple of shirts, some slacks, his shaver, a pair of shoes, a few pairs of socks, underwear, three neckties.

The telephone rang. Beckerman went on packing. After eight or nine rings the phone fell silent; and then, in another moment, it began to ring again.

He closed his suitcase. Took a last look around. He probably would never be coming back here, he knew.

The telephone was still ringing.

“Should I answer it?” the other Beckerman asked.

“No,” Beckerman said. “Just let it ring.” He picked up the suitcase and walked toward the door. The cab would be here in another five or ten minutes. He would wait for it downstairs.

He paused at the door. The dream-Beckerman, dull-eyed, simpering, lopsided, but his twin in all essential respects, gazed stupidly at him.

“I’m expecting a visit shortly from a Mr. Alvarez,” Beckerman said. The other Beckerman nodded. “He’ll ring the bell downstairs. You press this buzzer to let him in. You got that?”

“Yes. I have that.”

“Good. Well, so long, my friend,” said Beckerman. “The place is yours now. Good luck.”

And be sure to tell Alvarez to give Mr. Apostolides my regards, he thought, as he headed downstairs to the waiting cab.

HOT TIMES IN MAGMA CITY

Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s I was a regular contributor to Omni, a magazine of science and science-fiction that made a considerable stir in its day. Each monthly issue brought science articles, interviews with people on the frontier of scientific research, pictorial supplements, and one or two science-fiction stories by top writers. Printed on glossy paper, lavishly illustrated, paying huge fees for its material, it attained a vast circulation, far beyond that of any magazine devoted only to science-fiction, and it was a pleasure for me to be one of its elite group of contributors.

Something—I don’t know what—began going wrong with Omni in the 1990’s, though. Circulation fell and advertising (which greatly helped to pay its lofty production costs) dropped also, and by 1994 or thereabouts the publisher was beginning to think of abandoning the print edition of the magazine and moving it to on-line publication, which would save the huge expense of printing and distributing.

The Internet was in its infancy then and the proposal to move the magazine to cyberspace struck me as the wildest folly, a sure sign of Omni’s impending doom. I was, I should note, prejudiced by the fact that I myself, as of the mid-1990’s, still was living a modem-free existence: I didn’t then use e-mail and had no idea at all of how to access the Internet. Even so, I was right about Omni: taking the magazine off the newsstands and making it Internet-only would succeed in killing it within another year or two.

But the magazine was not yet on its deathbed in September, 1994, when Keith Ferrell, its ambitious and energetic editor, approached me with an invitation to write a novella for it. Chrysler Motors then was bringing out a new car called the Neon, and had hooked up somehow with Omni to sponsor something called the Chrysler Neon On-Line project. Omni would ask five or six leading s-f writers to do long stories depicting life in the near future, Chrysler would subsidize the cost of them, and they would be published exclusively on the Omni On-Line site; the writers would be free to sell the stories also for subsequent publication in the conventional s-f magazines.

It was, as the Godfather might say, an offer I couldn’t refuse. Even though I regarded (and to some degree still do) Internet publication as not really publication at all, because no tangible printed edition results from it, I was being allowed to have it both ways here—get the big Omni fee and still have my story distributed through the print media, where old-guard people like me would be able to find and read it.

An idea quickly came to me. Los Angeles, a city I have visited often and know very well, is constantly plagued by all manner of natural calamities: earthquakes, fires, droughts (sometimes followed by torrential rains and mudslides), lethal concentrations of smog, and almost everything else imaginable except volcanic eruptions. Well, I thought, why not bring on a volcanic eruption or two as well? There don’t happen to be any active or even inactive volcanoes in the vicinity of the Los Angeles Basin, but an area as geologically unstable as that is could surely generate one, especially if helped along by a science-fiction writer. And then I could examine the ways in which a resilient modern city might cope with the sudden and unexpected arrival of volcanoes in its midst.

So I postulated volcanoes bursting forth along Los Angeles’ eastern rim, and, since that idea was fantastic enough to carry a science-fiction story by itself, set it in what is essentially today’s Los Angeles rather than choosing to increase the distancing effect by inventing a futuristic one for my story. The work went swiftly. I like Los Angeles, but although I live in California myself I live as far from L.A. as Paris is from Nice, so the city I was destroying was someone else’s, not my own, and that made the imaginative task a little easier. I delivered the story in the spring of 1995; Omni posted it immediately on its on-line site, where, so far as I know, nobody ever looked at it; and a few months later it had its “real” publication in the issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine dated Mid-December, 1995.

One little irony ensued. After I wrote the story, I realized that it had considerable movie potential: the Hollywood film makers love to make movies about disasters in Los Angeles, and this was a disaster no one had ever thought of before. But apparently a lot of people had thought of it at the same time I did, because within a few weeks of my story’s publication, and before anyone in the movie industry had had a chance to consider it for filming, no less than three movies featuring volcanic eruptions in Los Angeles were announced. (I’m not claiming to be the victim of plagiarism here, just of an untimely coincidence.) All three came out simultaneously; I didn’t go to see them, and apparently nobody else did either, because they all vanished rapidly and even their titles are forgotten today, at least by me.

My story, though, does find its way into print every few years. And here it is again.

——————

It’s seven in the morning and the big wall-screen above Cal Mattison’s desk is beginning to light up like a Christmas tree as people start phoning Volcano Central with reports of the first tectonic events of the day. A little bell goes off to announce the arrival of each new one. Ping! and there’s a blue light, a fumarole popping open in somebody’s back yard in Baldwin Park, steam but no lava. Ping! and a green one, minor lava tongue reaching the surface in Temple City. Ping! again, blue light in Pico Rivera. And then come three urgent pings in a row, bright splotch of red on the screen. Which indicates that a big new plume of smoke must be rising out of the main volcanic cone sitting up there on top of the Orange Freeway where the intersection with the Pomona Freeway used to be, foretelling a goodly fresh gush of lava about to go rolling down the slope.

“Busy morning, huh?” says Nicky Herzog, staring over Mattison’s shoulder at the screen. Herzog is a sharp-faced hyperactive little guy, all horn-rimmed glasses and beady eyes, always poking his big nose into other people’s business.

Mattison shrugs. He is a huge man, six feet five, plenty of width between his shoulders, and a shrug is a big, elaborate project for him. “Shit, Nicky, this isn’t anything, yet. Go have yourself some breakfast.”

“A bunch of blues, a green, and a red, and that ain’t anything, you say?”

“Nothing that concerns us, man.” Mattison taps the screen where the red is flashing. “Pomona’s ancient history. It isn’t none of our business, what goes on in Pomona, not any more. Whatever’s happening where you see that red, all the harm’s already been done, can’t do no more, not now. And those blues—shit, it’s just some smoke. Let ’em put on gas masks. As for the green in Temple City, well—” He shakes his head. “Nah. They’ll take care of that out of local resources. Get yourself some breakfast, Nicky.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Scrambled eggs and snake meat.”

Herzog slithers away. He’s sort of like a snake himself, Mattison thinks: a narrow little guy, no width to him at all, moves in a funny head-first way as though he’s cutting a path through the air for himself with his nose. He used to be something in Hollywood, a screenwriter or a story editor or something, a successful one, too, Mattison has heard, before he blitzed out on Quaaludes and Darvon and coke and God knows what-all else and wound up in Silver Lake Citizens Service House with the rest of this bunch of casualties.

Mattison is a former casualty himself, who once had carried a very serious boozing jones on his back that had a heavy negative impact on his professional performance as a studio carpenter and extremely debilitating effects on his driving skills. His drinking also led him to be overly free with his fists, not a wise idea for a man of his size and strength, because he tended to inflict a lot of damage and that ultimately involved an unfortunate amount of legal expense, not to mention frequent and troublesome judicial chastisement. But all of that is behind him now. Mattison, who is twenty-eight years old, single, good-natured, and reasonably intelligent, is well along in recovery. For the past eighteen months he has been not just an inmate but also a staffer here at Silver Lake, gradually making the transition from victim of his own lousy impulse control to guardian of the less fortunate, an inspiration to those who seek to pull themselves up out of the mud as he has done.

Various of the less fortunate are trickling into the room right now. Official wake-up time at Silver Lake Citizens Service House is half past six, and you are expected to be down for breakfast by seven, a rule that nearly everybody observes, since breakfast ceases to be available beyond 7:30, no exceptions made. Mattison himself is up at five every morning because getting up unnaturally early is a self-inflicted part of his recovery regime, and Nicky Herzog is usually out of his room well before the required wake-up hour because perpetual insomnia has turned out to be an accidental facet of his recovery program, but most of the others are reluctant awakeners at best. Some would probably never get out of bed at all, except for the buddy-point system in effect at the house, where you get little bonus goodies for seeing to it that your roommate who likes to sleep in doesn’t get the chance to do it.

Mary Maud Gulliver is the first one in, followed by her sullen-faced roommate Annette Lopez, and after them, a bunch of rough beasts slouching toward breakfast, come Paul Foust, Herb Evans, Lenny Prochaska, Nadine Doheny, Marty Cobos, and Marcus Hawks. That’s most of them, and the others will be along in two or three minutes. And, sure enough, here they come. That muscle-bound bozo Blazes McFlynn is the next one down—Mattison can hear him in the breakfast room razzing Herzog, who for some reason he likes to goof around with. “Good morning, you miserable little faggot,” McFlynn says. “You fucking creep.” Herzog sputters back, an angry, wildly obscene and flamboyant response. He’s good with words, if nothing else. McFlynn drives Herzog nuts; he has been reprimanded a couple of times for the way he acts up when Herzog’s around. Herzog is an edgy, unlikable man, but as far as Mattison knows he isn’t any faggot. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Buck Randegger, slow and slouching and affable, appears next, and then voluminous Melissa Hornack, she of the six chins and hippopotamoid rump. Just two or three missing, now, and Mattison can hear them on the stairs. The current population of Silver Lake Citizens Service House is fourteen inmates and four full-time live-in staff. They occupy a spacious and comfortable old three-story sixteen-room house that supposedly was, once upon a time back around 1920 or 1930, the mansion of some important star of silent movies. The place was an even bigger wreck, up until five or six years ago, than its current inhabitants were themselves, but it has been nicely rehabilitated by its occupants since then as part of their Citizens Service obligation.

Mattison has long since had breakfast, but he usually goes into the dining room to sit with the inmates while they eat, just in case someone has awakened in a testy mood and needs to be taken down a notch or two. Since everybody here is suffering to a greater or lesser degree from withdrawal symptoms of some sort all the time, and even those who are mostly beyond the withdrawal stage are not beyond the nightmare-having stage, people can get disagreeably prickly, which is where Mattison’s size is a considerable occupational asset.

But just as he rises now from the screen to follow the others in, a series of pings comes from it like church bells announcing Sunday morning services, and a little line of green dots spaced maybe six blocks apart springs up out in Arcadia, a few blocks east of Santa Anita Avenue from Duarte Road to Foothill Boulevard, and then curving northwestward, actually reaching beyond the 210 Freeway a little way in the direction of Pasadena. This is new. By and large the Zone’s northwestern boundary has remained well south of Huntington Drive, with most of the thrust going down into the lower San Gabriel Valley, places like Monterey Park and Rosemead and South El Monte, but here it is suddenly jumping a couple of miles on the diagonal up the other way with lava popping up on the far side of Huntington, practically to the edge of the racetrack and the Arboretum and quite possibly cutting the 210 in half.

It’s very bad news. Mattison doesn’t need to wait for alarm bells to go off to know that. Everybody wants to believe that the Zone is going to remain confined to the hapless group of communities way out there at the eastern end of the Los Angeles Basin where the trouble started, but what everybody fears is that in fact it’s going to keep right on marching unstoppably westward until it gets to the ocean, like a bad case of acne that starts on a teenager’s left cheek and continues all the way to the ankles. They are doing a pretty good job of controlling the surface flows, but nobody is really sure about what’s going on deep underground, and at this very minute it might be the case that angry rivers of magma are rolling toward Beverly Hills and Trousdale Estates and Pacific Palisades, and heading on out Malibu way to give the film stars one more lovely surprise when the fabulous new Pacific Coast Highway Volcano abruptly begins to poke its head up out of the surf. Of course, it’s a long way from Arcadia to Malibu. But any new westward extension of the Zone, even just a couple of blocks, is a chilling indication that the process is far from over, indeed may only just have really begun.

