Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013
Author: Spilogale Inc.
Date: 2013-02-28 11:00:00+00:00

Kindle Edition, 2013 © Spilogale Inc.

Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

Table of Contents
| 222 words

March/April • 64th Year of Publication

NOVELETS

Among Friends | | Deborah J. Ross
Solidarity | | Naomi Kritzer
The Assassin | | Albert E. Cowdrey
The Lost Faces | | Sean McMullen

SHORT STORIES

The Cave | | Sean F. Lynch
Code 666 | | Michael Reaves
What The Red Oaks Knew | | Elizabeth Bourne and Mark Bourne
The Boy Who Drank From Lovely Women | | Steven Utley
The Long View | | Van Aaron Hughes
The Trouble With Heaven | | Chet Arthur

POEMS

Dislocated Heart/ A Starpilot's Post-Operation Note | | Robert Frazier

DEPARTMENTS

Books To Look For | | Charles de Lint
Books | | James Sallis
Plumage From Pegasus: Kozmic Kickstarter | | Paul Di Filippo
Films: All Man-Eaters Great And Small | | Kathi Maio
Coming Attractions | |
Curiosities | | Richard A. Lupoff

CARTOONS: Bill Long , J.P. Rini .
COVER BY MAURIZIO MANZIERI FOR "WHAT THE RED OAKS KNEW"

GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor
BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher
KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher
ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor
STEPHEN L. MAZUR, Assistant Editor
LISA ROGERS, Assistant Editor
HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor
REBECCA FRENCH, Subscriptions & Marketing Manager
CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor
SCOTT POLHEMUS, Editorial Assistant
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 124, No. 3 & 4, Whole No. 706, March/April 2013. Published bimonthly by Spilogale, Inc. at $7.99 per copy. Annual subscription $47.94; $59.94 outside of the U.S. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, 105 Leonard St., Jersey City, NJ 07307. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2013 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved. Distributed by Curtis Circulation Co., 730 River Rd. New Milford, NJ 07646 GENERAL AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 3447, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030
www.fandsf.com

Among Friends

By Deborah J. Ross
| 8428 words

Deborah Ross says The Children of Kings, a new Darkover novel she wrote in posthumous collaboration with Marion Zimmer Bradley, will be out in March, while a solo novel called Collaborators will be published in May under the byline of Deborah Wheeler.

Concerning this new story, she says her husband is a member of the Religious Society of Friends and they have Friends who are members of the Doylestown Monthly Meeting. But despite Doylestown's appearance in it, this story is a work of fiction, a product of Ms. Ross's imagination. In fact, readers should note that the novelist who appears at the end of this story never attended the 1848 trial of Thomas Garrett and John Hunn .

To consider mankind otherwise than brethren, to think favours are peculiar to one nation, and to exclude others, plainly supposes a darkness in the understanding: for as God's love is universal, so where the mind is sufficiently influenced by it, it begets a likeness of itself, and the heart is enlarged towards all men.
—John Woolman, "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes," 1754.

THE BUSINESS IN WILMINGTON had taken longer than Thomas Covington had expected, and it would be near full dark by the time he reached the farm. Hannah would fret, but not for long, as she was a woman of steady character. He would have need of her wisdom this night, for the discussion at his cousin's hardware store sat uneasily on him. Enoch had brandished a pamphlet by Pennsylvanian William Jackson, stating, "No one is under any moral obligation to lend himself as a tool to others for the commission of a crime, even when commanded by his government to do the wrong." Yet had not Sunderland Gardner from New York asserted, "Wrong may be wrongfully opposed, and war opposed in a warlike spirit"? What was a man to do when faced with the evils of slavery? Thomas had never doubted the rightness of his own actions, yet the dissension within the Quaker community weighed heavily on him. Delaware was a border state whose citizens felt strongly both for and against slavery, but surely Friends, who had universally condemned the practice nearly a century ago, ought to have greater unity.

The gray mare trudged on, her head swinging. Thomas eased back on the bench of his wagon and let her set her own pace. After so many years of companionable service, she needed little guidance back to her own barn. She wasn't a big horse, not as massive as her draft-horse dam, but so cheerful in her ways that she often did the work of a pair.

The mare's head shot up, ears swiveled forward, and she nickered. She was the friendliest horse Thomas had ever owned and would call out in greeting to just about any person she met. Although it was nearly dusk, Thomas could not see anyone, neither mounted nor on foot.

A ditch paralleled the road to the east, half-filled with water from recent rain, and beyond it brush had grown up like a stunted hedgerow. The mare turned her head in that direction. Thomas lifted the reins and she ambled amiably to a halt. Without the sound of her hooves on the road, he heard a rustling in the brush.

"Who is there?" Thomas called. "Whatever thy situation, friend, I will not harm thee."

For a time, nothing happened. The light faded, shadows lengthening. Thomas sat quietly, feeling the familiar stillness settle over him. Although his hearing was not as keen as it used to be, he caught the sound of harsh, quick breathing. A moment later, a man, as dusky of skin as the gathering night, emerged from the brush. He moved with a limp, half-crouching, and even in the poor light, Thomas could see how ragged were his clothes and how torn and battered his feet.

Thomas clambered down from the wagon and began talking in a friendly manner, speaking slowly and choosing his words with care. The man must be an escaped slave, one who had been hotly pursued and was even now at the very limit of his strength. The fugitive stumbled through a tale of having outwitted the men and dogs sent after him, but those slave-catchers had been replaced by one who was relentless. Having run as fast and as far as he was able, the poor man had had no choice but to seek aid. He'd hoped to find another of his race, someone he might trust, but none had come by. Seeing Thomas, in his wide-brimmed hat and coat of drab, and hoping he might be one of the Quakers who were said to befriend escaped slaves, he had decided to chance revealing himself.

The poor runaway was barely able to hobble, but with a good deal of assistance from Thomas, he pulled himself into the bed of the wagon. There he curled up on the sacks of flour, and Thomas covered him with his own long coat. Shivering a little in the cooling breeze, Thomas clucked to the mare. She broke into a brisk trot.

Before long, the Covington farm came into view. The dog, an aged, half-blind spaniel bitch, ran out to meet them. Hannah waited on the porch, lantern in hand. William, their youngest son and the only one still at home, stood behind her. Light streamed from the open door.

"Will, quickly!" Thomas called.

Hannah rushed to the wagon. She said nothing as she lifted the lantern. The light gleamed on a strand of her silver hair, escaped from its cap. The crease between her brows deepened as she studied the fugitive.

"Hannah, it is likely the slave-catchers are not far behind," Thomas said. "This time, they will demand to search both house and barn." In the past, Quakers had hidden runaways in a barn or haystack and then asserted in perfect honesty that they were not in the house. The slave-catchers were becoming more thorough.

She met his gaze unflinchingly. "Thee knows my mind on this matter, Thomas. This poor man needs care and rest. And a meal, I reckon. And proper clothing for this weather. And shoes!" A smile lit her face like a beam of morning sun. "Thee will find a way to put them off."

There was no arguing with Hannah in such a mood. William helped the fugitive to sit up and, together with Thomas, supported him to the house. They unhitched the mare, checked her feet, put her in her stall and fed her, and then secured the wagon and unloaded it. They found the fugitive sitting in the kitchen, drinking soup under Hannah's stern gaze while his feet soaked in a bucket of warm water. The heat of the oven filled the room, along with the smell of beans simmering with bacon. The fugitive's hands were shaking, but Thomas suspected this was from the embarrassment of being tended by a white woman. Hannah insisted that the runaway wear one of Jonathan's outgrown nightshirts and be put to bed. She would not hear of housing him in the barn, "For it is like to rain tonight."

As the evening progressed, the arrival of the slave-catchers became less and less likely. The fugitive, who gave his name as Nat, might have outrun them in his desperation, or darkness might have put a halt to the search.

Hannah retired and Thomas was preparing to do the same, having finished mending a piece of harness, when the dog came alert. She whined and pawed at the door. The rain predicted by Hannah spattered against the window glass, but not hard enough to obscure the sound of approaching footsteps. Thomas went to the back staircase. This would not be the first time a runaway had eluded capture while Thomas engaged the pursuers in a friendly discussion. They'd make their way north, either to John Hunn in Middletown or Thomas Garrett in Wilmington, who'd take them across the border to Pennsylvania.

"Will! Someone approaches!" Thomas called.

"Ready."

Thomas closed the door. A moment later, he heard the sounds of two men moving stealthily along the corridor and down the back stairs.

The knock was sharp, like the rounded metal cap of a walking stick against the wood of the door. The spaniel gave a yelp and cowered in the far corner. Thomas paused, seeking the inner stillness, and then called out, "Coming, coming!" He took a candle and held it aloft as he opened the door. A gust of moist air almost extinguished the flame. The flickering light was barely enough to make out a man on the doorstep, bare-headed in the rain.

"Friend, this is a rough night to venture abroad. What calamity draws thee from thy bed?"

The figure moved closer, and Thomas discerned a smooth oval face, neither young nor old, and as empty of expression as any he had ever seen. Dark hair hung limp and drenched, and the suit of cheap coarse-woven cloth suggested some time on the road, yet the man showed no discomfort. Rain dripped off the end of his nose.

"I have come for the slave."

"I fear thee will have found thy death if thee remains standing out in the rain." Thomas stepped back in invitation to enter.

The slave-catcher remained where he was.

"Thomas, what is it?" Hannah's voice drifted from the interior of the house.

"A poor benighted soul, caught out-of-doors in this rain."

"Bring him in, then, and warm him by the fire! I will be with thee shortly."

"Get inside, friend," Thomas urged the stranger. "Thee is in no condition to conduct business of any sort. Once thee is warm and dry, with a cup of my wife's chamomile infusion inside thee, then we can discuss the matter."

"I have come for the slave."

Thomas studied the stranger, debating in his own mind whether the man might be simple or merely so exhausted as to have no thought beyond his quest. "I am sorry, friend, but the rain makes such a clamor, and my ears do not work as they once did. I am having difficulty understanding thee. Will thee not come in?"

By slow degrees, Thomas convinced the slave-catcher that no business would be conducted until he entered and allowed himself to be dried and seated before the fire. By this time, Hannah had come down, properly dressed. The slave-catcher refused her offers of chamomile infusion or coffee. Thomas counted the minutes in his mind, the miles along the road to Wilmington, and when William and Nat would be safe with Thomas Garrett.

When the slave-catcher pressed his cause, Thomas inquired mildly whether he had a warrant, "For if thee will not take the word of an honest man that there are no slaves in this house, thee must proceed in a lawful manner." The man produced a document, surprisingly undamaged by the rain, and Thomas proceeded to study it at great length. By this time on previous occasions, the slave-catchers had grown impatient and restless. This one waited with admirable stillness. When Thomas glanced up from his reading, the slave-catcher rose.

"I will search the premises now."

"Indeed, it appears you have the right to do so," Thomas agreed. "But this warrant is made out only as 'Agent of Robert A. Cochoran.' Has thee a name?"

"A name?" The slave-catcher paused, his face as expressionless as always. "It is of no importance."

"It is of very great importance," Thomas said gently. As every slave knows.

"Then call me whatever name you choose, but let me get on with my work. We have spoken too long."

The slave-catcher made to push past Thomas, but Thomas stood firm, studying the other man's face and finding nothing of any personal or particular nature, no clue as to temperament or history, joy or sorrow or hope.

He is like Adam, unmarked as yet by life's travails, but an Adam corrupted and turned into an instrument of evil by the vile practice of slavery.