Mattison turns toward the dining room and calls out, “You better eat fast, guys, because I think they’re going to want us to suit up and get—”

And then the green dots on the screen sprout fluorescent yellow borders and the alarm bell at the Silver Lake Citizens Service House starts going off.

What the alarm means is that whatever is going on out in Arcadia has proven to be a little too much for the local lava-control teams, and so they are beginning to call in the Citizens Service people as well. The whole idea of the Citizens Service Houses is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have “volunteered” to do community service—any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service even while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.

What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course. And so it was just a matter of two or three weeks after the Pomona eruption before the County Supervisors asked the Legislature to extend the Citizens Service Act to include lava control, and the bill passed both houses the next day. Whereupon the miscellaneous boozers, druggies, trank-gobblers, and other sad substance-muddled fuckupniks who inhabit the Citizens Service Houses now find themselves obliged to go out on the front lines at least three or four times a month, and sometimes more often than that, to toil alongside more respectable folk in the effort to keep the rampaging magmatic flow from extending the grip that it already holds over a significant chunk of the Southland.

It is up to the dispatchers at Volcano Central in Pasadena to decide when to call in the Citizens Service people. Volcano Central, which is an arm of the Cal Tech Seismological Laboratory with its headquarters on the grounds of Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the hills north of town, monitors the whole Tectonic Zone with a broad array of ground-based sensors and satellite-mounted scanners, trying to keep track of events as the magma outcropping wanders around beneath the San Gabriel Valley, and if possible even to get a little ahead of things.

Every new outbreak, be it simply a puff of smoke rising from a new little fumarole or a full-scale barrage of tephra and volcanic bombs and red-hot lava pouring from some new mouth of Hell, is duly noted by JPL computers, which constantly update the myriad of data screens that have been set up all over town, like the one above Cal Mattison’s desk in the community room of the Silver Lake Citizens Service House. It is also Volcano Central’s responsibility, as master planners of the counteroffensive, to summon the appropriate kind of help. The Fire Department first, of course: that has by now been greatly expanded and reorganized on a region-wide basis (not without a lot of political in-fighting and general grief) and firefighters are called in according to a concentric-circles system that widens from the Zone itself out to, eventually, Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach. Their job, as usual, is to prevent destruction of property through the spreading of fires from impacted areas to surrounding neighborhoods. Volcano Central will next alert the National Guard divisions that have been put on permanent activation in the region; and when even the Guard has been stretched too thin by the emergency, the Citizens Service Houses people will be called out, along with other assorted civilian volunteer groups that have been trained in lava-containment techniques.

Mattison has no real way of finding out whether it’s true, but he believes that the Silver Lake house gets called out at least twice as often as any of the other Citizens Service Houses he knows of. He may actually be right. The Silver Lake house is located in an opportune spot, practically in the shadow of the Golden State Freeway: it is an easy matter for its inhabitants, when summoned, to take that freeway to one interchange or another and zoom out via the Ventura Freeway to the top end of the Zone or the San Bernardino Freeway to the southern end, whereas anybody coming from the Mar Vista house or the one in West Hollywood or the Gardena place would have a much more extensive journey to make.

But it isn’t just the proximity factor. Mattison likes to think that his particular bunch of rehabs are notably more effective on the lava line than the bozos from the other houses. They have their problems, sure, big problems; but somehow they pull themselves together when their asses are on the line out there, and Mattison is terrifically proud of them for that. It might also be that he himself is considered an asset by Volcano Central—his size, his air of authority, his achievement in having pulled himself up out of very deep shit indeed into his present quasi-respectability. But Mattison doesn’t let himself dwell on that angle very much. He knows all too well that what you usually get from patting yourself on your own back is a dislocated shoulder.

The bell is ringing, anyway. So here they go again.

“Can we finish breakfast, at least?” Herzog wants to know.

Mattison glances at the screen. Seven or eight of those green-and-yellow dots are blinking there. He translates the cool abstractions of the screen into the probable inferno that has burst out just now in Arcadia and says, glancing at his watch, “Gulp down as much as you can in the next forty-five seconds. Then get your asses in motion and head toward the suiting room.”

“Jesus Christ,” somebody mutters, maybe Snow. “Forty-five fucking seconds, Matty?” But the others are smart enough to know not to waste any of those seconds bitching, and are shoveling the food down the hatch while Mattison is counting off the time. At the fifty-third second, for he is fundamentally a merciful man, he tells them that breakfast is over and they need to get to work.

The lava suits are stored downstairs, in a room off the main hallway that once might have been an elegant paneled library. The remains of the paneling is still there, rectangles of mahogany or some other fancy wood, but the panels are hard to see any more, because just about every square inch of the room is packed with brightly gleaming lava suits, standing upright elbow to elbow and wall to wall like a silent congregation of robots awaiting activation.

What the suits are, essentially, is one-person body-tanks, solid sturdy shells of highly reflective melnar that are equipped with tractor treads, shovel appendages, laser knives, and all sorts of other auxiliary gadgetry. Factories in Wichita and Atlanta work twenty-four hours a day turning them out, nowadays, with the Federal Government paying the not insignificant expense as part of the whole ongoing disaster relief program that Los Angeles’s latest and most spectacular catastrophe has engendered. Mattison sometimes wonders why it was considered worthwhile to keep fifteen or twenty of these extremely costly suits standing around idle much of the time at each of the Citizens Service Houses, when it would be ever so much more efficient for the suits to be stored at some central warehouse at the edge of the Zone, where they could be handed out each day to that day’s operating crew. But that is a question he has never bothered to raise with anybody, because he knows that the Federal Government likes to operate in mysterious ways beyond the capacity of mere mortals to comprehend; and, anyway, the suits have been bought and paid for and are here already.

They come in two sizes, bulky and bulkier. Mattison hauls the three nearest suits out into the hallway and hands them to people of the appropriate size, which creates space for the others to go into the storage room and select their own suits for themselves. As usual, there is plenty of jostling and bumping, and some complaining, too. Herb Evans is just barely big enough for the bigger size suit, and might be better off with the smaller one, in which he could move about less awkwardly; but he always wants one of the big ones, and the one he has grabbed right now has also been grabbed from the other side by Marcus Hawks, who is six feet two and has a better claim to it. “I got it first,” Evans is yelling. Hawks, not letting go, says, “You go get one that’s the right size for you, you little dumb fucker,” and Mattison sees immediately that they both are prepared to defend their positions with extensive disputatory zeal, perhaps for the next three or four hours. He isn’t surprised: the denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive. There’s no time to let Evans and Hawkins sort things out; Mattison strides between them, gently but firmly detaches Evans’s grip from one arm of the suit and Hawkins’s from the other, and sends the two of them in opposite directions to find different suits entirely. He takes the big one for himself and moves out in the hallway with it so that he can get himself into it.

“As soon as you have your suits on,” Mattison bellows, “head on out into the street and get on board the truck, fast as you can!”

He squeezes into his own with difficulty. In truth he’s a little too big even for the big size, about an inch too tall and two or three inches too broad in the shoulders, but by scrunching himself together somewhat he can manage it, more or less. He has to. There’s no way he can stay behind when the Silver Lake house gets called out on lava duty, and he doesn’t know any tailors who do alterations on lava suits.

The big olive-green military transport truck that is always parked now in readiness outside the house has let its tailgate down, and, one by one, the suited-up lava fighters go rolling up the slope into the truck and take their positions on the open back deck. Mattison waits in the street until everybody is on board who’s going on board, twelve of the fourteen residents—Jim Robey, who is coming slowly back from the brink of cirrhosis, is much too freaky-jittery to be sent out onto the lava front, and Melissa Hornack is disqualified by virtue of her extreme obesity—and two of the four staffers, Ned Eisenstein, the house paramedic, and Barry Gibbons, the cook, who does not suit up because he is the one who drives the truck, and you can’t drive a truck when you’re wearing a thing that’s like a small tank. The remaining member of the staff is Donna DiStefano, the actual director of the house, who would love to go along but is required by her official position to remain behind and look after Robey and Hornack.

“We’re all set,” Mattison tells Gibbons over his suit radio, and swings himself up onto the truck. And away they go, Zoneward bound.

Early as it is, the day is warming up fast, sixty degrees or so already, a gorgeously spring-like February morning, the air still reasonably clear as a result of the heavy rain a couple of nights before. This has been a particularly rainy winter, and Mattison often likes to play with the idea that one of these days it’ll rain hard enough to douse the fucking volcanoes entirely, but he knows that that’s impossible; the magma just keeps coming up and up out of the bowels of the earth no matter what the weather is like on top. A volcano isn’t like a bonfire, after all.

The rains have made everything green, though. The hills are pure emerald, except where some humongous bougainvillea vine is setting off a gigantic blast of purple or orange. Because the prevailing winds this time of year blow from west to east, there’s no coating of volcanic ash or other pyroclastic crap to be seen in this part of town, nor can you smell any of the noxious gases that the million fumaroles of the Zone are putting forth; all such garbage gets carried the other way, turning the world black and nauseating from San Gabriel out to San Berdoo and Riverside.

What you can see, though, is the distant plume of smoke that rises from the summit of Mount Pomona, which is what the main cone seems to have been named. The mountain itself, which straddles two freeways, obliterating both and a good deal besides, in a little place called City of Industry just southwest of Pomona proper, isn’t visible, not from here—it’s only a couple of thousand feet high, after six months of building itself up out of its own accumulation of ejected debris. But the column of steam and fine ash that emerges from it is maybe five times higher than that, and can be seen far and wide all over the Basin, except perhaps in West L.A. and Santa Monica, where none of this can be seen or smelled and all they know of the whole volcano thing, probably, is what they read in the Times or see on the television news.

As the truck heads east along the Ventura, though, signs of the disaster begin to show up as early as Glendale, and by the time they have crossed over to the 210 Freeway and are moving through Pasadena there can be no doubt that something out of the ordinary has been going on a little further ahead. Everything from about Fair Oaks Avenue eastward is sooty from a light coating of fine pumice and volcanic ash that has been carried out of the Zone by occasional blasts of Santa Ana winds, and beyond Lake Avenue the whole area is downright filthy. Mattison—who is a native Angeleno, having grown up in Northridge and Van Nuys and lived for most of his adult life in a succession of furnished apartments in West Los Angeles—thinks of the impeccable mansions just to his right over in San Marino, with their manicured lawns and their blooming camellias and azaleas and aloes, and shakes his head at the thought of the way they must look now. He can remember one epic bender that began in Santa Monica and ended up around here in which he found himself climbing over the wall at three in the morning into the enormous sprawling garden of giant cactus at the Huntington Library, right down there in San Marino, and wandering around inside thinking that he had been transported to some other planet. It must look like Mars in there for sure these days, he thinks.

At Sierra Madre Boulevard the truck exits the freeway. “It’s blocked by a pile of lava bombs just beyond San Gabriel Boulevard,” Gibbons explains to him via the suit radio. “They hope to have it cleared by this afternoon.” He goes zigging and zagging in a southeasterly way on surface streets through Pasadena until they get to Huntington Drive, which takes them past Santa Anita Racetrack and brings them smack up into a National Guard roadblock a couple of blocks just beyond.

The Guardsmen, seeing a truckload of mirror-bright lava suits, wave them on through. Gibbons, who is undoubtedly getting his driving instructions now direct from Volcano Central, turns left on North Second Avenue, right on Colorado Boulevard, and brings the truck to a halt a little way down the street, where half a block of one-story commercial buildings is engulfed in flame and red gouts of lava are welling up out of what had until five or six hours ago been a burrito shop. The site is cordoned off, but just beyond the cordon a bunch of people, Mexicans, some Chinese, maybe a few Koreans, are standing around weeping and wailing and waving their arms toward heaven—the proprietors, most likely, of the small businesses that are getting destroyed here.

“Everybody out,” Mattison orders, as the tailgate goes down.

Firefighters are already at work at the periphery of the scene, hosing down the burning buildings in the hope of containing the blaze before it sets the whole neighborhood on fire. But the lava outcropping has been left for Mattison and his crew to handle. Lava containment is a new and special art, which the Citizens Service House people have gradually come to master, and the beleaguered Fire Department guys are quite content to leave that kind of work over to them and concentrate on putting out conventional fires.

Quickly Mattison sizes up the picture. Things are just in the very early stages, he sees. There’s still hope for containment.

What has happened here is that a stray arm of the underlying magma belt that is causing this whole mess has wandered up through the bedrock and has broken through the surface in eight or nine places along a diagonal line a couple of miles long. It’s as if a many-headed serpent made of fiery-hot lava has poked all its heads up at the same time.

For just one volcano to have sprung up out here would have been bad enough. But the area now known as the San Gabriel Valley Tectonic Zone has been favored, over the past year or so, with a whole multitude of them—little ones, but lots. The Mexicans call the Zone La Mesa de los Hornitos—that means “little ovens,” hornitos. You can cook your tortillas on the sidewalk anywhere in the affected area.

The lava pool here is maybe eleven feet by fifteen, a puddle, really, just enough to take out the burrito joint. The heat it’s giving off is, of course, fantastic: Mattison, who has become an expert in such things by this time, can tell just at a glance that things are running about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. Lava at that temperature glows yellowish-red. He prefers to work with it glowing bright-red, which is about 400 degrees cooler, or, even better, dark blood-red, 400 degrees cooler than that; but he is not given his choice of temperatures in these situations, and at least they are not yet into the white-heat stage, which is a bitch and a half to cope with.

It is the heat of the lava, and not any fire from below, that has set the adjoining buildings ablaze. Volcanoes, Mattison knows, don’t belch fire. But you push a lot of red-hot material up into a street like this and nearby structures made mostly of beaverboard and plywood are very quickly going to reach their flash point.

The flow, so far, is moving relatively slowly, maybe ten or twelve inches a minute. That means the lava is relatively viscous, and thank God for that. He knows of flows that come spurting out fifty times as fast and make you really dance. At the upper surface where the lava is coming into contact with the air he can see it congealing, forming a glassy skin that tinkles and clinks and chimes as inexorable pressures from below keep cracking it. Mattison watches odd blobs and bulges come drifting up, expand, harden a little, and break, sending squiggles of molten lava off to either side. A few big bubbles are rising too, and they seem ominous and nasty, indicators, perhaps, that the lava pool is thinking of spitting a couple of little lava bombs at the onlookers.

The pumping truck that has been supplied for Mattison’s crew this morning is strictly a minor-league item, but it appears adequate for his needs. The region has only so many of the big-ticket jobs available, just a handful, really, even after all these months since the crisis began, and those have to be kept in reserve for the truly dire eruptions. So what they have given him to work with, instead of a two-and-a-half-ton pump that can move thirteen thousand gallons of water a minute and throw it, if necessary, hundreds of feet in the air, is one of the compact Helgeson & Nordheim tripod-mounted jobs sitting on top of an ordinary flat-bed truck. It’s small, but it’ll probably do the job.

An auxiliary firefighter—a girl, couldn’t be more than fifteen, Latino, dark eyes glossy with excitement and fear—has been delegated to show him where the water hookup is. Every one of the myriad little municipalities in and around the Zone is now under legal obligation to designate certain hydrants as dedicated lava-pump outlets, and to set up and maintain reserve water-tanks at ground level every six blocks. “How far are we from the nearest dedicated hydrant?” Mattison asks her, speaking like a space invader from within his lava suit, and she tells him that it’s back behind them on North Second, maybe a thousand yards. Has he been provided with a thousand yards of hose? She thinks he has. Okay: maybe she’s right. If not, the firemen can lend him some. Lava containment is considered a higher priority than fire containment, considering that uncontrolled lava flows will spread a fire even faster than burning buildings will, since burning buildings don’t move through the streets and lava does.

Mattison picks Paul Foust and Nicky Herzog, who are two of the least befuddled of his people, to go with the girl from the Fire Department and set up the hose connection. Meanwhile he and Marcus Hawks and Lenny Prochaska get to work muscling the pump rig as close to the lava as they dare, while Clyde Snow, Mary Maude Gulliver, and Ned Eisenstein set about uncoiling the hundred yards of steel-jacketed hose that’s connected to the pump and running it in the general direction of North Second Avenue, where the water will be coming from. The rest of his crew begins unreeling the lengths of conventional hose that they have, ordinary firehose that would melt if used close in, and laying it out beyond the reach of the steel-jacketed section.

Mattison can’t help feel a burst of pride as he watches his charges go about their chores. They’re nothing but a bunch of human detritus barely out of detox, as he once was too, and yet, goofy and obstinate and ornery and bewildered and generally objectionable as they are capable of being, they always seem to rise above themselves when they’re out here on the lava line. Or most of the time, anyway. There are a few pissant troublemakers in the group and even the good ones have funny little relapses when you least expect or want them. But those are the exceptions; this kind of work is the rule. Good for them, he thinks. Good for us all. He’s quietly proud of himself too, considering that a couple of years ago he was just one more big drunken unruly asshole like the rest of them, assiduously perfecting his boozing techniques in every bar along Wilshire from Barrington to Bundy to Centinela and so on clear out to the ocean, and here he is calmly and coolly and effectively running his own little piece of the grand and glorious Los Angeles lava-control operation.

“Can we maybe get a little closer, guys?” he asks Hawks and Lenny Prochaska.

“Jeez, Matty,” Prochaska murmurs. “Feel the fucking heat! It’s like walking into a blast furnace wearing a bathing suit.”

“I know, I know,” Mattison says. “But we’ll be okay. Come on, now, guys. An inch at a time. Easy does it. We’re good strong boys. We can handle a nice hot time, can’t we?” It’s like talking baby-talk, and Hawks and Prochaska are big men, nearly as big as he is and neither of them especially sweet-natured. But he has their number. Their various chemical dependencies had reduced them, in the fullness of time, to something that functioned on the general level of competence of babies in diapers, and they need to prove over and over, now, that they are the tough hard macho males they used to be. So they lean down close and work with him to drag the pump rig forward and get the nozzle aimed right down the mouth of the lava well.

The suits they’re wearing are actually quite good at shielding them from the worst of the heat. They can withstand a surprising amount of it—for a time, anyway. The melnar is very tough stuff, and also, because it is so shiny, it turns back much of it through simple reflective radiation, and there’s interior insulation besides, and a coolant network, and infrared filters, and two or three other gimmicks also, all of which makes it possible to walk right up to a 2000-degree lava flow and even, if its surface has hardened a little, to step out onto it when necessary. Still, despite the protection afforded by the lava suit, it is quite apparent from the warmth that does get through that they are standing right next to molten rock that has come spurting up just now from the Devil’s own domain.

The hoses are hooked up now and Mattison has the nozzle directed to the place he wants it to be, which is along the outer rim of the lava flow. He sends a radio message back to Foust and Herzog out by the hydrant that they’re almost ready to go. Then he gives a hand signal and it travels back and back along the line, from Mary Maude to Evans to Cobos to Buck Randegger, or whoever it is that is standing behind Cobos, and on around the corner until finally it reaches Foust and Herzog, who know for sure now that the hose line is fully connected, and the water begins to shoot forth. Mattison and Hawks and Prochaska grip the nozzle together, slowly and grimly playing it along the edge of the flow.

The purpose of this operation is to cool the front of the lava well sufficiently to form a crust, and then a dam, that will cause the continuing flow to pile up behind it instead of rolling on down the street. This is a technique that was perfected in Iceland, and indeed half a dozen grizzled Icelanders have been imported to serve as consultants during this Los Angeles event, frosty-eyed men with names like Svein Steingrimsson and Steingrim Sveinsson who look upon fighting volcanoes as some kind of Olympic sport. But one big difference between Iceland and Los Angeles is that Iceland sits in the middle of a frigid ocean that provides an infinite quantity of cold water for use by lava-fighters, and the distances from shore to volcano are not very great. Los Angeles has an ocean nearby too, but it isn’t conveniently placed for hosing down lava outbreaks in the San Gabriel Valley, which is inland, at least thirty or forty miles from the coast. Hence the system of municipal water-tanks all along the borders of the Zone, and a zillion tanker trucks trundling back and forth bringing ocean water with which to keep the tanks filled, Los Angeles’s regular water supply being far from adequate even for the ordinary needs of the community.

Any lava-cooling job, even a small one like this, is a ticklish thing. It isn’t quite like watering a lawn. You are dumping 60-degree water on 2000-degree lava, an interaction which is going to produce immense billows of steam that will prevent you from seeing very much of what you are in the process of doing. But you need to see what you are doing, because as you build your lava dam along the front of the upwelling what you may all too easily achieve is not the containment of the lava but, rather, its deflection toward something you don’t want it to hit. Like the fire truck down the block, for example, or some undamaged buildings on the opposite side of the street.

So you have to wield your hose like a sculptor, dancing around squirting the water with great precision, topping up the dam here, minimizing its height there, all the while taking into account the slope of the ground, the ability of the subsoil to bear the weight of the new stone, and the possibility that the lava you are working with may suddenly decide to accelerate its rate of outflow from fifty feet an hour to, say, fifty feet a minute, which would send the flow hurtling over the top of your little dam and put you up to your ass in lava, with the hose still dangling from your hand as you become a permanent part of the landscape. Which is why the face-plate of your lava suit is equipped with infrared filters to help you see through all that billowing steam that you are busily creating as you work.

And there is other stuff to consider. Coming up out of the core of the earth, along with all that lava, are various gases, not all of them nice ones. Chlorine, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, all kinds of miasmas are likely to head swiftly surfaceward as though carried by a giant blowpipe. These are all poisonous gases, although you are more or less protected against that by your suit; however, traveling upward with the gases may be fragments of incandescent lava that will go up like a geyser and come down all over the neighborhood, including right where you happen to be. Therefore you want to listen, as you work, for strange new whooshings and bellowings and hissings, and in particular for the sound of something like an old-fashioned locomotive tooting its horn as it heads your way. Mattison has beaten a quick retreat more than a few times, sometimes taking his pump with him, sometimes abandoning it and running like hell as a highly local eruption starts nipping at his heels.

However, none of that happens this morning. This Arcadia thing is just a teeny-weeny little isolated lava outbreak with no special complications except for the owner of the burrito stand. Mattison, aided expertly by Marcus Hawks, who is just eight months out of a crack house in El Segundo, and Lenny Prochaska, whose powerful forearms bear needle tracks that look like freeway interchanges, deftly creates a low wall of cooled lava across the front of the outbreak, then adds a limb up its right-hand side and another up the left to form a U, after which they concentrate on hardening the new lava wherever it comes curling up over the boundaries of their wall. The cooling process is very quick. Along the face of the wall, the temperature of the lava has dropped to the 500-degree level, at which heat it is hardly glowing at all, at least not at the outer crust. Mattison figures that the crust he has built is maybe three inches thick, a skin of solid basalt over the hellish stuff behind.

Of course, lava is still oozing steadily from the ground at the original exit point, and probably will go on doing so for another six or seven hours at this site, maybe even a day or two. But the dam should hold it and keep it from welling out into Colorado Boulevard, which is an important thoroughfare that needs to be kept open. Instead, the lava will go on piling up on the site of the burrito stand, forming a little mountain perhaps fifteen or twenty feet high. Unless, of course, it decides to break through the surface a couple of dozen yards down the street instead, but Mattison doesn’t think that’s going to happen at this site.