They went upstairs together. Thomas took the lead, opening each door to show the emptiness of the chamber beyond. In this manner, they proceeded through the house. When Adam, as Thomas now thought of him, announced his intention to search the barn next, Hannah gave Thomas a warning look.

"I am an old man, as thee sees," Thomas explained, "and this night is too chill and damp for me. Will thee stay the night with us and continue the search tomorrow?"

"I have come for the slave. I will search the barn now."

"Thee will not find him there." Thomas accompanied Adam to the door and handed him a lantern. "Mind thee not disturb the gray mare's rest."

Without a reply, Adam walked into the rain. Hannah, drawing her knitted shawl more tightly around her shoulders, came to stand beside Thomas. They watched the upright figure cross the muddy ground between house and barn. The lantern cast a wavering light through the drizzle.

"Such a strange man," Hannah murmured. "Does he not arouse thy pity?"

"He does indeed. I fear he is as much a slave as Nat. Unlike Nat, however, he cannot escape to freedom."

The barn door opened and the slave-catcher passed within.

"Thomas, I think we must try again to have him stay the night with us. No man should be abroad in such—"

A horse's furious squeal issued from the barn, followed by the sound of thumping so loud it could be heard clearly above the rain. The mare must be kicking her stall to splinters.

Not pausing even to put on his coat, Thomas sprinted across the yard, Hannah following but a pace behind. They reached the barn just as the mare let out another squeal. The door to the stall was ajar and yellow light, too bright to come from the lantern alone, filled the space. The mare reared, hooves flailing the air.

Thomas reached the stall. The mare backed up, her rump pressed against the far corner. Her ears were pinned flat against her neck and white rimmed her eyes.

Adam lay facedown and unmoving in the center of the stall.

The lantern had toppled on its side. Already, flames were spreading through the straw. Thomas seized the mare's water bucket, which hung just inside the stall door, and dumped it over the burning straw. Steam and smoke billowed up, leaving a carpeting of sullen orange flames. He moved into them, stamping and scattering cinders. Hannah thrust her shawl into his hands. A moment later, the last of the fire was extinguished. Coughing from the smoke, he straightened up. The barn lay in near darkness. Hannah knelt beside Adam and turned him on his back.

"Thomas.…"

He looked over her shoulder. Adam's still form was barely discernible, a shadow among shadows.

"Thomas, he's not breathing."

"We must get him into the house."

Adam was surprisingly heavy. Between the two of them, Thomas and Hannah were able to load him onto a handcart and wheel him to the house. They laid him out on the kitchen table. In the lamplight, they saw that one side of the slave-catcher's skull had been laid bare, most likely by the mare's hooves. There was no blood, only a slight amount of oily fluid. Instead of pale bone, the gaping wound revealed metal couplings and gears of surpassing delicacy, and bits of glass, some of which shone like embers, blinking on and off. Similar structures were visible in a second gash along one forearm, as if Adam had tried to protect himself when the mare whirled and kicked. A faint, irregular clicking sound, and a hiss like escaping steam, arose from the body.

"What can this be?" Hannah murmured. "A man of gears and lights?"

Thomas had read of such things in newspapers sent by Philadelphia Friends. The specimens had been imported from Switzerland as playthings for the wealthy. Perhaps Yankee industry was now producing domestic models. Automata, they were called. He had not realized they would be so human in appearance.

Hannah looked up at Thomas, and never before had he seen such confusion in her eyes. "Is he—a mechanical person? Or a machine, crafted in the appearance of a man but with no more of the Inward Light than a pocket watch?"

After a moment's reflection, Thomas said, "I do not know what he may be, nor do I think he himself can tell us, damaged as he is."

She made a helpless gesture. "This work is beyond thy skill or mine to repair."

"But not, perhaps, that of Samuel Pusey."

"Yes, a watchmaker might have the knowledge." She lowered herself to one of the straight-backed kitchen chairs. "I do not know whether to bandage him or not. A poultice might make the damage worse."

If this had been a human man, a flesh and blood man, she would have washed him and dressed his wound, found clean clothing for him, and tucked him into the bed that Nat had so recently vacated. But she did not know what to make of this… automaton , this clockwork man. And, Thomas admitted to himself, neither did he.

SAMUEL PUSEY straightened up, replaced the slender riveting hammer beside his other tools, and removed his watchmaker's loupe. He had worked through most of the day, carefully removing tiny, intricate pieces of metal, sometimes straightening them, other times fashioning new ones. Adam's eyes had remained open through the entire process, his body likewise unmoving.

"The mechanism is most marvelously wrought," Samuel said. "In all my years, I have never encountered its like. My cousin, John Pusey of Doylestown, wrote that he'd seen one some years ago, but he did not have the opportunity to examine it."

"The automata must have become more common since then for one to be found so far from a city," Thomas commented. "It appears they now have employment beyond being mere curiosities."

Samuel nodded, his expression troubled. "I have repaired the damaged parts as best I could, but I cannot say whether it will function as it did before."

Thomas bent over Adam, still stretched out on the table. "He does not appear to be functioning at all."

"There is one more connection to be completed. Thomas, is thee certain this is the right thing, to risk the reanimation of a slave-catching device?"

"I do not know that Adam is a device , Friend Samuel. Were he flesh and bone, neither thee nor I would ask such a thing. Are we not, as our Friends in Farmingham remind us, under solemn obligation to use all in our power to ameliorate the condition of our fellow men, of every color and every condition in life?"

"That has never been in question," Hannah said quietly from where she sat sewing by the window. She was making a shirt, although Thomas had not inquired whether it was for the next runaway slave to pass through their farm, or for Adam. She did not add what they were all thinking, which was how to respond to a being that looked like a man and spoke like one, but was in fact not a man.

They sat in silence for a time, each seeking counsel from the Light within. Thomas found no answer to his own uncertainty, and no less certainty regarding how to proceed. Samuel Pusey roused, and, without speaking, bent again over the slave-catcher's head. Adam's eyes remained open. No hint of expression altered the undamaged areas of his face. Thomas heard a faint wheeze, like softly escaping steam. The slave-catcher's eyes blinked, irises dilating and constricting rapidly.

"Do not be afraid," Thomas said. "Thee is among friends."

"I remember you." Adam's voice sounded rusty. "Are you my master?"

"There are no masters here, nor slaves," Thomas said, "for we are all equal in the eyes of God."

"All men ," Samuel amended.

Adam sat up. "Am I a man?"

Thomas exchanged glances with Hannah, and saw that they were of like mind. I do not know.

"If I am not a man," Adam said, but slowly, as if the process of reasoning were foreign, "then why have you repaired me? And if I am, if I am a…slave-catcher—yes, that is why I came among you and why we ought to be enemies—then the question is the same. Why did you help me?"

"Must there be a reason?" Thomas said. "Does kindness require any cause beyond that of God which exists in all of us?"

"How do you know I will not continue as I have done, following the slave who sheltered among you?"

"No fugitive has ever come to harm in our care." Thomas laid his hand on the automaton's shoulder. "Even thee."

"I don't understand."

Hannah finished sewing a button and snipped the thread with the little pair of scissors she kept in her apron pocket. "Then bide with us and see if understanding does not naturally arise from thy own experience."

THE FOLLOWING FIRSTDAY dawned bright and clear, as if the rain had been a dream. Covered buggies stood in a row outside the Meeting house. Word had spread of the unusual visitor, and it looked as if the entire Meeting had arrived early to greet him. Friends from neighboring Meetings had come, too.

Thomas and Hannah alighted from their buggy, then William and Adam. William went directly inside, but Thomas waited by the door, greeting others as they entered. Adam stood as stiff as a lightning rod, unrevealing of any emotion. He wore the shirt Hannah had made for him, plain and uncollared but of good woolen cloth, with William's old coat, trousers, and shoes. Hannah had stitched the skin-like covering on the side of his head so neatly that the scar barely showed.

The hour for worship drawing nigh, they all went in. The Meeting house was constructed with facing benches in the main room, and a divider that could be lowered to separate the men's and women's business meetings.

The Meeting settled into silence. Here and there, a bench creaked as one person or another adjusted their posture. Thomas centered down, his breathing growing slower and deeper. First his body would quieten, and then his mind. He often saw himself like a vessel from which he poured out the cares of the day, the petty irritations, the thoughts and worries, until all that remained was an empty place, expectantly waiting. From time to time, his attention wandered. On one of these occasions, he became aware of a sensation as if the entire assembly were breathing in unison, even the faint click and hiss from the automaton.

Thomas felt a gathering. All the colors in the room gradually became brighter. The silence deepened. Even the little Wilbur boy, who often found it difficult to hold still through Meeting, sat like one transfixed.

There came a stirring on the facing bench, where old Margaret Coffin sat. Most of the time, she was so quiet, Thomas was not sure if she were awake. Her joints popped when she got to her feet. She stood, head bowed, hands clasped before her. The feeling of expectancy, of immanence, heightened.

She lifted her head, and a trick of the sun bathed her face in light. "If a stranger sojourn with thee in thy land," she cried out in a ringing voice, surely too powerful for such a frail body, "thee shall not vex him; but the stranger that dwelleth with thee shall be as one born amongst thee, and thee shall love him as thyself."

For a moment longer she stood. The scriptural reference hung in the air as if it had been written there in invisible fire. Then she bowed her head, her back bent under the weight of her years, and lowered herself to the bench. After that, Thomas sensed the entire room drifting through a mist infused by sunlight that lifted slowly, sweetly, until everyone realized that the Meeting had ended.

As was their custom, the men and women divided for their separate meetings. The women tended to matters of caring for the sick, marriages and births and the like, and Hannah had been one of the clerks these last few years. Adam sat beside Thomas in the men's meeting. If the automaton understood or was aware of the unifying ministry, he gave no sign. Much of the time was taken up with a discussion of those Friends who had been convicted and fined for helping runaway slaves. Two members were selected to receive donations on their behalf. It seemed to Thomas that Adam listened with particular attention.

The women had not yet concluded their business when the men adjourned. This was often the case, and Thomas could never be sure whether the women had more issues to settle or simply moved more slowly through their discussions. William took Adam to examine the architecture and construction details of the Meeting house. While they were gone, Samuel Pusey approached Thomas.

"Friend, a matter is weighing on my mind concerning the automaton."

Thomas nodded encouragingly.

"I think—I cannot be certain, but I think I did not reassemble him in exactly the same manner in which he was originally fabricated."

"Thee was well favored in thy work, Samuel. Adam appears to function properly, although we cannot know what he was truly like before he was damaged."

Samuel frowned, visibly cogitating. "Thee described him as dull-witted and stubborn. Does it not seem that he now functions better ? That he is more articulate, more spiritually responsive? Or might that be a result of us knowing him better, and he, us, so that he is more at his ease?"

What Samuel did not say, and what Thomas understood very well, was the troubling matter of whether Adam possessed a soul, and whether such a soul had been present when he first appeared in the yard that rainy night. Was it possible for a being to look like a man and to speak as one, and yet have no share in redemption? Thomas could not believe it, but the matter was for Divine, not human, judgment.

Three days later, a party of men trotted into the Covington farm. The sun had passed overhead two hours ago and the yard was dry, the air warm. From where they were working in the potato field, Thomas and William saw the riders turn off the main road. They reached the house just before the three men. Hannah stood on the porch, drying her hands on her apron. Adam was not in view, most likely still within the house. The last time Thomas had seen the automaton, he had been sitting on a bench in the kitchen, slowly and carefully shelling peas.