He sometimes wonders what life is going to be like around here when all this is over, the volcanoes have died down, and the whole eastern half of the Los Angeles Basin is littered with new little mountains in the middle of what used to be busy neighborhoods. Are they going to dynamite them all? Build around them? On top of them? And where are they going to put the freeways to replace the ones that are now mired in cooling lava that soon will be solid rock?

Hell, it’s not his problem. That’s one of his mantras: Not my problem. He has enough problems of his own, currently under control but not necessarily going to stay that way if he borrows trouble from elsewhere. One day at a time is another phrase that he has been taught to repeat to himself whenever he starts worrying about things that shouldn’t matter to him. Easy does it. Yes. First things first. These are absolutely right-on concepts. Somebody else will have to figure out how to repair Los Angeles, once all this is over. His job, which will last him the rest of his life, is figuring out how to operate Cal Mattison.

The fires in the surrounding buildings are just about out, now. One of the firefighters comes over and asks him how he’s doing. “Under control,” Mattison tells them. “Just a little tidying-up to do.”

“You want us to stick around, just in case?”

Mattison thinks for a moment. “You got work nearby?”

The firefighter points. “There’s a whole line of these things, from the freeway all the way down to Duarte. If you don’t think the lava’s going to pop, we can move on south of here. There’s a bad one going on on Duarte, just at the Monrovia line.”

“Go on, then,” Mattison says. “We get any problems, I’ll call you back in.”

Real executive decision-making. He feels good about that. Time was when he never wanted to be the one who made the call about anything.

But he’s confident of his own judgment right here and now. This job has been handled well. There’s a high in that that feels like half a fifth of Crown Royal traveling through his veins, smooth and fine and warm.

The firefighters go away, leaving just two of their number posted as supervisors during the wrap-up and report-filing phase of the job here, and Mattison, signaling back down the line to have the hose shut down, moves forward onto the lava dam. It can be walked on, now, at least by someone equipped with tractor treads like his. He tests the crinkly new skin. It holds. Dainty little tinkling sounds are coming from it, the sounds of continued cooling and hardening, but it supports his weight. It’s a little like walking on thin new ice, except that what is behind the fragile surface is molten rock instead of chilly water, and if he falls through he will be very sorry, though not for long. But he doesn’t expect to fall through, or he wouldn’t be up here.

Mattison isn’t walking around on the dam just to show off. He needs to check out the fine points of the construction job. The dam slopes up and back at a 45-degree angle, and he wants its lip to rise just a little steeper even than that, so he moves along the face of the front, using his suit’s shovel appendage to trim and shape the boundary between new rock and hot lava. He can feel mild warmth, not much more than that, through his suit, at least until he reaches a place where red can be seen crackling through the black, a tiny fissure in the dam, not dangerous but offensive to his sense of craft. He steps back, radios Foust and Herzog to turn the water back on, and has Hawks and Prochaska give the fissure a squirt or two.

Then he checks the far side of the lava front to make sure that there’s no likelihood that the top of the lava dome he has created is simply going to spill back the other way, down into the residential block behind the event. But no, no, the oozing lava is quietly piling itself up, filling in behind the dam, giving no indication that it means to go off in some new direction. Thank God for that much. Because of the way the magma pool lies in relation to the giant subterranean fault line that kicked this whole thing off, the surface flows tend to be consistently directional, rising on a diagonal out of the ground and moving, generally, from east to west only. With some residual slopping around—lava is a liquid, after all—but not, as a rule, with any unpredictable twisting and turning back the way they have just come. Except, of course, when a badly thought out dam is slapped in its path. But Mattison tries to think his work out properly.

Just as Mattison is wrapping everything up, Gibbons radios him from the truck to say, “They want us to move along to San Dimas when we’re done here.”

“Jesus,” Mattison says. “San Dimas is way the hell to the east. Isn’t everything over and done with back there by now?”

“Apparently not. Something new is about to bust out, it seems.”

“Tell them we’ll need a lunch break first.”

“They said they wanted us to—”

“Right,” says Mattison. “We aren’t fucking soldiers, you know. We’re volunteer citizens and some of us have been working like coolies out here all morning. We get a lunch break before we start busting our asses again today. Tell them that, Barry.”

“Well—”

“Tell them.”

As Mattison has guessed, the San Dimas thing is serious but not catastrophic, at least not yet. The preliminary signs indicate a bad bust-out is on the way out there, and auxiliary crews are being pulled in as available, but one team more or less won’t make any big difference in the next hour. They get the lunch break.

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. “I sure wouldn’t mind a beer right now,” Evans says, and Hawks says, “Why don’t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you’re wishing things up? Don’t cost no more than beer, if it’s just wishes.”

“I never liked champagne,” Paul Foust says. “For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.” He smacks his lips. “I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue—that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut—”

“Knock it off,” says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.

“You never stop wanting it,” Foust tells him.

“Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don’t you think I know that? Knock it off.”

“Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?” Marty Cobos asks.

“And how about needles, too?” says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. “Let’s talk about needles too.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,” Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer. “What do you need to play around with my head for?”

“Why, did you have some kind of habit?” Mary Maude asks him sweetly.

“You hooer, I’m going to throw you into the lava,” Prochaska says, getting up and heading toward her. Mary Maude weighs about ninety pounds, Prochaska maybe two-fifty. He could do it with one flip of his wrist.

“Lenny,” Mattison says warningly.

“Tell her to leave me be, then.”

“All of you,” says Mattison. “Leave each other be. Jesus Christ, you think it’s any easier for the others than it was for you?”

It is the tension, he knows, of the morning’s work that is doing this to them. They’re all on the edge, all the time, of falling back into their individual hells, and that keeps them constantly keyed up to a point where it doesn’t take much for them to get on each other’s nerves. Of course, Mattison’s on the edge himself, he always will be and won’t ever let himself forget it, but he is in recovery and they aren’t, not really, not yet, and the edge is thinner for them than it is for him. Each of them has managed to reach the abstinence level, at least, but you can get to that point simply by having yourself chained to a bed; that keeps you out of the clutches of your habit but it doesn’t exactly qualify you as being free of it. Real recovery comes later, if at all, and you can be a tremendous pain in the ass while you’re trying to attain it, because you’re angry just about all the time, angry with yourself for having burdened yourself with your habit and even angrier with the world for wanting you to give it up, and the anger keeps bubbling out all the time. Like lava, sort of. Makes a mess for everybody, especially yourself, until you understand, really and truly understand in your bones, that until you want to give it up, nothing’s going to happen.

They calm down, though, as the sandwiches hit their bellies. Mattison waits until they’ve eaten before he springs the San Dimas thing on them, and to his surprise there is no enormous amount of griping. The usual grumblers—Evans, Snow, Blazes McFlynn—do the expectable amount of grumbling, but not a whole lot, and that’s it. They all would rather go back to the house and watch television, of course, but somewhere deep down they know that this volcano business is actual worthwhile and important stuff, perhaps the first time in their lives they have ever done anything even remotely worthwhile and important, and some part of them is tickled pink to be out here on the lava frontier. Hollywood is just a dozen miles west of here, after all. They all see themselves as characters in the big volcano movie, heroes and heroines, riding into battle against the evil monster that’s eating L.A. That’s how Mattison himself feels when he’s out here, and he knows it’s the same for them, maybe even more intense than it is for him, because he also has the self-esteem that comes from having made it back out of his addiction to this level of recovery, and they don’t. Not yet. So they need to be heroes in a movie to feel good about themselves.

They clean up the lunch mess and Mattison goes back to check his lava dam, which is holding good and true, and then off they go to San Dimas for whatever is to be required of them there.

To get there they have to travel through the heart of the Zone, the very belly of the beast, the place where it all started.

No. Where it all started was fifty or sixty miles down in the crust of the earth, and maybe fifty miles east of where Mattison and his pals are now: out in Riverside County, where the tremendous but hitherto unknown Lower Yucaipa Fault had chosen to release its accumulated tension about sixteen months ago, sending a powerful shock wave surfaceward that went lalloping through the Southland at a nifty 7.6 on the Richter. The earthquake made a serious mess out of Riverside, Redlands, San Bernardino, and a lot of other places out there in the eastern boondocks, and caused troubles of lesser but not inconsiderable degree as far west as Thousand Oaks and the Simi Valley.

Californians don’t enjoy big earthquakes, but they do expect and understand them, and they know that after you get one you wait for the lights to come back on and then you sweep up the broken crockery and you call all your friends in the affected area as soon as the phones are working so that, ostensibly, you can find out if they are okay, but really so that you can trade horrendous earthquake stories, and sooner or later the supermarket will reopen and the freeway overpasses will be repaired and things will get back to normal.

But this one was a little different, because the Yucaipa thing had evidently been so severe a fracture that it had shattered the roof of a colossal and previously unsuspected pool of very deep subterranean gases that had been confined under high pressure for ten or twenty million years, and the gas, breaking loose like a genie that has been let out of a bottle, had taken hold of a whopping big column of molten magma that happened to be down there and pushed it toward daylight, causing it to come up right underneath the San Gabriel Valley, which is just a little way east of downtown L.A. You expect all kinds of troubles in L.A.—earthquakes, fires, stupid politics, air pollution, drought, deluges and mudslides, riots—but you don’t seriously expect volcanoes, any more than you expect snow. Volcanoes are stuff for Hawaii or the Philippines, or southern Italy, or Mexico. But not here, thank you, God. We have our little problems, sure, but volcanoes are not included on the list.

Now the list is one item longer.

The first volcano—the only one, so far, that had built a real full-size volcano-style cone for itself—had popped up at that freeway interchange near Pomona, a couple of days after the big Yucaipa earthquake. First there was thunder, never a common thing in Southern California, and the ground began to shake, and then it began to puff up, making a blister two or three yards high that sent the freeway spilling into pieces as though King Kong’s big brother had bashed it from below with his fist, and smoke and fine dust started to spurt from the ground. After which came a hissing that you could hear as far away as Long Beach, and showers of red-hot stones went flying into the air, a pretty good indication that this wasn’t simply an aftershock of Yucaipa. Then came the noxious gases, a gust of blue haze that instantly killed half a dozen people who were standing around watching; and then a thick column of black ash decorated by flashes of lightning arose; and then, seven or eight hours later, the first lava flow began. The sky was bright as day all night long from the bursts of incandescent gas and molten rock that were coming forth. By the next morning there was a gray volcanic cone forty feet high sitting where the interchange had been.

If that had been all, well, you would watch it on the news for the next few nights, and then the Federal disaster teams would come in and the people in the neighborhood would be relocated and the National Geographic would publish an article about the eruption, and somebody would start a class action suit complaining that the governor or the president or somebody had failed to give proper warning to home buyers that a volcano situation might develop in Pomona, and the religious crazies in Orange County would deliver sermons about sin and repentance, and after a while the impacted area would become a new tourist attraction, Pomona Volcanic National Park or something like that, and life would go on in the rest of Los Angeles as it always did once the latest catastrophe had turned into history.

But the Pomona thing was only the beginning.

That great column of magma, rolling upward from the depths of the earth on a long slant to the west, began breaking through in a lot of other places, bursting out like an attack of fiery pimples across a wide, vaguely triangular strip bracketed, roughly, on the east by the Orange Freeway, on the north by Las Tunas Drive and Arrow Highway, on the south by the Pomona Freeway, and on the west by San Gabriel Boulevard. Within the affected zone anything was likely to happen. Volcanic vents opened in completely random patterns. Lava flows the size of small creeks would crop up in people’s garages, or in their living rooms. Fumaroles would sprout in a front lawn and fill a whole neighborhood with smoke and ash. Houses suddenly began to rise from the ground as subsurface bulges formed beneath them. A finger of fierce subterranean heat would whiz along a street and fry the roots of every tree and shrub in your garden without harming your house. All this would be accompanied by almost daily earthquakes—not big ones, just nerve-wracking little jiggles of 3.9 or 4.7 that drove you crazy with fear that something gigantic was getting ready to follow. Then things would be quiet for a couple of weeks; and then they would start again, worse than before.