The leader was a big-boned man with a thick, ginger-colored mustache and a distinctive red vest under his open coat. Thomas had never met the man before, but thought he must be Robert A. Cochoran, the same slave-catcher named on Adam's warrant. Cochoran pulled his horse to a halt, sending the long tails of his coat flapping, but did not dismount.

"Afternoon." He tipped his hat to Hannah. "Ma'am."

Thomas stepped forward. "Good afternoon, friend."

Cochoran sucked air through his teeth. "I've come for the nigger. Don't give me no story, neither, 'cause I know he come by here."

"Thee is searching for a runaway slave?"

"You heard right. We can do this the easy way—you hand him over and we'll be on our way. Or me and my men can drag him out, and I can't guarantee what might get broke in the process."

"Thee will find no slaves here."

"You'll understand if I don't take your word for it." Cochoran lifted one hand to signal his men.

"Friend, thee is in Delaware. We have laws, and thee could go to prison for breaking into another man's premises. I assure thee I have none of thy property here." Thomas spoke smoothly, having had similar conversations a number of times.

Hannah came down the steps. "By thy appearance, thee has traveled a long way. Thee and thy companions must be thirsty as well as tired. Come in, rest with us, and share our dinner."

Her words produced the usual effect in those unaccustomed to the ways of Quakers. The two hands shifted in their saddles, exchanging glances. Cochoran looked confused, then suspicious, then even more confused. "That's kindly of you, ma'am, but my business is tracking down the nigger. I'll have to search the house. And the barn."

"Of course," she said with her gentle smile, "but thee will do so with clean hands and a full stomach."

The slave-catcher wavered visibly. Before he could respond, however, Adam came out onto the porch. In his plain white shirt and trousers with suspenders, he looked like any other Quaker. He did not speak, only stood there. Something in his stillness reminded Thomas of the intent, listening silence of Meeting.

Cochoran stiffened in the saddle. "Where's the nigger? Why ain't you caught him?"

For a moment, no one answered.

"Well? Get down here!"

Adam did not move. Thomas wondered if this was the first time Adam had deliberately disobeyed a command. He thought, Only men may choose to answer the leadings of the Inward Light, rather than the commands of a worldly authority.

He turned to Cochoran. "I have told thee, friend, there are no slaves here."

"Maybe not," Cochoran said. "Maybe the nigger's long gone. But that —" with a jerk of his chin toward the porch where Adam stood, "—that belongs to my employer, Durham N. Turner. For all your fine words, Pastor, you are indeed in possession of another man's property."

Hannah walked up to Adam and took one of his hands in hers. "Adam, does thee wish to go with this man?"

Adam's shoulders hunched. "No, I do not. I do not wish to catch slaves."

Her voice was gentle, relentless. "And why is that?"

"Servitude is hateful to me. I will not inflict it on another." If it were possible for a mechanical throat to form a sob, that sound permeated Adam's response. "If I, who am metal and glass, can comprehend this, then so much more must a living man, no matter the color of his skin or his station in life. Even—" and here his gaze returned to the face of Cochoran "—even thee."

Hannah nodded, released Adam's hand, and stepped down off the porch. She halted an arm's-length from the horsemen. "Thee has thy answer," she said to Cochoran.

"If thee would seize this man—" Thomas took up the argument, only to be interrupted by Cochoran.

"It's not a man!"

"Is he not shaped like one?" Thomas demanded. "Does he not speak as one, with conscience and goodliness?"

"Don't you go quoting no scripture to me! That there's one of those auto-ma-jigs, and I've got every lawful right to haul it back—"

"Then thee must return with the sheriff and a warrant for his arrest, stating what crime he may have committed. Otherwise, I bid thee depart in peace."

Cochoran's free hand moved toward the stock of the rifle, in its holster tied to the saddle. One of his men glanced pointedly toward Hannah, as if to say he was not easy about threatening violence against a woman who had been so hospitable.

The slave-catcher gathered up the reins and wheeled his horse. "You ain't heard the last of this!"

Thomas moved to Hannah's side as they watched the riders trot back down the road. "No," he said quietly, "I expect we have not."

Adam joined them. "Thomas, I fear I have brought thee much trouble."

"No. Thee has brought us hope. But thee must not tarry. William will take thee north to Friends who will see thee safely to Pennsylvania."

Adam's face lacked the mobility of flesh, but Thomas had learned to read the subtleties in his posture. "I do not want to leave thee, Friend Thomas, or thee, Friend Hannah. I have so much to learn. I think…I have been pondering the awakening of my spirit, and wondering if Friend Samuel put me back together in a different way, or if—" Adam stumbled to a halt. "A thought has come to me, that once I was a man of flesh. Not a…a good man, but one who took delight in chasing a terrified runaway. A man who…I do not want to be. I think it would have been better to let Cochoran take me, and send me back to be put once more into endless sleep, rather than to remember."

Thomas did not know how to answer. If Adam had been human and a Christian, citing Scripture on redemption and hope would have been appropriate. But Adam had no such shared knowledge, being so clearly guided by the Inward Light alone.

In the end, Thomas decided to bring Adam to John Hunn himself. They went along briskly in the same covered buggy in which Thomas had driven his family to Meeting. Adam spoke long and earnestly, and as Thomas listened, he remembered the teachings of George Fox, who had founded the Religious Society of Friends almost two centuries ago. Thomas wondered how, in these dark times, Adam or any of them might walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.

Two weeks later, Thomas learned that charges had been brought against him by the former owner of both Nat and Adam, although the latter was not mentioned by name, only referred to as "a mechanical device."

The day after the summons arrived, a Friend traveling north from Maryland brought word that Adam had been captured and returned to his owner. Thomas received the news like a physical blow, as if his own child had been delivered into slavery.

" I think it would have been better to let Cochoran take me, " Adam had said, " and send me back to be put once more into endless sleep, rather than to remember. "

It took another six months for the United States Circuit Court to schedule the trial, during which time there was no further news about Adam's fate. Inquiries revealed nothing. Thomas did not know whether Adam had been put to the work of catching fugitives or had refused and been condemned to that endless sleep. The matter troubled him sorely. He understood that slaves had little power to resist, but few runaway slaves faced execution upon their return or were forced to hunt down their fellows. This Durham N. Turner, who claimed Adam as his property, would not understand. Nor might those who championed the rights of African slaves, but who might see Adam and his kind as machines without agency or moral choice. If the plight of enslaved blacks was dire, what of those who were not even recognized as human?

THOMAS ARRIVED EARLY at the New Castle courthouse, an imposing structure of red brick. The courtroom itself was large, chill and damp in these winter months. Thomas took his place in front of the railing, not a little surprised to find every chair and bench in the viewing section occupied, a few women among the men. More onlookers stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the back of the room, spilling out onto the corridor beyond. The audience was equally divided between fellow Quakers and sympathizers, and well-dressed folk who, by their expressions of disapproval, represented the pro-slavery position. Several reporters, including a man from the magazine The Blue Hen's Chicken , stood at the back, taking notes. The atmosphere was tense, with many hostile glances cast in the direction of Thomas and the other Friends. Even so, Thomas found cause for optimism. Thomas Garrett had prevailed upon his good friend, the abolitionist John Wales, for the defense. On the other hand, the judges were Charles W. Hall, an undistinguished District judge, and Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney had presided over the Amistad case, considered a victory for the anti-slavery movement, but he was also known as a strict proponent of states' rights.

The judges took their places on the bench, the jury was seated, and proceedings began with a series of motions followed by opening statements. John Wales had warned Thomas that the case was likely to go against him. There was no evidence that Thomas had harbored Nat. On the other hand, three eyewitnesses had seen Adam at the Covington farm and had heard Thomas refuse to hand him over to Robert Cochoran. Those witnesses proceeded to give testimony, as did Durham N. Turner. On cross-examination, Wales asked each to describe the automaton, a self-locomoting machine in the shape of a man, and for Turner to give its provenance. Turner produced a bill of sale from an importing firm, the Lake Geneva Trading Company. The sheriff testified that once a complaint had been filed and a warrant issued, he had searched the Covington farm but found no sign of the described property. He could not state of his own knowledge if such a device had ever been present.

Chief Justice Taney had been listening to the testimony, a frown on his long, dour face. He wanted to know how the defendant had been able to prevent a self-locomoting machine from carrying out the instructions of an agent, meaning Cochoran, placed in authority over it. Had Thomas instructed the machine otherwise? Had he physically restrained it?

Cochoran returned to the stand and was reminded he was still under oath. "Nossir, your Honor, Covington didn't do nothing but stand there."

"Then why were you unable to retrieve the automaton?"

"Well, he…," the slave-catcher glanced at Thomas. "He talked to it. Pardon, his wife did. She asked what it wanted to do."

Taney's shoulders straightened, a subtle movement under the folds of his judge's gown. Thomas caught the leap of interest in his expression, a tightening of the small muscles around the eyes. "And what did this device communicate? It can speak?"

"Yessir, it surely can. It said—" Cochoran's face twisted with the effort of remembering "—it didn't like bein' a slave, so it wouldn't do that to anyone else. Or thereabouts."

Now Judge Hall sat up as well. "This mechanical device quoted the Golden Rule?"

"Not…not exactly."

"Exactly enough for this court," Taney said dryly, "albeit in the negative form."

"Your Honor," Turner's attorney spoke up once the bustle of reaction from the audience had died down. "This is beside the point. The defendant, Thomas Covington, unlawfully prevented my client from enjoying the use of his property."

Taney's voice dropped in pitch and his dark, unruly brows drew together. "Are you attesting that the defendant is guilty of failing to take positive action to return property that expressly did not wish to be returned?"

The attorney blanched, but only for a moment. "The automaton is not a volitional agent, your Honor. It is a machine. It can be taught to parrot back phrases and it can follow a limited range of instructions, but it cannot wish for anything."

"That remains to be determined. Mr. Turner, in your affidavit you state that the device was eventually recovered. Present it before this court for examination."

Turner got to his feet. "I'm afraid that wouldn't do any good, your Honor. When the automaton refused to function as it ought, I took it back to the manufacturer. They removed the animation element and inserted a new one. It's working properly now, but it doesn't remember what happened to it before."

Oh, Adam. Thomas wished Hannah were here.

"Animation element?" Taney lifted one eyebrow. "And what might that consist of?"

"It's.…" Turner bent over the table and rifled through a stack of papers, finally extracting one and reading from it. "It's a discorporated nonmaterial motivational unit. "

"A what?" someone in the audience exclaimed. Taney glared at the man and the hubbub subsided.

"By this," Taney addressed himself to Turner once more, "do you mean a soul ?"

"I…I suppose so."

"And whence came this soul?"

"I'm sorry, your Honor, the papers don't say. It must have been the sort of man suited to catching slaves. Maybe even a slave himself." Turner recovered a modicum of composure as he nodded in approval of his own argument.

Thomas felt too numb, too horrified to speak. At his side, John Wales scribbled notes on a piece of foolscap.

Judge Hall cleared his throat. "So you have no information as to whether the provider of this…soul was a free man or slave?"

"Your Honor!" Turner's attorney exclaimed, gesturing for his client to remain silent. "Is this germane to the charges?"

"We are attempting to determine whether the automaton constitutes in itself a device for the unlawful imprisonment of a free man's…soul, or whether, in its capacity as the encasing structure for a slave, it fulfills in its entirety the definition of property. "

The discussion went on for another three-quarters of an hour, although Thomas had not the heart to follow it closely. It sickened him to his very marrow to think of Adam, that new and bright spirit, now so casually extinguished. As a Friend, he was committed to the testimony of peace, but he could not deny the anger that stirred at the notion of the souls of men, those reflections of Divinity itself, treated as expendable commodities.

Adam, gone.…

Turner submitted his ownership papers, along with other informational materials from the Lake Geneva Trading Company, as evidence. Taney announced that he and Judge Hall would review the documents and hear closing arguments after the recess. After they retired, John Wales leaned toward Thomas.

"Mr. Covington, are you unwell?"

Thomas came back to himself. "Friend," he said, gently reminding the lawyer that Quakers did not use such titles, "I am distressed to learn of the death of a friend."

"You cannot mean the automaton?"

"Not the metal housing, but the soul within it, yes. John Wales, this was a child of God, even as you or I. Should we not mourn his passing, and for such a senseless cause as the pursuit of men who seek only their own freedom?"

Wales swept his hair back from his high forehead. "The business at hand is your acquittal. Grief and politics can come later."

Grief comes when it comes, Thomas thought, but did not say it aloud.

Court resumed. Turner's lawyer restated his case, pointedly referring to the eyewitness testimony. He implied that the malfunction of the automaton, which necessitated the considerable expense of repairs, was due to damage inflicted on it by the defendant. Wales, in his turn, argued that Cochoran and his assistants had entered the property of Thomas Covington uninvited. Without a proper warrant and proof of ownership of the mechanical device, Thomas had been under no obligation to deliver the automaton. If the automaton had refused to comply with its instructions, then perhaps those instructions were improperly issued. Given the necessity for subsequent repairs, the automaton was certainly defective. In neither case could responsibility be assigned to his client.

As persuasive as these arguments were, Thomas grew increasingly uneasy. The question was not whether Cochoran or Turner or anyone else had the proper authority to claim a piece of stolen equipment, but whether Adam or any human soul should be enslaved.

Thomas caught the eye of his attorney and beckoned him over. "John, thee must allow me to speak. Put me on the stand!"

"Are you mad? You'll be under oath and the plaintiff will question you on cross-examination! You'd be slitting your own throat!" Wales hesitated, perhaps remembering that Thomas would not swear an oath that implied he was at other times untruthful. "I'm sorry, but it's too late. Unless you have some new piece of evidence you haven't told me about."

"Not evidence, no—"

"Counsel for the defense, do you require a recess?" Justice Hall inquired. Taney was scowling in disapproval.

"Thomas, there's a time and a place for everything. Now let me do my job." Wales straightened up. "I'll resume my statement straightaway, your Honor."

Thomas sat helplessly as Wales concluded his speech. He did not expect the jury to confer for long, and they did not. As the courtroom settled to hear the verdict, Thomas felt a sense of dread. He listened as Hall reviewed the salient points in the case, searching for any hint as to how the judges saw Adam's status—machine or man, slave or free? But Hall kept only to the testimony presented, and Taney's expression was unreadable.

In the end, did it matter in whose favor these men decided? Would Adam be less dead in either case?

After Hall concluded, Taney glanced down at his notes and began. "This court was unable, given the facts presented, to determine if the entity referred to as the automaton is entirely a mechanical device or whether it, by the moiety which might be considered a human soul, has a valid claim to consideration as a person. Furthermore, we have been unable to determine whether that person, if any such exists, is to be considered a slave or a free citizen. Therefore, we have attempted to ascertain whether, at the time the Constitution was ratified, federal law would have recognized this entity as a citizen, and we have determined that it would not. A device created for the sole purpose of servitude, regardless of any hypothetical human component, must therefore be regarded under law as property."

The jury found in favor of the plaintiff, the fine being calculated at the cost of the automaton, its repairs, and the loss of its use. Some of the onlookers gasped at the amount, far more than the value of a slave.

After the court adjourned, Turner went up to the jury and attempted to shake their hands; some accepted, but others turned away, clearly uncomfortable.

Only a few of the onlookers left the courtroom, and most of those had been standing at the back. Thomas got to his feet and the murmurs died. Turner, in the midst of thanking one of the jurors, stepped back.

Thomas faced the bench. "Judge, I have not always acted according to my conscience, at times out of fear of losing what little I possess. Now that burden has been removed from me, so I say to thee, to Durham Turner, and to all in this courtroom, that if anyone knows a fugitive—slave or automaton—who needs shelter, send him to me that I might befriend him!"

Taney glowered at Thomas, but Thomas did not flinch. Words poured from his mouth as if he were not their originator, but only the voice of the spirit that moved through him. He sensed the close attention with which his arguments were received.

"My friends, are we not called to regard all mankind as our brethren? Was the soul placed in the automaton once a man? And must he then be our brother, for whom we ought to have the most tender care?"

His voice swelled as he exhorted the audience to, "Quench not the spirit, but live in love and unity one with another! The same expression of God's love dwells in all of us, male and female, black and white, slave and free— and sheathed in metal ! It is as vile a practice, and as contrary to the laws of God, to keep a metal person in bondage as it is to enslave another man, for both are living souls!"

At moments, there was such a profound silence, he might have been in Meeting. Now and again, a member of the audience hung his head or someone else hissed their displeasure.

"Consider, friends, that a black man may escape to a free state and thereby become free. Consider that he may purchase his freedom and that of his family. But what of the automaton? We have heard testimony in this court that the boundaries of the states and their laws regarding slavery are of no account in this case. This automaton was pursued and then seized in Pennsylvania, in what ought to have been a place of sanctuary. Then he was executed without trial. His light was forever extinguished. And for what reason?"

Thomas paused. For the last few minutes, he had been so caught up in his ministry as to become unaware of his listeners. Now he saw them, the reddened faces and those nodding in agreement. Toward the back, a small, mousy woman, whom he had noticed previously, sat as if rapt, a journal book open on her lap. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

"For the reason of following the leadings of the spirit, for answering the demands of conscience! Even without having been instructed, this automaton understood the great teaching from the Gospel of Luke— As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. Friends, we are commanded that if a stranger sojourns with us, we must not vex him, but shall love him as ourselves. How can it be love to enslave a soul and then destroy it for speaking God's truth?"

A fever seized him as he saw Adam no longer as a slave or a tortured soul but as a martyr, even as many of his own faith had met the same fate. He found the insight so moving that, for a moment, he could not find the words. But then, as if a floodgate had opened within him, phrases thundered from his mouth. He scarcely knew what he said, so overcome was he with awe and fire. His limbs trembled, but his voice did not. When he paused to draw breath, the room still echoed with his words.

"A martyr? A holy saint?" sneered Durham Turner. "That piece of worthless machinery? What's next—setting free our cotton gins? I've heard enough of this balderdash!" He strode from the courtroom.

Thomas sagged, the passion that had fueled his words spent. His ministry had lasted for over an hour. He gathered himself and returned to the defendant's table, where John Wales waited. They were joined a moment later by one of the jurors.

"Old man, I came here with my mind set against you. Having heard you, I now believe every word you have said. I have done you an injustice."

"Not me, friend," Thomas replied. "Look rather at thy dealings with the unfortunate and oppressed, and then address thy concern to thy own conscience. Never advocate for the vile custom of slavery, whether of a black man or an automaton."

An elderly man, by his plain dress and hat a fellow Quaker although one Thomas did not know, stopped for a moment, said, "Thee was well favored," and quietly departed.

Last of all was the mousy woman, the one who had been so affected by what Thomas said. She clasped his hand in both of hers, her eyes still reddened with weeping.

"Oh, sir! Your words have wrung my heart! I had not known there was such goodness in men—or such evil! I am…I am writing a book, you see, on the sufferings of the negro slaves. John Jewett of the National Era has expressed interest in publishing it in serial form. Now I see I must enlarge my story to include those poor souls who inhabit the automata. I only hope I can be as persuasive as you have been."

Thomas extracted his hand as gently as he could. She was so earnest, still quivering with the intensity of her fervor. Such zeal might incite revolutions, start wars, or bring a nation to its knees.

"Would you…I would like to correspond with you," she said, "to gain more particulars about this automaton in order to better depict the plight of its kind. I mean, of his kind."

Perhaps there might be hope for reason and tolerance, for fellowship and the "Spirit that delights to do no evil."

Thomas gave the woman his address and received in exchange a lady's fine calling card. After she left, he took the card out of his pocket and studied it.

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe
Cincinnati, Ohio.

She'd come a long way to hear him. He did not doubt she would go even further.

Solidarity

By Naomi Kritzer
| 11234 words

Naomi Kritzer introduced us to Beck Garrison and her seastead home in our May/June 2012 issue and then shared with us the story of filming High Stakes in the story of the same name in our Nov./Dec. issue. This new tale takes us deeper into the heart of the floating nation known as New Minerva.

THE SEASTEAD HAS SOME big hotels, but they're all over on Amsterdarn, for the tourists. On Rosa and Min, we have a couple of guest houses—just a few small rooms, comfortable and private, with attached bathrooms. When someone has a guest visiting from shore, they stay in a guest house, because no one's apartment is big enough to comfortably house guests.

When I went to the guest house on Min, the guy said they were full. The guy running the Rosa guest house said the same thing. It was possible they really were full, but it was just as possible my father had paid them to turn me away.

My father doesn't hold any of the elected offices and he's not even on the Business Council, but his word carries a lot of weight on the seastead. Our chain of manmade islands is technically a half-dozen separate countries, each with its own rules, but from the antiquated freighter that holds Lib to the decommissioned aircraft carrier that's built into Amsterdarn, people know who my father is, and care what he thinks.

The seasteads were built by people who wanted to live with fewer rules. (Or none at all, in the case of Lib.) They've been afloat here for forty-nine years. My father brought me to live here when I was four, and told me that my mother had died. I didn't question that until the year I turned sixteen, when I got my first job—finding stuff, for people who wanted to buy it—and realized for the first time what a messed-up place this was.

And now, for defying him—first by helping a woman escape from a factory where she'd been bonded against her will, and then by helping a bond-worker named Miguel who was trying to start a union—my father had kicked me out.

Fine. That was fine . I didn't want to have to live with him anyway .

Especially after he'd lied to me about my mother. Especially after what had happened to Miguel.

With nowhere else to go, I went to the Catholic church to sit and think. The knowledge that I would not see Miguel there was nearly overwhelming. I was a little worried the priest would try to talk to me, but everyone left me alone. The church was crowded, and a lot of people were crying; clearly, I wasn't the only person grieving Miguel's death. Most of the people there seemed to actually be praying. I found a spot in the shadows and tried to consider my options sensibly.

I could take a boat to Amsterdarn. It was unlikely that my father had bought off every taxi driver and every hotel owner, so that would probably work. Amsterdarn was large, though, and honestly it kind of freaked me out, since I didn't know anyone over there. I could go to Thor's apartment and see if they had a couch they'd let me sleep on—except his parents would call my father, and turn me away if he asked them to.

I didn't think the American Citizens' Services Bureau (our fake embassy) was likely to be open this time of night. But even if it was, leaving like this—now—felt cowardly. All the bond-workers had stayed (well, almost all) and they were in a lot more danger than I was.

And that brought me to my final option. I could go rent a locker to sleep in, like a bond-worker would. I stayed in the church for a long time after that idea occurred to me. The third time I pulled out my gadget to check my mail, I had to admit to myself that I was hoping my father would change his mind. He wasn't going to. I stuck it in my pocket and found the stairs down to the lower levels.