Not all the lava events were trivial garage-sized ones. A few fissures as big as three blocks wide opened and sent broad sheets of molten matter rolling like rivers down main thoroughfares. That was when the Icelanders showed up to give advice about cooling the lava with hoses. Teams like Mattison’s were called out to build lava dams, sometimes right across the middle of a big street, so that the flow would back up behind the new rock instead of continuing right on into the towns to the west—or, perhaps, into Los Angeles proper, the city itself, still far away and untouched on the other side of the Golden State Freeway. The dams did the trick; but they had the unfortunate side effect of walling off the Zone behind ugly and impassable barriers of solid black basalt.

Today’s route takes Mattison and Company on a grand tour of the entire Zone. Freeway travel is a joke in these parts once you get anywhere east of Rosemead Boulevard, and there are new lava-created dead ends all over the place on the surface streets, and so it takes real ingenuity, and a lot of backing and filling, to make a short trip like the one from Arcadia to San Dimas, which once would have been a quick buzz down the 210 Freeway. Now it’s necessary to backtrack down Santa Anita around the new outbreaks on Duarte Road, and then to come up Myrtle in Monrovia to the 210, and take the freeway as far east as it goes before it gets plugged up by last month’s uncleared lava, which is not very far down the road at all; and then comes a lot of cockeyed wandering this way and that on surface streets, north to south and north again, through such towns as Duarte and Azusa and Covina and Glendora, places that no Angeleno ordinarily would be going in a million years, in order to get to the equally unknown municipality of San Dimas, which is just a couple of hops away from Pomona.

The landscape becomes more and more hellish, the further east they go.

“Look at all this shit,” Nicky Herzog keeps saying, over and over. “Look at it! This is fucking hopeless, you know? We all ought to give up and move to fucking Seattle.”

“Rains all the time,” says Paul Foust.

“You like lava better than rain? You like fucking black ashes falling from the sky?”

“We don’t give up,” Nadine Doheny says dreamily. “We keep on keeping on. We are grateful for everything we have.”

“Grateful for the volcanoes,” Herzog says, in wonder. “Grateful for the ashes. Is that what you think?”

“Leave her alone,” Mattison warns him. Nadine’s conversation is made up mostly of recovery mantras, and that bothers the flippant, sharp-tongued Herzog. But Doheny is right and Herzog, smart as he is, is wrong. We don’t give up. We don’t run away. We stand our ground and fight and fight and fight.

Still and all, the Zone looks awful and even after all this time he has not grown used to its hideousness. There are piles of ashes everywhere, making it seem as if a black snowfall had hit the area, and also, not quite as universally distributed but nevertheless impossible to overlook, little encrustations of cooled lava, clinging to houses and pavements like some sort of dark fungus. Light dustings of pumice drift on the breeze. The sky is white with accumulated smoke that today’s winds have not yet been able to blow out toward Riverside. Where major fires have burned, whole blocks of rubble pockmark the scene.

The truck has to detour around all sorts of lesser obstacles: spatter cones, small hills of tephra, lapilli and cinders and lava bombs and other forms of ejected volcanic junk, et cetera, et cetera. Occasionally they pass an active fumarole that’s enthusiastically belching smoke. Around it, Mattison knows, are piles of dead bugs, ankle-deep, killed by gusts of live steam or poisonous vapors. The fumaroles are surrounded also by broad swaths of mud that somehow has been flung up around their rims, often quite colorful mud at that, green or pink or red from alum deposits, bright yellow where sulfur crystals abound. Sometimes the yellow is laced with streaks of orange or blue, and sometimes, where the mud is very blue, it is splotched in a highly decorative way by a crust of rich chestnut-brown.

“It’s like fairyland, isn’t it?” Mary Maude Gulliver cries out, suddenly. “It’s like something out of Tolkien!”

“Crazy hooer,” Lenny Prochaska mutters. “I’d like to give you a fairyland, you hooer.”

Mattison shushes him. He smiles at Mary Maude. It’s hard to see this place as a fairyland, all right, but Mary Maude is one of a kind. Give her credit for accentuating the positive, anyway.

Aside from the mineral incrustations in the mud, the Zone shows color where the ground itself has been cooked by the heat of some intense outbreak from below. That ranges from orange and brick red through bright cherry red to purple and black, with some lively streaks of blue. But this show of color is the only trace of what might be called beauty anywhere around. Every building is stained with mud and ash. There are hardly any live trees or garden plants to be seen, just blackened trunks with shriveled leaves still hanging from the branches.

There aren’t many people still living in these neighborhoods. Most of those who could afford it have packed up all their worldly possessions and had them carted off to new homes outside the Zone and, in a good many cases, outside the state altogether. A lot of those at the very bottom of the income ladder have cleared out also, moving to the new Federal relocation camps that have been set up in downtown L.A., Valencia, Mojave, the Angeles National Forest, and anyplace else where there was no irate householders’ association to take out an injunction against it. The remaining residents of the Zone, mainly, are the lower-middle-income people, the ones who haven’t yet lost their houses but couldn’t afford to hire moving companies and aren’t quite poor enough to qualify for the camps. They are still squatting here, grimly guarding their meager homes against looters, and hoping against hope that the next round of lava outbreaks will happen on any street but their own.

Just how desperate some of these people are getting is something Mattison discovers when the truck’s erratic route around the various obstacles takes it through a badly messed-up segment of a barrio somewhere between Azusa and Covina and they see some kind of pagan religious sacrifice under way in the middle of a four-way intersection, where the pavement has begun to bulge slightly and show signs of imminent buckling as gas pressure builds from below. Flat slabs of blue-black lava have been piled up in the crosswalk to form a sort of rough, ragged-edged altar that has been surrounded by green boughs torn from nearby trees.

What is evidently a priest—but not any sort of Catholic priest; his dark face is painted with green and red stripes and he is wearing a brilliant Aztec-looking costume, bright feathers and strips of fur all over it—is standing atop the altar, grasping a gleaming butcher-knife in his hand. The altar is stained with blood, and more is about to be added to it, because two other men in less gaudy outfits than the priest’s are at his side, holding forth to him a wildly fluttering chicken. Assorted pigs, sheep, and birds are lined up back of the altar, waiting their turn. In a wider circle around the site are perhaps fifty shabbily dressed men, women, and children, silent, stony-faced, holding hands and slowly, rhythmically stamping their feet.

The nature of the thing that is taking place here is utterly obvious right away to everyone aboard the Citizens Service House truck. Even so, it isn’t always easy to believe the evidence of your eyes when you see something like this. Mattison stares in shock and disbelief, wondering whether they have slipped through some time-fault and have dropped down into an ancient era, primitive and barbaric. But no, no, prosaic evidence of the modern century can be seen on every side, lampposts, store fronts, billboards. It’s just what’s going on in the middle of the street that is so exceedingly strange.

“Holy fucking shit,” Buck Randegger says. He’s a former highway construction worker who has been substance-free about four months and is, much like this lava altar, still plenty rough around the edges. “I thought the fucking Mexicans in this town were supposed to be Christians, for Christ’s sake.”

“We are,” Annette Perez tells him icily. “And also other things, when we have to be. Sometimes both at the same time.” The butcher-knife descends in a fierce arc, the newly headless chicken flaps its wings insanely, the crowd of worshippers jumps up and down and cries out three times in a high-pitched ecstatic way, and Randegger expresses his disgust and amazement at the whole weird pagan scene with a maximum of pungency and a minimum of political correctness. For a moment it looks as though Perez is going to jump at him, and Mattison gets ready to intervene, but she simply shoots Randegger a black glare and says, “If this was your neighborhood, carajo, and you had a god, wouldn’t you want to ask him to stop this shit?”

“With pigs? With sheep?”

“With whatever would do it,” she says.

Gibbons, meanwhile, is backing the truck out of the intersection, since the assembled congregation now is staring at them as though their presence here is quite unwelcome and it seems manifestly not a good idea to try to drive any closer. Mattison, taking one last look over his shoulder, sees a small pig being led up the side of the altar. The truck swings left at the first corner, then takes the next right and right again, which brings it around to the far side of the site of the ceremony in the same moment as a little earthquake goes rippling through the vicinity, 3.5 or so, just enough to make the gaunt blackened palm trees that line the street start swaying. The worshippers in the intersection behind them glower and point at the truck as it reappears, and begin to scream and yell furiously and shake their fists, and then Mattison hears some popping sounds.

“Hit the gas,” he tells Gibbons over his suit radio. “They’re shooting at us.”

Gibbons speeds up. The street ahead is carpeted with a layer of loose ash maybe two feet deep, but Gibbons ploughs through it anyway, sending up swirling black clouds that make everybody on the open deck close the faceplates of their suits in a hurry. Beyond the ash is a stretch of crunchy cinders and other sorts of tephra, so that they all grab hold of each other and hang on tight as the truck clanks and jounces onward, and then a little newly congealed lava in the road makes the ride even rougher; but after that the street turns normal again for a while and they can relax, as much relaxation as may be possible while you ride in an open truck through territory that no longer looks like just a suburb of Hell, but the Devil’s own back yard.

There have been repeated outbreaks of tectonic activity here before, early on in the crisis—that much is obvious from the burned-out houses and the black crusts of old lava everywhere and the ashen landscape—but something new and big is apparently getting ready to happen. The sky here is dead white from thick upwellings of steam and sulfurous fumes, except where the fumes are coal black. Streaks of lightning keep jumping around and the ground trembles continuously, as if a non-stop earthquake is going on. The sidewalks are warped and bulging in many places and some little red tongues of lava can be seen beginning to ooze from cracks in the pavement. Every few minutes a dull distant boom can be heard, a muffled sound that definitely gets your attention, something like the fart of a dinosaur that might be sauntering around a few blocks away.

Three or four weary-looking fire crews and some Guardsmen are slowly taking up positions in the street and getting their gear into order; some of the biggest pumps Mattison has ever seen have already been hauled into place for the lava-cooling work; police helicopters are whirling overhead, booming down orders to whatever remaining population may still be living here to evacuate the area at once. It is a truly precarious scene. Mattison is ever so happy that he traded the horrors of substance abuse for the privilege of visiting places like this.

The same thing is occurring to some of his companions, evidently. Blazes McFlynn lays his hand on Mattison’s right arm and says, “I didn’t sign on for any goddamned suicide missions, Matty. Let me off this fucking truck right now.”

“Let you off?” Mattison says mildly.

“Fucking A. I want out, this very minute.”

Mattison sighs. McFlynn always makes trouble, sooner or later: if only he had known that this San Dimas operation was going to be tacked on to the day’s outing, he probably would have opted to leave McFlynn behind at the outset. McFlynn is, of all goofy things, a bombed-out circus acrobat and pensioned-off movie stunt man, strong as a tow-truck winch, who over the course of time has found relief from stress in a whole smorgasbord of addictive substances and now—having very badly broken his leg while winning a moronic barroom bet that involved jumping off the top of a building, thereby acquiring a severe limp that makes it hard for him to practice either of his professions, draws generous compensation pay from a variety of governmental sources while undergoing one of his periodic spells of detoxification and Citizens Service. His first name is actually Gerard, but if you call him anything but Blazes he will react unpleasantly. He is the only man in the house for whom Mattison in his pre-sober state would have felt any reticence about decking, for McFlynn, though some five inches shorter than Mattison, is probably just about as dangerous in a fight, gimpy leg and all.

“Are you saying,” Mattison asks him once more, “that you don’t want to take part in the current operation?”

“The whole street is going to blow any minute.”

“Maybe so. That’s why we’re here, to get things under control if it does. You want to walk back from here to Silver Lake? You think you’ll catch a bus, maybe, or phone for a cab? The option of your departing this operation simply does not exist at this moment, okay, McFlynn?” McFlynn tries to say something, but Mattison talks right over him, although keeping his voice mild, mild, mild, as he has been taught to do all the time when addressing the inmates, no matter what the provocation. “You find this work not to your liking, well, when you get your cowardly ass back to the house tonight you can tell Donna that you don’t want to do volcano work any more, and she’ll take you off the list. You aren’t any fucking prisoner, you understand? You don’t have to do this stuff against your will and in fact you are perfectly free, if you like, to pack up and leave the house tomorrow and go back to your favorite substance, for that matter. But not today. Today you work for me, and we work in San Dimas.”