It was late enough by then that I wasn't certain I'd be able to find a landlord. I tried Debbie's old room, but of course she'd given up that rental while she was on the show and no one knew where she was staying now. A woman named Elaine recognized me, though. "Why do you want our landlord?" she asked bluntly.

"I need a place to stay. My father kicked me out."

"Oh! That's terrible. I'll find him for you."

It turned out that lockers could be rented only by the week, which meant I had to spend a lot more than I'd expected. Then it turned out that mattresses and blankets were offered a la carte and had to be paid for separately. Oh, and so was the lock. If I stayed there for more than six weeks it would cost more to rent the mattress and blanket than it would have to buy them, but surely by then.…

The locker was exactly long enough for the mattress, with half a meter of clearance overhead. It felt a little like crawling into my own coffin, an image I tried desperately to push out of my head. Elaine showed me how to lock it from the inside. It was pitch black, and I realized that the only light source I had with me was my gadget. I turned it on, trying to glean some reassurance from the dim glow. But the "battery low" light was lit, and I didn't have the charging cable. I turned it off and tried to settle in.

The mattress was so hard I wasn't sure why I'd bothered to rent it, and the blanket was thin. I had no pajamas or even a toothbrush, and I'd forgotten to get a pillow.

When I focused, though, I could feel the movement of the waves: the gentle up-and-down rocking that had been part of my life since I was four years old. That, at least, was the same down here as it was in my father's apartment. I closed my eyes and focused on the waves until I fell asleep.

I woke up desperately wanting to pee. It took me a second to remember how to work the lock, and I mis-remembered the distance to the floor and stumbled. Three women were standing around talking, but they fell instantly silent and stared at me, wide-eyed.

"Elaine helped me rent this locker last night," I said. "My father kicked me out. And I have to pee. Can you tell me where the bathroom is?"

It was down the hall, but you needed to swipe an ID card to get in. "I'll swipe you in," one of the women said grudgingly, "but you'll owe me the charge."

"…it costs money?"

There was a round of derisive laughter. "You sound like a foob," one of them said. "Fresh on the boat. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, honey, and there's water in those bathrooms. Desalinated water. You don't think that's free, do you?"

Of course. In our apartment, the water was simply billed to my father. "I have an ID card," I said, hesitantly, "but I'm not sure it'll work. And I don't want my father to know where I am."

"You can get a cash-basis card if you want to stay anonymous," the woman said. "They cost more, though." She swiped her card and let me into the bathroom. "Don't waste water," she called after me. "It's all getting billed to me."

I peed. The toilet would be saltwater, so at least I wouldn't be charged as much, but it flushed itself twice while I was sitting on it. I'd run into toilets before that did this and it had startled me, but never infuriated me. When I was done, I rinsed my mouth, since I had no toothbrush. I carried a hairbrush in my backpack, and I wet it to brush my hair and then put my hair in a ponytail. I would have liked a shower, but I had no towel, plus I didn't want to abuse the woman's generosity.

"The stupid toilet flushed itself three times," I said when I came out. "But I used less than a gallon from the sink. Can I pay you later today? I need to get money from Geneva."

"Yeah," she said, and told me how much I owed her.

Now that I'd peed, I realized how hungry I was. The last time I'd eaten was on Amsterdarn, yesterday, with Thor and Janice. Clark's was the dining room on this level: it was cheap and offered meal plans by the week. The line was really long, probably due to the slowdown the union had organized. I was standing in it when I remembered that this was the dining hall that had poisoned Debbie's sister Lynn. What if they poisoned me? What if my father had paid them to poison me? What if the whole purpose of throwing me out was to set me up to get so sick that they could blackmail me with medical care?

I went to the sandwich shop near my morning school, instead.

"Hey, Beck!"

It was Thor, waving me over to his booth. Seeing a friendly face gave me a jolt of hope and relief—a sense that everything would be okay, maybe. I slid in across from him. "You look a little frazzled," he said.

"Yeah. My father kicked me out. He said I could come back if I agreed to 'act like his daughter,' which I think probably means spy on whoever he wants me to spy on, and tell him anything he asks."

I wanted to sound tough and defiant when I said this, but looking at Thor's face—which was worried and concerned and sympathetic all at once—broke my resolve. I started to cry. Thor moved over next to me and put his arm around my shoulders as I sobbed.

"Hey," he said. "Beck, it's not that bad. You can go to California, right? And live with your mom."

"I don't want to leave." I tried to explain, but I could tell from the noises he was making (the sort of "uh-huh" that means, "You can keep talking, I'm still listening," not the sort that means, "I totally agree with you") that he thought I was nuts.

"I can't wait to go back," he said. "If I had a parent on shore who wanted me, I'd be in the embassy right now saying, 'Get me out of here!'"

"Shore's home for you, though," I said.

"I asked Tyrone—you know, the guy at the Citizens' Services Bureau—about whether I could become an emancipated minor. He said no, probably not, at least not yet. But the day I turn eighteen, he said he can help me. I might enlist."

"Enlist?"

"In the military. Which admittedly is a little like being a bond-worker, since you can't quit, but they pay for everything . Housing, food, clothes, all your medical care.…"

I had seen a few movies where people were in the Army. I pulled away and looked at Thor, trying to imagine him with all his pretty curls shaved off for boot camp or whatever they called it these days. I must have made a face because Thor laughed.

"Anything but the Navy," he said. "I've had enough of the ocean."

He put his arm around me again and I leaned my head against his shoulder.

"Go to California," he said. "That way when I get there in two years, I'll have someone to visit."

But I didn't want to leave. I didn't want to leave Thor . And I knew from the way his arm tightened as he said "go" that he didn't really want me to go, either.

I GOT MONEY from my underground off-the-official-books bank and went to Miscellenry to buy the stuff I needed most urgently—a toothbrush, a towel, a change of clothes. A second blanket. A charge cable for my gadget. A flashlight. Jamie took my money and avoided my eyes. I could feel my father's influence as if he loomed over Jamie's shoulder, glaring at me. I thought about asking Jamie if he wanted to hire me back—he'd said just the other day he'd hire me back in a second—but I was afraid I'd start crying again when he said no. So I didn't ask.

"I need a cash-basis water card," I said.

Jamie looked over his shoulder, like he really did expect my father to be standing there, and said, "I don't sell those," a little bit too loudly. Then he pulled one out from under the counter and slipped it to me. "Don't tell anyone," he whispered. I reached for my wallet and he shook his head. "It's on me."

I tried to calculate how long my savings would last, paying for bed, food, water, and all the things I was probably still forgetting to account for. Not long, was the answer. Maybe a month. And then…what?

For now, I decided, I wasn't going to worry about it.

It was supposed to be my first day back at school, but I was pretty sure I couldn't go—if my father was cutting me off, he'd surely have canceled with my tutors. The day stretched out in front of me, empty, so I went for a walk, Min to Rosa to the far edge of Pete. I didn't go to Pete very often, because about the only thing I can say in Russian is, "Sorry, I don't speak Russian." (I had a Russian tutor for a while when I was little, but then my father got pissed off at some collective decision made on Pete and switched me to Spanish. Which I don't speak very well, either.)

Pete does have a few cool things, though, including a good-sized stretch of open deck that you can get onto for a really small fee—you don't need an ongoing subscription. Unfortunately, I realized only after I'd paid my entry fee that the weather was lousy. It was overcast and drizzling, but at that point I felt obligated to go stand in the open air for a little while anyway, because otherwise I'd have wasted my money. I looked out over the rail. I could see Sal, which was about a kilometer away, but only barely. Sal is short for Silicon Waters, and it's separated from the rest of the seastead because they do nanotech experimentation and the rest of the steaders were nervous about the dangers. Of course, people go back and forth by boat all the time. It's where my father's business is, although mostly he works from home.

Amsterdarn was on the other side of the stead from here, so I couldn't see it. Aside from Sal, I could see a couple of speedboats and someone who looked like he was out fishing. One of the signs said (in English, Spanish, and Russian) that on a clear day, visibility from this point was 6.85 miles, but I certainly couldn't see that far right now.

"…funeral of the rabble-rouser," someone said, in English. I stiffened but didn't look around.

"What about the press? I'm thinking of Stead Life , in particular, since they have a significant following." The voices were male; there were two of them; they were standing a short distance away. I resolutely stared out to sea.

"They're already not going."

"Heh. Good. The last thing we need is someone making more of this than it is."

"At any rate, we hired the ADs for the actual action. Your people are for the perimeter—we want you to make sure no unacceptable targets even make it to the funeral in the first place. Ideally we'd like no one who isn't a bond-worker, but for sure, absolutely no minors are to be allowed in."

"Understood."

My ears were burning, and even though I hadn't meant to, I glanced at the men. One of them was the operations manager for the Scoundrels, which is a protection firm on Lib. I recognized him because he puts up a lot of ads. People call the Scoundrels the Cut-Rate Bastards behind their backs. The other guy I didn't recognize, and to my relief, he looked at me blankly. "Hey, girl," he said. "You planning to go to the big funeral tomorrow? Are all the kids going to be there?"

"I'm sorry," I said, in Russian. "I don't speak English."

He shrugged and turned back to the Scoundrel. "Payment will be in cash. Since your job is to keep people out of something, I was going to suggest a base payment with a large bonus that goes down for every citizen and dependent who's missing afterward.…" When I heard there was a list of citizens they were to make particular effort to keep away from the funeral, I decided I'd been out in the rain long enough. I might be on that list. My picture might be on that list. Hopefully they wouldn't look at my ID photo and recognize the damp, bedraggled Russian teenager who had been standing right by them.

I'd listened long enough to know that they were planning to do something horrible at the funeral. I had to tell someone! But Miguel was dead, and I had no idea where Debbie was.

After dithering as I walked across the bridge from Pete, I went to the church where I'd gone to meet Miguel. Miguel said the priest had noticed me, and had wondered if he should talk to me about my faith—since he knew Miguel, maybe he'd be officiating at the funeral. Maybe he'd have some idea what to do.

The church was open and less crowded today. I looked for Debbie but didn't see her. I didn't see the priest, either, but there was a door at the far end and I thought it might lead to an office. I tried knocking, and when no one answered, I tried opening it. It led to a hallway, and one of the doors off the hallway was labeled "Fr. Timothy Esposito."

It occurred to me he might not be here. Priests sometimes got called out to visit sick people, didn't they? And…actually, I had no real idea what priests did all day. I knocked. The door was opened by a middle-aged man in a black suit and one of those weird white collars that goes straight across. "Oh," he said, surprised. "It's you. Rebecca, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I said, and wondered if I was supposed to add "Father" or if only Catholics were supposed to do that. "I want—can I talk to you for a minute? Mr.…Father…Mr. Esposito?"

He opened the door a little wider and gestured for me to come in. "You can call me Tim."

Tim. Okay. I took a deep breath and entered.

Tim's study was crammed full of books—old-fashioned bound books. Some of them were Catholic, or at least religious, but as I looked around I noticed he also had Lord of the Rings , the complete works of J. K. Rowling, and The Secret Garden .

"Have a seat," he said, gesturing to a chair, and sat down across from me. I'd sort of expected him to sit behind his desk, but he had two visitor chairs and he sat in one of them.

"I'm not here to talk about my faith, just so you know," I said. "I'm a rationalist."

He gave me a slightly quirked smile. "That's fine."