McFlynn, who surely was aware when he began complaining that this was where the discussion was going to end, is just starting to crank up a disgruntled and obscene capitulation when Gibbons says, over the radio from the truck cab, “Volcano Central wants us to start setting up the pump, Matty. Satellite scan says there’s a lava bulge about to blow two blocks east of us down Bonita Avenue, which is the big street straight in front of us, and we’re supposed to dam it up as soon as it comes our way.” So they are going to be right on the front line, this time. Fine, Mattison thinks. Hot diggety damn.

They all get off the truck, and seal up their suits, and set about getting ready to deal with the oncoming eruption.

Because the pump they will be using this time is a jumbo job, just about the biggest one Mattison has ever worked with, he designates not only Prochaska and Hawks, once again, for the pumping crew, but also Clyde Snow and Blazes McFlynn, who will be up front not only because he’s strong but also because Mattison wants to keep a close eye on him. In any case he’s going to need all the muscle-power he can get when it becomes necessary to swing that big rig around to keep the shifting lava penned up. He puts the generally reliable Paul Foust in charge of the controls that operate the pump itself. The rest—Randegger, Herzog, Evans, and the three women, Doheny and Perez and Gulliver—Mattison deploys at various points along the line to the standpipe, so that they can keep the hose from getting tangled and cope with any other interruptions to the flow of water that might arise.

Everybody is in place none too soon. Because just as the signal arrives from the rear that the water connection has been made, there comes an all too familiar bellowing and groaning from the next block, as though a giant with a bad bellyache is about to cut loose, and then Mattison hears five sharp heavy grunts in succession, oof oof oof oof oof, followed by an eerie crackling sound, and suddenly the air is full of fire.

It’s like one of the Yellowstone geysers, except that what is being flung up is a lot of tiny bits of hot lava riding on a plume of bluish steam, and for a couple of moments it’s impossible to see more than a few feet in front of your face-plate. Then there is one single booming sound, not muffled at all but sharp and hard, and the bluish geyser of steam in front of them triples or quadruples in height in about half a second, and the pavement ripples beneath their feet as though an earthquake has happened precisely in this spot. Mattison comprehends that there has been a terrific explosion a very short way down the block and they are all about to be hurled sky-high, or maybe are already on their way up to the stratosphere and just haven’t had time to react yet.

But they aren’t. What has happened is that an underground gas pocket has blown its head off, yes, but it has done it in one single clean whoosh and all the pent-up junk that is being released has taken off for Mars as a coherent unit, the steam and mud and lava bits and whatnot rising straight up and vanishing, clearing the air beautifully behind it. A couple of good-sized lava bombs go soaring past them, fizzing like fireworks, and come down with thick plopping thunks somewhere not far away, but they don’t seem to do any damage; and then things are quiet, pretty much. The whole blurry geyser that was spewing straight up in front of them is gone, the ground they are standing on is still intact, and they can see again.

Mattison has just about enough time to realize that he has survived the explosion when he registers the force of an inrush of cool air that’s swooping in from all sides to fill the gap where the geyser had been. It isn’t strong enough to knock anybody down, but it does make you want to brace yourself pretty good.

And then comes the heat; and after it, the lava flow.

The heat is awesome. Mattison’s suit catches most of it, but enough of the surge gets through his insulation so that he has no doubt at all about its intensity. It is what he calls first-rush heat: the subterranean magma mass has been cooking whatever deposits of air have surrounded it down there, and all that hot air, having had no place to go, has gone on getting hotter and hotter. Now it all comes gleefully zooming out at once. Mattison recoils involuntarily as though he has been belted by an invisible fist, steadies himself, straightens up, looks around to check up on his companions. They’re all okay.

The lava, having busted through the pavement at last, follows right on the heels of that hot blast. A glowing red-orange river of it, maybe two or three feet deep, flowing down the middle of the street, taking the line of least resistance between the buildings as it heads in their direction.

“Hose!” Mattison yells. “Pump! Hit it, you bozos, hit it right down front!”

The lava is moving faster than Mattison would prefer, but not so fast that they need to retreat, at least not yet. It’s actually three separate streams, each runnel six to eight feet wide, traveling in parallel paths and occasionally overlapping in a braided flow before separating again. The surface of each flow is fairly viscous from its exposure to the cool air, darker than what is below and showing irregular bulges and lobes and puckerings, which break open now and then to reveal the bright red stuff that lies just underneath. Here and there, narrow arcs of dark congealed lava rise above the stream at sharp angles like sleek fins, making it seem as though lava sharks are swimming swiftly downstream through the fiery torrent.

As the water from their big nozzle hits the first onrush of the flow, a scum of cooling lava starts to form almost instantly atop the middle stream. The front of it begins to change color and texture, thickening and turning gray and wrinkled, like an elephant’s hide.

“That’s it!” Mattison tells his men. “Keep hitting it there! Smack in the middle, guys!”

The water boils right off, naturally, and within moments they are able to see nothing in front of them once again except a wall of steam. This is the most dangerous moment, Mattison knows: if the lava—pushed toward them by whatever giant fist of gas is shoving it from below—should suddenly increase its uptake velocity, he and his whole team could be engulfed by it before they knew what was happening to them. For the next few minutes they’ll be fighting blind against the oncoming lava flow, with nothing to guide them about its speed and position but Mattison’s own perceptions of fluctuations in its heat.

The heat, at the moment, is really something. Not as fierce as it had been in the first instant of the breakout, no, but powerful enough to tax the cooling systems of their lava suits practically to their limits. It feels like a solid wall, that heat: Mattison imagines that if he leaned forward against it, it would hold him up. But he knows that it won’t; and he knows, also, that if things get much hotter they will have to back off.

What he is trying to do is to build log-shaped strips of solidified lava along the front of the row, perpendicular to the line of movement. These will slow its advance as the fresh stuff piles up behind them. Then he can raise the angle of the hoses and start pumping the water upward to form larger blocks of lava, which he will eventually link to create his dam. And in time he will have buried the live lava at its source, entombing it beneath a little mountain of newly created rock and thus throttling the upwelling altogether.

The theory is a nice one. But in practice there usually are problems, because the lava, unlike your average river, tends to advance at a variable speed from moment to moment, and you can build a lovely little log jam or even some good-sized retainer blocks and nevertheless a sudden fast-moving spurt of molten stuff will spill right over the top and head your way, and there is nothing you can do then but drop your hoses and run like hell, hoping that the lava isn’t traveling faster than you are.

Or else, as Mattison knows all too well, your dam will work very effectively to halt the lava in its present path—thereby inducing it to take up a different path that will send it rolling off toward some still undamaged freeway or still unruined houses, or maybe pouring down a hillside into another community entirely. When you see something like that happening, you need to move your whole operation around at a 90-degree angle to itself and start building a second dam, not so easy to do when you are operating with two-ton pumps.

Here, just now, everything is going sweetly so far. It’s a tough business because of the extreme heat, but they are holding their own and even managing to achieve something. They have been able to maintain themselves at a distance of about half a block from the front edge of the lava flow without the need to retreat, and Mattison can see, whenever the steam thins out a bit, that the color of the lava along the edge is beginning to turn from gray to a comforting black, the black of solid basalt. A pump crew from some other Citizens Service House has arrived, Mattison has been told, and is building a second lava dam on the opposite side of the breakout. The fire crews are at work in the adjacent blocks, hosing down the structures that were ignited by the initial geyser of lava fragments.

If visibility stays good, if the water supply holds out, if the pump doesn’t break down, if the lava doesn’t pull any velocity surprises, if some randomly escaping gobbet of hot rock doesn’t go flying through the air and melt one of the hoses, if there isn’t some new eruption right under their feet, or maybe an earthquake, if this, if that—well, then, maybe they’ll be able to knock off in another hour or two and head back to the house for some well-earned rest.

Maybe.

But things are beginning to change a little, now. The lava is penned up nicely in the middle but the bulk of the flow has shifted to the right-hand stream and that one is gaining in depth and velocity. That brings up the ugly possibility that Mattison’s dam is achieving diversion instead of containment, and is about to send the entire flow, which has been traveling thus far from west to east, off in a southerly direction.

Volcano Central is monitoring the whole thing by satellite, and somebody up there calls the problem to Mattison’s attention via his suit radio about a fifteenth of a second after he discovers it for himself. “Start moving your equipment to the right side of your dam,” Volcano Central says. “There’s danger now that the lava will start rolling south down San Dimas Avenue into Bonelli County Park, where it’ll take out the Puddingstone Reservoir, and maybe keep on going south until it cuts the San Bernardino Freeway in half on the far side of the park. A piece of the 210 Freeway will also be at risk down there.”

The street and park names mean nothing to Mattison—he has never been anywhere near San Dimas before in his life—and he can form only a hazy picture of the specific geography from what Volcano Central is telling him. But all that matters is that there’s a park, a reservoir, and an apparently undamaged stretch of freeway to the south of here, and his beautifully constructed lava dam has succeeded in tipping the flow toward those very things, and he has to hustle now to correct the situation.

“All right, everybody, listen up,” he announces. “We’re making a 90-degree shift in operations.”

Easier said than done, of course. The hoses will have to be decoupled and dragged to new hydrants, the massive pump has to be swung around, the trajectory of the water stream has to be recalibrated—nor will the lava stand still while they are doing all these things. It’s a challenge, but stuff like this is meat and potatoes to Mattison, the fundamental nutritive agent out of which his recovery is being built. He starts giving the orders; and his poor battered bedraggled team of ex-abusers, ex-homelesses, ex-burglars, ex-muggers, ex-whores, ex-this, ex-that, all of it bad, swings gamely into action, because this is part of their recovery too.

But in the middle of the process of moving the pump, Blazes McFlynn steps back, folds his arms across the chest of his lava suit, and says, “Coffee break.”

Mattison stares at him incredulously. “What the fuck did you say?”

“Time out, is what I said. You think it’s a snap, hauling this monster around? I’m tired. I’m a crippled man, Matty. I got to sit down for a while and take a breather.”

“The lava is changing direction. There’s a park and a reservoir and a freeway in the path of danger now.”

“So?” McFlynn says. “What’s that mean to me?”

Mattison is so astonished that for a moment he can’t speak. If this is a joke, it’s a damn lousy one. He needs McFlynn badly, and McFlynn has to know that. Flabbergasted, Mattison gapes and gestures in helpless pantomime.

McFlynn says, “Not my park. Not my freeway. I don’t even know where the fuck we are right now. But my bad leg is aching like a holy son of a bitch and I want to sit down and rest and that’s that.”

“I’ll sit you down, all right,” Mattison says, recovering his voice finally. “I’ll sit you down inside a volcano, you obstreperous lazy son of a bitch. I’ll drop you in on your head.” He knows that he is not supposed to speak to the inmates this way, and that everybody else is listening in and someone is bound to talk and he will very likely be reprimanded later on by Donna, but he can’t help himself. He doesn’t pretend to be a saint and McFlynn’s sudden rebellion has pissed him off almost to the breaking point. Almost. What he really would like to do now is put one hand under McFlynn’s left armpit and one hand under the right one and pick him up and carry him to the lava and dangle his feet over the fiery-hot flow for a moment and then let go.

Very likely that is exactly what Mattison would have tried to do two years ago, if he and McFlynn had found themselves in this situation two years ago; but it is a measure of the progress he has been making that he merely fantasizes tossing McFlynn into the lava, now, instead of actually doing it. The fantasy is so vivid that for a dizzy moment he believes that he is actually doing it, and he gets a savage rush of glee from the spectacle of McFlynn disappearing, melting away as he goes under, into the blazing river of molten magma.