I was waiting for some sort of religious sales pitch; it didn't come. After a minute of expectant silence I realized he was waiting for me to go on.

"Okay," I said. "I'm coming to you because I think you were Miguel's friend and might know what to do. I heard some people talking an hour ago, over on Pete. One of them was the guy who runs the Scoundrels, and the other I don't know who he was. They're planning to do something horrible at Miguel's funeral. I don't know if they're going to blow up the church, or what, but it's going to be bad."

Tim's brow furrowed. "The funeral isn't going to be here," he said. "They're holding it on the sea platform that was built by the network for their reality show. Apparently, instead of selling it to Amsterdarn, as originally planned, Janet handed it over to the bond-workers who'd performed on the show."

"Oh. Oh. " Well, that explained why they thought they could destroy it without sinking part of the stead. "Tell them not to! I mean— can you? Can you warn them?"

Tim pondered this. "Given this information, I might be able to persuade people to move it here. They'd have to put it off for another day or two, though, while I negotiate with my neighbors for some additional space. Part of the reason it's being held on the sea platform is to enable more people to attend. The other reason is because Catholic funerals aren't set up to allow for speech-making." He shrugged. "I can turn a blind eye to that, but there's a limit to how many people you can fit in here. The biggest church is the Methodist church, which is a level up from here and about four times the size. Whether they'd be willing to host—who knows?"

"Were you going to be there on the platform?"

"Yes." He raised an eyebrow. "So apparently the gentlemen you overheard on Lib consider me entirely disposable. They may be hoping the next priest will be more willing to dance to their tune."

"But you'll tell people," I said.

"Yes, I'll try to get the word out."

"Okay," I said, standing up. "Do you think there's anyone else I should tell?"

"Feel free to warn anyone you like, although rumors of danger may only make people more stubborn. It's hard to know."

"Thank you."

"Thank you ." He stood up. "Feel free to come by and talk anytime. About anything. Rationalists are welcome here; I'm a Jesuit, after all."

I smiled, although I didn't really get the joke, and went back out.

I wasn't sure whether I could trust the priest or not—I didn't know if he'd actually try to get the funeral moved, and for that matter, I didn't know if he actually had the necessary influence. Maybe, I thought, I should spread the word, too. Although, I wasn't sure how to persuade people to trust me. Debbie would, but I had no idea where to find her.

I passed a dining hall; the lines coming out were unreal. The sandwich shop I'd planned to buy dinner at was just as bad. If I went to Clark's, I could warn people, and surely they weren't actually organized enough to poison me under the circumstances. I went back down to the locker-room level and got in line.

"Miguel's funeral's been delayed," said the man in front of me. "Pass it on."

Well. Apparently the priest was the guy to go to.

Clark's, when I finally made it in, was crammed full of people. Instead of chairs, the tables had long benches, and people sat shoulder-to-shoulder. I took a plate and held it out to the servers, who gave me four scoops of…stuff. There was a scoop that looked sort of like animal protein, but I couldn't tell what kind. The second was beige, like mashed potatoes. The third was green and on inspection I thought it was broccoli. The fourth was brown and was ice cream. To go with all that I got a small glass of water. I looked around for somewhere to sit; I didn't see any spots. But a man saw me looking and scooted over, making a small space, and I sat down. I was hungry enough that it all tasted okay.

"Miguel's funeral's been postponed," I said. "Pass it on."

He grunted. "I know."

The staff here didn't appear to have slowed down—or maybe it was just that customers were expected to do more of the work. We had to carry our own food to the table and bus our own dishes. The dishes went through an automatic washer, but the person who put in the last dish had to give the rack a shove toward the sprayer. I copied the people around me and made my way back to my locker. My gadget's battery was almost drained; I needed to find somewhere to plug it in.

But when I got to the locker room that night, I was locked out of my unit. There was a notice of eviction taped to the side. I pulled it off, blinking away tears of frustration and bewilderment. The letter said that because I was a dependent , and neither a citizen nor a guest-worker, I was not legally permitted to engage in commerce my guardian had forbidden. The money I'd paid—for the locker, the mattress, the blanket, all of it—had been refunded. To my guardian.

I felt like screaming and kicking the side of the locker. Or throwing up. I knocked on locker six, because I still owed her money. She slid the side up; she'd been watching TV on her own gadget. "I'm not passing you in again."

"No, I don't need you to. I just want to pay you back for this morning," I said. "I couldn't wait, you see.…" I held out the letter of eviction. My throat was already closing.

She took it from my hand and looked at it. "Well, isn't that a load of boiled shite," she said. "He took your money, and now he's saying it's not good enough? What, he couldn't tell looking at you that you're a teenager?"

"I don't know," I said. "The lighting in here's pretty bad. Maybe he couldn't tell."

She handed me the letter. "Don't worry about paying me back for the water, kid."

"Can you tell me… do you know if there's anyone who wouldn't care? Who'd let me stay? I'm tired," I said, and my throat started closing again. "I just want somewhere I can sit ."

The locker door by my ankle slid up and another woman looked up at me. "I'll tell you," she said. "Keep going down."

The woman in six started to say something but the woman in the lower unit shook her head. "You really think she ought to go home right now? Go down. Dodge the authorities. And don't piss anyone off." She slid her door shut again.

GO DOWN. Dodge the authorities. Don't piss anyone off.

A good portion of stead is actually below the waterline. The old cruise ships generally have a draft of about thirty feet, Lib's freighter is closer to forty feet, and to provide stability, there's actually fifty to sixty feet of stead underwater for the main sea platforms that make up Min and Rosa. Some of this is used for habitation—a lot of the locker rooms, for instance, are in the underwater portions of the sea platforms—but the farther down you go, the more it's utility stuff, like generators and desalinators.

I'd never been below the locker rooms, but I knew the stairs kept going, even if the elevators didn't.

I shouldered my backpack, glad that I hadn't left any of my possessions behind to be confiscated and given to my father. I had a blanket, a snack, and a flashlight. Everything I really need. I found the stairs and started going down. Below the habitable levels, the doors were supposed to be locked, but when I got to the bottom level, I found that the door's latch had been taped open. Around the edge of the door frame someone had taken permanent marker and scrawled welcome to the free land, the glad land, the fair land, the no-man's-land, the lost land, the you-and-me-and-thee land. It was a song lyric I recognized, from a stateside musician, about a guy being locked up in a hospital after murdering a bunch of people.

I was under a desalination plant. It was cool down here, and damp. I could hear water dripping and hoped it was condensation rather than a leak. There were supposed to be alarms for things like leaks, but there were also supposed to be locks on doors like the one I'd just come through. Dim lights shone through a tangle of wires and pipes overhead and the ceiling was low. I had to duck a lot to pass under low-hanging pipes and I'm not actually that tall.

Dodge the authorities. Don't piss people off.

I had no idea where I was going, but I kept walking for a while. Presumably if you were near the door, you were more likely to be found by the authorities. If they ever actually came down here. I wasn't sure they did. Surely they'd rip the tape off the latch if they came down.

And then, off to the right, I saw a brighter glow. I followed it, only to be stopped with a blast of brilliant, dazzling light in my face. I flung up one hand and flinched back. "I'm sorry!" I said.

The light left my face. "Not a cop," someone said.

I couldn't see anything but spots. "No," I said. "I'm not a cop." Don't piss people off. Too late, I wondered if I should have tried harder to sound friendly.

Someone grabbed my arm. "Over here," the voice said. "You can sit down. You'll be able to see again in a minute. Next time don't sneak up on us."

"I wasn't trying to sneak ," I said. "All I knew was, if I went to the bottom level I might find somewhere I could stay. I rented a locker but got evicted, because.…" Should I tell these people I was a dependent? They could probably guess. "Because the guy was an asshole."

I was sitting on something hard, but it wasn't the floor. I patted it with my hands and concluded it was a concrete block. I could smell food cooking, and as my vision slowly returned I looked around.

Yes, there were people living here. I could see blankets spread on the floor, marking out beds. Someone had a little stove going: they'd cut into one of the wires running past our heads and added a spliced-in makeshift outlet. It looked like a fire hazard. I could see the dripping water now: it was dripping from one of the pipes, and being caught in a bucket. One of the men got up to swap in a fresh bucket, and carried the full bucket over to the circle. He ladled water into cups. "Do you have a cup, kid?" he asked.

I had a water bottle in my backpack. "It's fresh?" I asked.

"Straight from the desalinator."

"Do I need to pay you?" I asked a little nervously.

"Yeah," he said and held out his hand. "In advance. In gold ."

"Shut up, Leo," the woman next to me said, laughing. "I think she believes you." She turned to me. "It's free as long as you're down with receipt of stolen property. You could get a pretty hefty fine for taking that water, you know."

"But they'd fine you just as much for being down here at all," someone else added.

I held out my water bottle and Leo filled it.

"My name's Kat," the woman said. "The water boy is Leo."

"Shut up," he said.

"Water boy of the day ."

"I'm Rebecca," I said, wondering if people would recognize me. If they'd throw me back out. Or over the side. That last would be tricky, though, since we were several stories below the waterline.

No one reacted to my name. I was just a grubby nobody, apparently, and grubby nobodies were okay.

"Soup's up," someone said, and they gave me some of the soup, too. I offered my trail mix to the meal, and that got a round of approving nods; I appeared to be following the rules.

Kat showed me around the encampment. They drew water (a trickle at a time) out of the fresh pipes; they drew electricity from the wires and yes, they were willing to let me charge up my gadget. The thing I thought was most impressive was the latrine; they'd hung a shower curtain to provide privacy, and the latrine went straight to a waste pipe. Kat showed me how it worked: you unlatched the top part to use it, then relatched the top part and pulled on something near the bottom to flush. "Be absolutely sure the lid is latched when you flush," she warned me, "or we will be swimming in shit."

When the meal was over, everyone settled in for the night, leaving one person awake to empty buckets and watch for cops. "If anyone comes," Kat said, "you'll need to grab your bag and get out as fast as you can. Keep your flashlight off if you possibly can—light will lead them to you."

Dodge the authorities .

"What happens if you're caught?"

"They fine you for trespass and theft."

That didn't sound too bad, but Kat raised an eyebrow and added, "Could you pay a fine? Because if not, they bond you for it till you pay off the debt."

"You'll still come out ahead, if you're not caught too often," Leo said from his sleeping spot a few meters away.

"What if you're a dependent?" I asked. "Theoretically, I mean." It's illegal to sell someone under eighteen into bond—everywhere that has laws, at least.

"Then your parents get the bill. And the bond, if they can't pay. You're their responsibility. Theoretically ."

"Okay," I said.

"Sleep tight," she said.

My gadget was charged, and as I started to stash it, I wondered if I'd be able to get a signal down here. I could, it turned out. I wrapped up in my blanket and tried to check my mail. I couldn't get into any of my accounts—not even the one I thought my father hadn't known about. It was a good thing I hadn't used that account to contact my mom.

On the stead's "trending" page, where you could see all the "hot right now!" links, I saw that the first episode of High Stakes had been released. I pulled it up to watch.

It was weird to see which scenes they put back-to-back, telling the story. They'd focused a lot on Debbie, and there was a long clip of her telling the story about getting arrested with her sister when they were caught with the T-13.

From that, they segued into a scene of one of the people from the network staff at a shop—it was on Amsterdarn, I was pretty sure, because it was well lit and I didn't recognize the owner. They bought a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin, and ten tablets of T-13. There was a brief interview with the shopkeeper, who looked utterly baffled when they asked him about the legality of T-13.

Then a scene stateside: this time Janet was interviewing a lawyer who said that for a first offense, if he was representing someone, he thought he could have drug possession charges reduced to the point where the person would be sentenced to five years of probation. "If someone can't afford a good lawyer, though," he added, "if they're working with an overwhelmed public defender's office, they might get three years, or five, or even ten. And I mean prison time, not probation."

I wondered what a public defender was and moved over to the sidebar to see if they had notes. They did: it was a lawyer who worked for people who couldn't afford lawyers. Weird. I switched back over to the show.

Now they were showing video of people getting off a plane on Amsterdarn while a voiceover talked about laws on the stead, and how the differences between stead and shore had led to all sorts of fugitives taking up residence on the stead. I thought maybe they'd segue to Thor's father, but no. They switched to a picture of a little girl with pigtails, hanging from a bar, a big grin on her face.

"My name is Lenore Garrison," a new voice said. "This is my daughter, Becky. I haven't seen her since she was four years old, when her father violated the custody order and took her to New Minerva."

It was my mother. That's my mother . I looked around wildly, wanting to show someone—wanting to show Thor , actually, but of course he wasn't there. She looked older than my father, because her hair was mostly gray. She was tense. I could see it from the way she held her hands.

My mother pretended, in the interview, that she hadn't heard from me; she was protecting my secret. She spoke in a composed, calm way, although the camera angle changed a few times and I could tell they'd edited out bits. I wondered if she'd told Janet that she could only interview her if she didn't show her crying.

"I kept my married name," she said near the end, her lips twisting into a faint smile. "I'm hoping that she'll have an easier time finding me, if she ever comes looking. I'm not sure whether she even knows I'm alive."

After the interview with my mother, Janet's voice talked about how they ran a database check on all the heavy-hitters of the seastead and found that it wasn't just the bond-workers who were often on the lam. I thought they'd mention Thor's father for sure now, but in fact there were fifteen people on the station who'd committed embezzling and tax evasion, plus another twenty-two who'd done one but not the other, and a bunch more who'd been either convicted or charged with fraud. There were eleven sex offenders, four men who'd been involved in human trafficking (I had to look that one up: apparently they'd been selling people somewhere that bond-workers were illegal), and two who'd jumped bail after being charged with felony assault. One man had been charged with murder. Probably the creepiest people on the list: nine of the doctors practicing medicine on the seastead had lost their stateside medical license due to ethical violations, including someone who'd been experimenting medically on his patients . That got them curious about seastead medicine and they'd done some checking; four more doctors on the seastead might never have actually gone to medical school at all.

Cut to the lawyer. "The fact is, here in the U.S. we pay a lot in taxes, but part of what we get from that is oversight. We have people who check to see whether the food we eat is safe, whether our water is safe to drink, whether our doctors are licensed to practice medicine. On the seastead, it's caveat emptor for everything. Let the buyer beware. But the fact is, most of us are not in a position, on a day-to-day basis, to check every bite of food and make sure it's not contaminated with pesticide or E. coli ."

Back to the stead, and Deb was talking again.

"My sister was poisoned," she said. "I don't know if it was on purpose or by accident, but it destroyed her kidneys. The cost of treatment was so high, the only way to get a loan to cover it was to allow her bond to be sold to a skin farm on Lib. She said no, but there's a loophole. If you're dying, your bond can be sold without your permission to anyone willing to pay for the treatment. And that's how she wound up chained to a bench in a skin farm."

I knew what was coming next: the recording I'd gotten and passed to Janet, of the skin farm. I didn't need to see that again. I shut my gadget off before I killed the battery, and lay down to try to sleep. The floor was hard, and even wrapped in both my coat and the blanket I was chilly. I rested my head on my backpack. I want my Mom , I thought, and drifted—finally—to sleep.

WHEN I WOKE UP, the camp was quiet around me, and when I sat up, I realized that everyone was gone.

The whole camp was gone, in fact. Bedrolls had been packed up and carried away. The curtain around the latrine had been taken down and the waste pipe closed back up. Even the water leak was patched (with what looked like a wad of gum). Next to me, someone had written in chalk, TONIGHT: L-38.

I wondered how to find L-38. Probably Kat could have explained it to me.

Someone had filled my water bottle for me before closing up the water pipe. I wondered what time it was and reached for my gadget.

It was gone.

I went through my bag, double-checked the spot where it had been plugged in to charge the night before…nothing. My money, which was deep in the bag I'd had under my head all night, was still there, but the gadget had been in my hand when I fell asleep and someone had taken it. Stolen it.

It probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. These people routinely stole water and trespassed rather than pay rent. Stealing from a person is different, but I doubted swiping my gadget had been some sort of collective decision. Although leaving me sleeping surely had been.

If I could find my way to L-38 tonight, I could ask for it back. That might work. I sighed heavily and headed for the stairs.

Upstairs, I went to the sandwich shop, hoping to find Thor. He jumped up when he saw me and pulled me into a hug.

"That was your mom, wasn't it?" he said.

"Yeah," I said into his shoulder. "It was."

"She pretended—"

"She knew I was keeping it a secret," I said. We sat down. "They sort of mentioned your dad, too."

"Yeah, guess he's not the only lowlife on board, huh?" Thor had already bought two sandwiches, and passed one over to me, along with a pop. I would have liked to refuse on principle but I was too hungry.

"Yeah, it gets worse, too. Who do you think the sex offenders are?"

"Uncle Paul," Thor said. "I don't trust any man who wants me to call him 'uncle' when he's not actually my relative."

"Huh." I couldn't talk; too busy eating.

"And I totally bet that jerk doctor who didn't want to treat Tom's ankle properly was one of the ones who had his license yanked."

I swallowed. "I don't know where Janet looked this stuff up. Can we check?"

"I bet we could from your dad's computer. But database access like that costs money, and some of these people are probably using false names here—someone would have noticed the license thing, otherwise. Also, digging for this information takes time. Janet has assistants." He looked a little wistful. "Someone else will do it, though. It'll get around."

"Ha. We could start rumors about people we don't like. My dad, for instance."

"True. I mean, he's already a kidnapper. Maybe he's also defrauded people, molested children, and eaten kittens."

"He'd never eat a kitten. Too much work for too little meat."

"Wait, are you quoting something he's said ?"

"He was kidding around at the time." I looked at Thor. "He's not always awful, you know? Back when I was little we got along better."

"Well, I'm glad he's not always horrible to you."

"He's not."

"Good."

I finished my sandwich and was thinking about buying another one when the shop owner brought over two banana splits.

"Dammit," I said, between bites. "I have money, you know. I could be buying my own breakfast. Lunch. Whatever this is."

"I was kind of thinking of this as a date," Thor said, looking at his own banana split and turning bright red. "So I'm paying, okay?"

A date.

"Well, okay," I said, taking another bite of banana split.

When we'd finished eating, Thor said, "Hey, I had a message for you. Not from your mom."

"Oh?"

"Or your dad, either. Someone from Stead Life wants to talk to you. They tried reaching you by phone and mail and couldn't get you, so they came to me. They said you could go straight to their office, if that would be easier than calling. They're on the Cruise Ship part of Rosa, level thirty-two, west edge."

" Stead Life wants to talk to me?" This made me unaccountably nervous. "Do you think it's about my mom?"

"No, actually, they called yesterday before High Stakes went live."

"Weird. Well, I'll go see them, I guess. What time is it? Are you late for anything?"

"I don't care," he said.

"Don't get yourself in trouble," I said, and squeezed his hand. He squeezed mine back.

"Are you sure you don't want me to walk you to the Stead Life office?" he said.

"Do you think I actually need protection?"

"I mostly just think it would be fun to walk with you."

"How about halfway, then you go to class?"

He grinned. "Okay."

The Stead Life offices were a lot smaller than I'd imagined them. Just like High Stakes , they had a producer who was not one of the people who appeared on camera. Her assistant buzzed me in and then went for coffee. The producer's name was Leah; I'd seen it in the credits a million times but I'd never seen her face. She was the opposite of Janet—scruffy where Janet was polished, nerdy where Janet was slick. "You're Beck Garrison," she said, before I could introduce myself. "I'm glad your friend found you. You disappeared really effectively."

Huh. Good .

"We can interview you on camera if you want, but mostly I was hoping you could help me find that woman, Debbie. We really want to interview her."

I laughed out loud. "You're hiring me for a finding job?"

Leah blinked, confused for a second. "Oh, yeah, you found stuff for the Miscellenry, didn't you? I heard that when I did background on you. Well, so. Yes, we want you to find Debbie and help us arrange an interview. She's disappeared even more thoroughly than you did."

"Probably because she doesn't want to get killed."

"If necessary, we can give the camera and list of questions to the person of her choice. You, for instance. Surely she'd want to get the word out on the stead. That's what we do: get the word out."

I bit my lip and looked up at Leah. "So why weren't you planning to go to Miguel's funeral?"

Leah looked down at her desk. "We didn't think it fit our show. Funerals aren't very interesting."

"Oh? Really? Is that the reason?"

"More or less."

"Yeah. If Debbie gives you an interview, will you actually air it? Even if—say—Paul Garrison tells you not to?"

"We don't take orders from your father, Beck."

"That's good, because you'd probably be surprised by just how many people on this stead do . And the ones who don't are easily cowed by his goons."

Leah tilted her head. "I live on Min because I don't like people telling me what to do. I run a reality show because I like asking questions. And I carry a gun because I don't like people trying to intimidate me."

"Good to know," I said. "If I find Debbie, how shall I tell her to reach you?"

"Let me give you a disposable phone—"

I shook my head. "I've had a bad experience with gift gadgets. How about just a number?"

"Fine." Leah wrote a number down on an index card and handed it over. "You can also feel free to come back here. I'm hoping to interview her before tomorrow morning. Let me know if you hit a dead end."

It kept coming back to finding.

I started with the locker rooms, because maybe someone knew where she was, enough to pass the message along, but no luck. I tried Clark's, plus similar low-end dining halls on Rosa and Pete. I tried the real estate office, on the off chance that she'd used her money to buy a place to live straight off.

When I went to St. Peter's, Father Tim looked happy to see me. "I assume you heard the funeral got moved," he said.

"I heard it wasn't going to be on the sea platform anymore," I said.

"Yeah. We've fixed things with the Methodists. It'll be tomorrow, in their church. I'm hoping it will at least be a harder location to attack. They certainly won't be able to blow it up without destroying a lot of stuff they'd rather not destroy." I must have looked uncertain because he added, "We can't not hold a funeral."

"I guess not."

"Any news on the slowdown?"

"I'm not the one to ask," I said. "Do you know anything new?"

"I've heard rumblings of a caveat to the 'medical care' thing, after the broadcast last night. No one wants to be packed off to a doctor who didn't go to med school."

"Or who might experiment on them? I can't imagine why they'd object."

In any case, Father Tim hadn't seen Debbie and didn't know how to get a message to her. "Actually," he said a little sheepishly, "I was thinking of asking you to try to find her for me. I want to make sure she's okay with the current funeral plans. If you could give her this note.…" He handed me a paper envelope. "She can send a message through you, if she doesn't want to come up."

Come up . Of course . She was hiding at the bottom of the stead, the same as I had last night.