But actually doing it would be extremely poor procedural technique. And also McFlynn is not exactly a weakling and Mattison is aware that he might find himself involved in a non-trivial fight if he tries anything. Mattison has never lost a fight in his life, but it is some time since he has been in one, and he may be out of practice; and in any case there’s no time now, with the lava about to overflow his dam, to fuck around getting into fights with people like Blazes McFlynn.

So what he does, instead, is turn his back on McFlynn, swallowing the rest of what he would like to say and do to him, and indicate to Prochaska, Hawks, and Snow, who have been watching the whole dispute in silence, that they will have to finish moving the pump without McFlynn’s help. They all know what that means, that McFlynn has shafted them thoroughly by dumping his share of this tremendous job on their shoulders, and they are righteously angry. A certain amount of venting occurs, which Mattison decides would be best to permit. Hawks tells McFlynn that he’s a motherfucking goof-off and Prochaska says something guttural and probably highly uncomplimentary in what is probably Czech, and even Snow, not famous for hard work himself, gives McFlynn the hand-across-bent-forearm chop. McFlynn doesn’t seem to give a damn. He replies to the whole bunch of them with an upthrust finger and a lazy, contemptuous smirk that makes Mattison think that the next event is going to be a crazy free-for-all; but no, no, they all ostentatiously turn their backs on him too and continue the job of guiding the pump toward its new position.

It’s a miserably hard job. The pump is on a wheeled carriage, sure, but it isn’t designed to be moved in an arc as narrow as this, and they really have to bust their humps to swing it into its new position. The men grunt and groan and gasp as they bend and push. Mattison, who as the biggest and strongest of the group has taken up the key position, can feel things popping in his arms and shoulders as he puts his whole weight into the job. And all the while McFlynn stands to one side, watching.

The pump is more than halfway into place when McFlynn comes limping over as though he has graciously decided that he will join them in the work after all.

“Look who’s here,” says Hawks. “You fucking son of a bitch.”

“Can I be of any assistance?” McFlynn says grandly.

He tries to take up a position against the side of the pump carriage between Hawks and Prochaska. Hawks turns squarely toward McFlynn and seems to be thinking about throwing a punch at him. Mattison, who has been worried about this possibility since McFlynn made his announcement, poises himself to step in, but Hawks gets his anger under control just in time. Muttering to himself, he turns back in Prochaska’s direction. There is just enough room for McFlynn to shove his way in between Hawks and Mattison. He braces himself and puts his shoulder against the carriage, making a big show of throwing all his strength into the task.

“Hey, be careful not to strain yourself, now!” Mattison tells him.

“Fuck you, Matty,” McFlynn says sulkily. “That’s all I have to say, just fuck you.”

“You’re welcome,” says Mattison, as with the aid of McFlynn’s added strength they finally manage to finish swinging the big pump around and lock it on its track.

The men step back from it, wheezing, sucking in breath after their heavy exertions. But the incident isn’t over. Prochaska goes up to McFlynn and says something else to him in the harsh language that Mattison assumes is Czech. McFlynn gives Prochaska the finger again. Maybe there’s going to be a fight after all. No. They are content to glare, it seems. Mattison glances at McFlynn and sees, through the face-plate of his suit, that the expression on McFlynn’s face has become unexpectedly complicated. He looks defiant but maybe just a little shamefaced too. An attack of conscience? A bit of guilt over his stupid dereliction kicking in at last, now that McFlynn realizes that he actually was needed badly just now and fucked everybody over by crapping out? Better late than never, Mattison figures.

Prochaska still isn’t finished letting McFlynn know what he thinks of him, though: he throws in a couple of harsh new Slavic expletives, and McFlynn, who probably has no more of an idea of what Prochaska is saying to him than Mattison does, dourly gives him back some muttered threats salted with the standard Anglo-Saxonisms.

Things are starting to get a little out of hand, Mattison thinks. He needs to do something, although he’s not sure what. But he has a lava flow to worry about, first.

The lava, in fact, is getting a little out of hand also. Not that it has started to flow in any serious way toward Whatchamacallit Park and Whozis Reservoir, not yet. A thin little eddy of it has begun to dribble off that way over the right-hand edge of Mattison’s dam, but nothing significant. The main flow is still traveling from east to west. The real problem is that new flows are starting to emerge from the ground alongside the original source, and there are now six or seven streams instead of three. Red gleams are showing through the gray and black of the dam, indicating that the hot new lava is finding its way between sections of the hardened stuff. That means that what is coming out now is thinner than before.

Thin lava moves faster than thick lava. Sometimes it can move very fast. The direction of the flow can get a little unpredictable, too.

The pump is in place in its new location and ready to start throwing water, but it needs to have the water, first. Mattison is still waiting for confirmation that the hoses behind him have been moved and hooked to different hydrants. He can see Nicky Herzog a short distance down one of the side streets to his right, kneeling next to a section of thick hose as he fumbles around with a connector.

“Are we okay?” Mattison asks him.

“Just about ready,” Herzog replies. He straightens up and begins to give the hand signal indicating that the water line is completely set up. But suddenly he seems to freeze in place, and starts swinging around jerkily in a very odd way, going from side to side from the waist up without moving his legs at all. Also Herzog has begun flinging his arms rigidly above his head, one at a time, as if he is suddenly getting tickled by an electric current.

For a moment Mattison can’t figure out what’s going on. Then he sees that the rightmost lava stream, the one that had already begun to escape a little from the dam, has been joined by one of the newer and thinner streams and has greatly increased in volume and velocity. It has changed direction, too, and is running straight at Herzog in a great hurry, traveling at him in two prongs separated by a green Toyota utility van that somebody has abandoned in the middle of the street.

Herzog is in the direct line of the flow, and he knows it, and he is scared silly.

Mattison sees immediately that Herzog has a couple of choices that make some sense. He could go to his left, which would involve a slightly scary jump of about three feet over the lesser prong of the new lava stream, and take refuge in an alleyway that looks likely to be secure against the immediate trajectory of the stream because there are brick buildings on either side of it. Or he could simply turn around and run like hell down the street he’s in, hoping to outleg the advancing flow, which is moving swiftly but maybe not quite as swiftly as he could manage to go. Both of these options have certain risks, but each of them holds out the possibility of survival, too.

Unfortunately Herzog, though a quick-witted enough fellow when it comes to sarcastic quips and insults, or to laying out a million-dollar story line for some movie-studio executive, is fundamentally a clueless little yutz as far as most normal aspects of life are concerned, and in his panic he makes a yutzy decision. Apparently Herzog perceives the Toyota as an island of safety in the middle of all this madness, and, breaking at last from his paralysis, he jumps the wrong way across the narrower lava stream and with a berserk outlay of energy pulls himself up onto the hood of the green van. From there he clambers desperately to the Toyota’s roof and begins to emit a godawful frightened caterwauling, high-pitched and strident, like an automobile burglar alarm that won’t turn off.

What he has achieved by this is to strand himself in the middle of the lava flow. Maybe he expects that Mattison will now call in a police helicopter to lower a rope ladder to him, the way they would do in a movie, but there are no helicopters in the vicinity just now, and the lava that surrounds the Toyota isn’t any special effect, either: it’s a fast-flowing stream of actual red-hot molten magma, a couple of thousand degrees in temperature, which is widening and widening and very soon will be lapping up against the Toyota’s wheels on both sides. At that point the Toyota is going to melt right down into the lava stream and Nicky Herzog is going to die a quick but very unpleasant death.

Mattison doesn’t like the idea of losing a member of his crew, even a shithead like Herzog. He knows that his crew is made up entirely of shitheads, himself included, and the fact that Herzog is a shithead does not invalidate him as a human being. Too much of the human race falls into the shithead category, Mattison realizes. If nobody in the world ever lifted a finger to save shitheads from their own shitheadedness, then almost everybody would be in trouble. He himself, as Mattison is only too well aware, would still be compulsively cruising the bars along Wilshire and waking up the next morning under somebody’s carport in Venice or Santa Monica. So he resolved some time back, quite early in his sobriety, to do whatever he could to help the shitheads of the world overcome their shitheadedness, starting with himself but extending even unto the likes of McFlynn and Herzog.

Nevertheless, Mattison is helpless in this instance. He is cut off from Herzog now by the larger of the two lava flows and he doesn’t see a damned thing that he can do by way of rescuing him in time. A couple of minutes ago, maybe, yes, but now there’s no chance. Even with an armored suit on, he can’t just wade through a stream of hot fresh lava. He is going to have to stand right where he is and watch Herzog melt.

All of this analysis, the sizing up of the somber situation and the arriving at the melancholy conclusion, has taken about 2.53 seconds. Roughly 1.42 seconds later, while Mattison is still glumly making his peace with the idea that Herzog is screwed, a lava-suited figure unexpectedly appears in the street where Herzog is trapped, emerging from the alleyway into which Herzog had failed to flee, and calls out, extending his arms to the terrified man on top of the van, “Jump! Jump!” And, when Herzog does nothing, yells again, angrily, “Come on, you prick, jump! I’ll catch you!”

Mattison isn’t sure at first who the man who has come out of the alleyway is. Everybody looks basically like everybody else inside a lava suit, and it’s not too easy to distinguish one voice from another over the suit radios, either. Mattison glances around, taking a quick inventory of his crew. Hawks right here, yes, and Prochaska, yes—

Can it be Clyde Snow, over there by the mouth of that alleyway? No. No. Snow is right over there, on the far side of the pump carriage. So it has to be Blazes McFlynn who right at this moment is standing at the very edge of a diabolically hot stream of lava and stretching his arms out toward the gibbering and wailing Nicky Herzog. McFlynn, yes, who has found some sort of detour between the adjacent buildings and made his way as close to the Toyota as it is possible to get. Incredible, Mattison thinks. Incredible.

“Jump, will you, you nitwit faggot!” McFlynn roars once more. “I can’t stay here the whole fucking day!”

And Herzog jumps.

He does it with the same grace and panache with which he has handled most other aspects of his life, coming down in McFlynn’s approximate direction with his body bent in some crazy corkscrew position and his arms and legs flailing wildly. McFlynn manages to grab one arm and one leg as Herzog sails by him heading nose-first for the lava, and hangs on to him. But, slight as Herzog is, the force of his jump is so great and the angle of his descent is so cockeyed that the impact on McFlynn causes the bigger man to stagger and spin around and begin to topple. Mattison, watching in horror, comprehends at once that McFlynn is going to fall forward into the lava stream still holding Herzog in his arms, and both men are going to die.

McFlynn doesn’t fall, though. He takes one ponderous lurching step forward, so that his left leg is no more than a few inches from the edge of the lava stream, and leans over bending almost double so that that leg accepts his full weight, and Herzog’s weight as well. McFlynn’s left leg, Mattison thinks, is the broken one, the one that is bent permanently outward after the seventy-nine-cent job of setting it that was done for him at the county hospital. McFlynn stands there leaning out and down for a very long moment, regaining his balance, adjusting to his burden, getting a better grip on Herzog. Then, straightening up and tilting himself backward, McFlynn pivots on his good leg and swings himself around in a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc and goes tottering off triumphantly into the alleyway with Nicky Herzog’s inert form draped over his shoulder.

Mattison has never seen anything like it. Herzog can’t weigh more than a hundred forty pounds, but the suit adds maybe fifty, sixty pounds more, and McFlynn, though six feet tall and stockily built, probably weighs two-ten tops. And has a gimpy leg, no bullshit there, a genuinely damaged limb on which he has just taken all of Herzog’s weight as the little guy came plummeting down from that Toyota. It must have been some circus-acrobat trick that McFlynn used, Mattison decides, or else one of his stunt-man gimmicks, because there was no other way that he could have pulled the trick off. Mattison, big and strong as he is and with both his legs intact, doubts that even he would have been able to manage it.

McFlynn is coming around the far side of the pump carriage now, no longer carrying Herzog in his arms but simply dragging him along like a limp doll. McFlynn’s face-plate is open and Mattison can see that his eyes are shining like a madman’s—the adrenaline rush, no doubt—and his cheeks are flushed and glossy with sweat. It’s the look of the hero coming back in glory from a tremendous victory. McFlynn’s heroism is bullshit, Mattison knows; it’s just the next scene in McFlynn’s private movie. But you live out your movie long enough and it goes real on you. Herzog was going to get killed and, thanks to McFlynn, he wasn’t. That’s real.

“Here,” McFlynn says, and dumps Herzog down practically at Mattison’s feet. “I thought the dumb asshole was going to wait forever to make the jump.”

“Hey, nice going,” Mattison says, grinning. He balls up his fist and clips McFlynn lightly on the forearm with it, a gesture of solidarity and companionship, one big man to another. McFlynn’s face is aglow with the true redemptive gleam. That must have been why he did it, Mattison thinks: to cover over the business about refusing to help move the pump. Well, whatever. McFlynn is a total louse, a completely deplorable son of a bitch, but that was still a hell of a thing to have done. “I thought you had gone off on your coffee break,” Mattison says.

“Fuck you, Matty,” McFlynn tells him, and shambles away to one side.

Herzog is conscious, or approximately so, but he looks dazed. Mattison yanks his face plate open, snaps his fingers in front of his nose, gets him to open his eyes.

“Go over to the truck and sit down,” Mattison orders him. “Chill out for a while. You’re off duty.”

“Yeah,” says Herzog vaguely. “Yeah. Yeah.”

And give yourself a couple of good shots of bourbon to calm yourself down while you’re at it, Mattison thinks, but of course does not say. Christ, he wouldn’t mind a little of that himself, just now. It is, however, not an available option.

“All right,” he says, looking around at Hawks, Prochaska, Snow, and a couple of the others, Foust and Nadine Doheny, who have come up from the rear lines to see what’s going on. “Where were we, now?”

The hose line that Herzog had been supervising has been obliterated by the new lava stream, of course, and the Toyota van is up to its door-handles now in lava too. But there are other hose lines coming in from other streets, and they still have a dam to build before they can call it a day.

Mattison is getting a little tired, now, after all the stuff with McFlynn and then with Herzog, but he can feel himself starting to function on automatic pilot. Groggily but with complete confidence he gets the water running again, and cuts through another handy alley so that he can set up a second line of lava logs along the new front, about thirty feet south of the Toyota. It takes about fifteen minutes of fast maneuvers and fancy dancing to choke it off entirely.

Then he can devote his attention to building the larger dam, the one that will contain this whole mess and shove the lava back on itself before it does any more damage. Mattison plods back and forth almost like a sleepwalker, giving orders in an increasingly raspy voice, telling people to move hoses around and change the throwing angle of the pump, and they do what he says like sleepwalkers themselves. This has been a very long day. They don’t usually do two jobs the same day, and Mattison means to have Donna DiStefano say something to the Citizens Service administrators when he gets back.

Big ragged-edged blocks of black stone are forming now all across the middle of the street and curving around toward the south where the runaway lava stream had been. So the thing is pretty well under control. By now another team of Citizens Service people has arrived, and Mattison figures that if he is as tired as he is, then the others in his crew, who don’t have his superhuman physical endurance and are still hampered to some degree by the medical aftereffects of their recently overcome bad habits, must be about ready to drop. He tells Barry Gibbons that he would like him to requests permission from Volcano Central to withdraw. It takes Gibbons about five minutes to get through—Volcano Central must be having one whacko busy day—but finally they okay the request.

“All right, guys,” Mattison sings out. “That’s it for today. Everybody back in the truck!”

They are silent, pretty much, on the way back. The San Dimas thing has been grueling for all of them. Mattison notices that Herzog is standing on one side of the truck and McFlynn on the other, facing in opposite directions. He wonders whether Herzog had had the good grace even to thank McFlynn for what he had done. Probably not. But Herzog is a shithead, after all.

For a long time Mattison can’t stop thinking about that little episode. About McFlynn’s perversity, mainly. Crapping out on the rest of the pump team in a key moment without any reason, nonchalantly stepping to one side and leaving Prochaska and Hawks and Snow to do the heavy hauling without him, even though he must have known that his strength was needed. And then, just as light-heartedly, running into that alleyway to risk his life for Herzog, a man whom he despises and loves to torment. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Mattison pokes around at it from this way and that, and still he doesn’t have a clue to what might have been going on in McFlynn’s mind in either case.

Possibly nothing was going on in there, he decides finally. Perhaps McFlynn’s actions don’t make any sense even to McFlynn.

McFlynn has been a resident in the house long enough to know that everybody is supposed to be a team player, and even if you don’t want to be, you need to pretend to be. Letting the team down in the clutch is not a good way to ensure that you will get the help you need in your own time of need. On the other hand, there was no reason in the world why McFlynn had to do what he did for Herzog, except maybe that he was feeling sheepish about the pump-moving episode, and Mattison finds that a little hard to believe, McFlynn feeling sheepish about anything.

So maybe McFlynn is just an ornery, unpredictable guy who takes each moment as it comes. Maybe he felt like being a louse when they were moving the pump, and maybe he felt like being a hero when Herzog was about to die a horrible death. I don’t know, Mattison thinks. That’s cool. I don’t know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to hell with it. It isn’t Mattison’s job to get inside people’s heads, anyway. He’s not a shrink, just a live-in caregiver, still too busy working on his own recovery to spend time fretting about the mysterious ways of his fellow mortals. He just has to keep them from hurting themselves and each other while they’re living in the house. So he gives up thinking about McFlynn and Herzog and turns his attention instead to what is going on all around them, which actually is a little on the weird side.

They are almost at the western periphery of the Zone, now, having retraced their route through Azusa and Covina, then through towns whose names Mattison doesn’t even know—hell, most of these places look alike, anyway, and unless you see the signs at the boundaries you don’t know where one ends and the next begins—and are approaching Temple City, San Gabriel, Alhambra, all those various flatland communities. Behind them, night is beginning to fall, it being past five o’clock and this being February. In the gathering darkness the new spurts of smoke atop far-off Mount Pomona are pretty spectacular, lit as they are by streaks of fiery red from whatever is going on inside that cone today. But also, a little to the south of the big volcano, something else seems to be happening, something odd, because a glaring cloud of blue-white light has arisen down there. Mattison doesn’t remember seeing blue-white stuff before. Some new kind of explosion? Are they nuking the lava flow, maybe? It looks strange, anyway. He’ll find out about it on the evening news, if they are. Or maybe he won’t.

Booming noises come from the southeast. A lot of tectonic garbage seems to be going into the sky back there too; he sees small red lava particles glowing against the dusk, and dark clouds too, ash and pumice, no doubt, and probably some nice-sized lava bombs being tossed aloft. And they experience two small earthquakes as they’re driving back, one while they’re going up Fair Oaks in Pasadena, another fifteen minutes later just as they’re about to get on the westbound Ventura Freeway. Nothing surprising about that; five or six little quakes a day are standard now, what with all that magma moving around under the San Gabriel Valley. But the two so close together are further signs that things are getting even livelier in the Zone just as Mattison and his crew are going off duty. Hoo boy, Mattison thinks. Hot times in Magma City.

It’s beginning to rain a little, out here in Glendale where they are at the moment. Nothing big, just light sprinkles, enough to make the rush-hour traffic a little uglier but not to cause serious troubles. Mattison likes the rain. You get so little of it, ordinarily, in Los Angeles, eight or ten dry months at a time, sometimes, and right now, with everything that’s going on behind him in the Zone, the rain seems sweet and pure, a holy blessing that’s being scattered on the troubled land.

It’s good to be going westward again, moving slowly through the evening commute toward what is still the normal, undamaged part of Los Angeles, toward the sprawling city he grew up in. What is happening back there in the Zone, the lava, the ash, the blue-white lights, seems unreal to him. This doesn’t. Down there to his left are the high-rise towers of downtown, and the clustering stack of freeways meeting and going off in every which way. And straight ahead lie all the familiar places of his own particular life, Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys in this direction and Hollywood and Westwood and West L.A. in that one, and so on and on out to Santa Monica and Venice and Topanga and the Pacific Ocean.

If only they could drop a curtain across the face of the Zone, Mattison thinks. Or build a fifty-foot-high wall, and seal it off completely. But no, they can’t do that, and the lava will keep on coming, won’t it, crawling westward and westward and westward until one of these days it comes shooting up under Rodeo Drive or knocks the San Diego Freeway off its pegs. What the hell: we can only do what we can do, and the rest is up to God’s mercy and wisdom, right? Right? Right.

They are practically back at the house, now.

The rain is getting worse. The sky ahead of them is starting to turn dark. The sky behind them is already black, except where the strange light of eruptions breaks through the night.

“McFlynn really pissed me off today,” Mattison tells Donna DiStefano. “I entertained seriously hostile thoughts in his direction. In fact I had pretty strong fantasies about tossing him right into the lava. Truth, Donna.”

The house director laughs. It’s the famous Donna laugh, a big one, high up on the Richter scale. She is a tall, hefty woman with warm friendly eyes and a huge amount of dark curling hair going halfway down her back. Nothing ever upsets her. She is supposed to have been addicted to something or other very major, fifteen or twenty years back, but nobody knows the details.

“It’s a temptation, isn’t it?” she says. “What a pill he is, eh? Was that before or after the Herzog rescue?”

“Before. A long time before. He was bitching at me from lunchtime on.” Mattison hasn’t told her about the pump-moving incident. Probably he should; but he figures she already has heard about it, one way or another, and it isn’t required of him to file report cards on every shitty thing the residents of the house do while he’s looking after them. “There was another time, later in the day, when it would have given me great pleasure to dangle him face first into the vent. But I prayed for patience instead and God was kind to me, or else we’d have had some vacancies in the house tonight.”

“Some?”

“McFlynn and me, because he’d be dead and I’d be in jail. And Herzog too, because McFlynn was the only one in a position to rescue him just then. But here we all are, safe and sound.”

“Don’t worry about it,” DiStefano says. “You did good today, Matty.”

Yes. He knows that that’s true. He did good. Every day, in every way, inch by inch, he does his best. And he’s grateful every hour of his life that things have worked out for him in such a way that he has had the opportunity. As if God has sent volcanoes to Los Angeles as a personal gift to him, part of the recovery program of Calvin Thomas Mattison, Jr.

There’s nothing on the night’s news about unusual stuff in the Zone this evening. Usual stuff, yes, plenty of that, getting the usual perfunctory coverage, fumaroles opening here, lava vents there, houses destroyed in this town and that and that, new street blockages, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe the blue-white light he saw was just a tremendous searchlight beam, celebrating the opening of some new shopping mall in Anaheim or Fullerton. This crazy town, you never can tell.

He goes upstairs—his little room, all his own. Reads for a while, thinks about his day, gets into bed. Sleeps like a baby. The alarm goes off at five, and he rises unprotestingly, showers, dresses, goes downstairs.

There are lights on all over the board. Blue for new fumaroles, here, here and there, and another red one in the vicinity of Mount Pomona, and a whole epidemic of green dots announcing fresh lava cutting loose over what looks like the whole area, top to bottom. Mattison has never seen it look that bad. The crisis seems to be entering a new and very obnoxious phase. Volcano Central will be calling them out again today, sure as anything.

What the hell. We do what we can, and hope for the best, one day at a time.

He puts together some breakfast for himself and waits for the rest of the house to wake up.

Table of Contents

- Copyright
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- IN THE CLONE ZONE
- HUNTERS IN THE FOREST
- A LONG NIGHT’S VIGIL AT THE TEMPLE

- THEBES OF THE HUNDRED GATES

- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN

- IT COMES AND GOES
- LOOKING FOR THE FOUNTAIN
- THE WAY TO SPOOK CITY
- THE RED BLAZE IS THE MORNING
- DEATH DO US PART

- THE MARTIAN INVASION JOURNALS OF HENRY JAMES

- CROSSING INTO THE EMPIRE
- THE SECOND SHIELD
- HOT TIMES IN MAGMA CITY