SO, THE PROBLEM NOW was this: the thought of endlessly wandering around that dimly lit maze of pipes and wires with no destination, trying to find someone who was hiding on purpose when I'd already been warned that plenty of groups down there weren't "friendly"—frankly, that didn't sound like a good plan. I mean, I'm not exactly a coward, but when I went to rescue Lynn from the place on Lib, I took an Alpha Dog with me. I could actually hire a bodyguard, but going down there with a hired gun was the most certain way possible to ensure that no one trusted me and I never found Debbie.

I pondered whether I knew anyone who was big enough to make me feel like I had someone with me, but also nonthreatening enough that he wouldn't make things worse, and went to see if I could find Thor. I caught him as he came out of his afternoon class. His face lit up when he spotted me. "I wasn't expecting to see you again today."

"Yeah, well, I want company for something." I was trying to avoid specifics where people could overhear.

"Awesome." Thor put his arm around me and his head close to mine. "Do you need help getting to the Citizens' Services Bureau?"

"No," I said. "I want company while I hunt for Debbie."

"Why do you need her?"

" Stead Life wants to interview her."

He raised his head and glanced over his shoulder. Shara was coming out of the tutor's apartment as well, and he waved. "See you later," he said cheerfully, and we picked up the pace.

"Okay," he said, "I'm in."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course. Do you want to stop and get something to eat first?"

"Yeah," I said, "but you have to let me treat, because it's not a date when I'm kind of basically using you for your height and gender."

"Sure it is," he said. "As long as we're spending time together, I'm good."

"You haven't seen where I'm taking you!"

"I should tell you, I'm still jealous of that Alpha Dog who got to hang out with you on Lib."

"You should be more jealous of Lynn. After all, she was officially my date—that's how I got the Alpha Dog to rescue her."

"True, but since she's either dead or somewhere awful, that felt like sort of a tasteless joke for me to make."

"Sorry."

"No, it's okay for you to make it. I just didn't feel comfortable going there."

I bought us both sandwiches. The line was kind of long; a lot of the people with dining hall contracts had realized the one-person operations like sandwich shops were mostly not affected by the slowdown.

"We should make sure you're not being followed," Thor said. "I mean, if other people are after her, you probably don't want to lead them to her by accident."

"Good point," I said, and we took a circuitous route to the locker-room level. If anyone was following us, they were good enough that we didn't see them when we looked over our shoulders repeatedly.

The door to the utility level was still taped open. On the other side, Thor looked around in wonder. "I can't believe you didn't think this was a romantic destination," he said. "It's dimly lit, mysterious, and our parents would never find us down here. What more could you ask for?"

" Not being slapped with a massive fine if you're caught during your date?"

"That just adds the element of excitement."

Walking down the row, I realized that the whole place was labeled on a grid with letters and number: A-Z in one direction, 1-99 in the other, which undoubtedly was the key to finding L-38, that number I'd seen written when I got up this morning. Debbie hadn't been with last night's squatter crowd, but I went to L-38 anyway, thinking I could ask if anyone knew how to find her. I could ask about my gadget, too. But no one was there, so either it was too early, or someone (like the gadget thief) had written down entirely the wrong location to send me astray.

We kept walking down that aisle, past holding tanks with AIR BALLAST CHAMBER stenciled on them in orange, and something with a sign saying DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE, and a locked cage that held a bunch of switches that looked sort of rusty.

"Password!"

It was a male voice, but not one I recognized. I froze and held up my hands to show I didn't have a weapon. Thor did the same. "Sorry, I'm not with your group," I said. "I'm looking for someone I have a message for."

A light exploded in my eyes and I covered them, too late. When my vision started to come back I found myself nose-to-nose with a man in a black leather jacket, with a blue tattoo of a lightning bolt down his cheek. "What sort of message?"

" Stead Life wants to interview Debbie. Union organizer Debbie. They want to put her on their show. I said I'd try to find her and let her know."

"Can't help you," he said. "But pass freely."

"Okay," I said. "Uh. How freely? Any areas I should avoid? I'd hate to get shot, you know?"

"Hardly anyone down here has a gun," he said dismissively. "Just don't act like you're a cop, you'll probably be fine."

"Thanks," I said. "But if hardly anyone has a gun.…"

He shrugged.

I turned to Thor as we walked away. "We can go back, if you want."

"We haven't found Debbie yet."

"I feel guilty about getting you into this."

"You're not making me do anything."

"Yeah, but I asked you to come.…"

Thor put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a sideways hug. "Quit it," he said. "If you're here, I want to be here."

If Debbie were here, she was surely as far as possible from the stairway in. The next encampment we passed wasn't guarded at all, but abandoned. It looked a lot more established than the place where I'd slept last night; there were bedrolls laid out. I couldn't tell if everyone who normally lived there was out for the day or if they'd scattered when they saw us coming. "Debbie?" I called, tentatively. "It's Beck." No response.

"Do you want to wait here and see who comes?" Thor asked.

"No," I said. "If we can't find her, we can try this spot again."

The next camp found us before we found them. We were approaching a corner when I felt something hit me in the back. I was starting to turn to look behind me when every muscle in my body seized up; I fell, hard, unable even to catch myself.

"What the hell are you doing here?" someone was yelling at me. No, at Thor.

I struggled for breath. The shock—it had been an electric shock, I was pretty sure—had stopped, but I was still having trouble making things work, and that included my mouth. "Stop, wait," I said, struggling for coherence. "Don't blame him! I made him come!" I need to tell them I want Debbie , I thought, but in a way that doesn't make me sound like a threat . Whoever it was shocked me again; this time it felt sort of like the numbness that shoots down your arm when you hit it between the bones of the elbow. Thor was yelling something, too. I didn't know what. "It's not Thor," I said when I could talk again. Which was not exactly helpful, but I was terrified that they would hurt him even worse, because he was big and more of a threat. Why did I bring him ? Why did that seem like a good idea ?

Hands grabbed my shoulders and yanked me upright; I could see nothing but a dazzling light. "Oh, her," someone said.

"Let her go." This time it was a woman's voice, with a southern accent. "She's one of us."

"Debbie?" I said, hopefully.

"Yeah, hon, it's me. Put her on one of the cots. The boy, too. Good God, y'all, can't you tell an Alpha Dog from a jumpy teenager?"

"Is Thor okay?" I asked.

"Yeah, he got the same as you. Just relax, you'll feel better in a few minutes."

My vision slowly cleared, although my fingers and toes still felt weird. I sat up and looked around. We were in the far corner, as far as possible from the stairs, and this camp looked downright permanent. They had plastic sheets tacked up all over, with labels written on them in permanent maker: men's bathroom, women's bathroom, kitchen, do not disturb.

The most startling thing—I mean, beyond finding Debbie and getting shocked—was that there was a child here. A little girl, three years old, watching TV.

"Holy crap," Thor said, sitting up next to me. "Do you think she lives down here? I mean, all the time?"

Bond contracts typically required contraceptive injections for workers—male or female, it didn't matter. They usually further specified that if a child was born anyway , that child would be taken away and placed for adoption unless either the mother or the father could buy out within one month of giving birth.

It's pretty harsh, but it's not like you could keep a kid in the locker rooms. I wouldn't have thought you could keep a kid down here, either, but clearly someone had managed it.

Once we were steady on our feet, Debbie led us behind the "do not disturb" plastic sheet to a room with an actual table and chairs. "Welcome to my office," she said. "Have a seat. You must have had a pretty big reason to go to the trouble of tracking me down."

" Stead Life wants to interview you," I said, and laid out their proposal.

"What do you think, Beck?" she asked when I was done. "Should I do it?"

"I think it's a good idea," I said. "It'll give you another chance to get the word out, both on the seastead and elsewhere."

"Maybe." She ran one hand through her hair and sighed. "I wish I could talk this over with Miguel. He had a much better sense of strategy than I do. He'd probably have come up with a better idea than hiding down here."

"Yeah, well," Thor said. "He also got killed. So maybe not."

"Hmm," Debbie said. "Tell them this, Beck. Tell them I'll do it—I'll meet them down here, in A-15, right near the stairs. I'll give them a half-hour interview. But in exchange, they have to cover Miguel's funeral, too. I heard they aren't coming. I want them there. That's my condition."

I nodded. "Yeah," I said. "I'll tell them."

Miguel's funeral was held the next day.

I knew what Debbie was thinking: getting Stead Life to cover the funeral would be good for the movement and would build sympathy for the people doing the slowdown, but it would also provide them with human shields. Uncle Paul or my father or whoever it was behind the man I heard hiring the Cut-Rate Bastards—they might have been able to get away with sinking a sea platform full of bond-workers, but killing journalists guarantees that their friends will make you look as bad as possible in the stories that run afterward.

I liked that idea, but I thought they could do with a few more human shields. I had Thor pass the word to Shara and the rest of our classmates; I told Geneva about the funeral when I met her to withdraw more money; I told Jamie at Miscellenry. Father Tim had been sympathetic, so I stopped in at the Baptist Mission Outreach Center, the Mormon Mission, and the Russian Orthodox church over on Pete. The Mormons were not initially sympathetic—I think they were annoyed about the slowdown—but when I told them about overhearing threats of violence they said they'd come.

I went to the funeral two hours early to make sure I had a seat. No one stopped me entering. Once I was in the church, I borrowed a phone and called my father.

"Hello, Beck," he said when he picked up.

I looked over my shoulder. "How did you know it was me?"

He sighed heavily. "You're the only person who has my private number. Besides, you're coming in from the Methodist church's data node. I'm not surprised you decided to go to the funeral."

"Well, I was calling to let you know I'm here," I said. "I know the ADs were going to do something horrible to the funeral the first time around, and the Cut-Rate Bastards were supposed to keep any minors from getting in. I'm here, Thor's here, and I think most of the other teenagers are coming. All the religious leaders are coming, including the Baptists and the Russians. Stead Life is coming. If anything goes down, it's not just bond-workers who will die."

There was a pause. Then he said, "You know, I was expecting you to bring up a more personal issue first."

My cheeks warmed. "Mom," I said. "I saw her on TV."

"Yes. 'Mom.' I suppose it won't do much good to give you my side of the story at this point, but she was trying to keep you from me, she was telling you lies about me, and it was clear that it was her or me—we could never both be your parents."

I didn't really want to argue about this. Not here, not on the phone. So I sat there silently, waiting to see if he had anything else to say.

"Come home, Beck," he said. "Please? You don't…I don't want you to feel like you have to go to her. To give up the sea, the stead, your life here. I'm sorry I turned you out. Just come home."

"Settle the strike," I whispered. "I know you can make it happen. Negotiate with the bond-workers, find a deal that everyone's satisfied with, and when the slowdown's over, I'll come home."

THE METHODIST CHURCH was a lot like the Catholic church, only bigger: one of the stead's large interior rooms, structural pillars here and there, folding chairs. They'd borrowed extras (probably from St. Peter's) and jammed them together, with standing room in the aisles and in the back.

The Methodist church had elaborately painted walls: they'd created twelve arched windows that looked out on various made-up scenes. One showed the sea on a sunny day; another had gardens. The window painting next to me depicted a playground filled with children. I wondered if children on real playgrounds all looked as joyful as the kids in the painting, or if in real life they squabbled a lot over whose turn it was to go down the slide.

Father Tim and the Methodist minister both appeared to be presiding. I wondered if Tim was nervous. He didn't look nervous. He welcomed everyone and then drew a cross in the air and blessed the crowd. Some of the people near me crossed themselves, but most kept their hands at their sides, so I didn't feel too conspicuous.

There was a series of readings. Some of them were religious: Father Tim read a passage about Moses saying "Let my people go." Some of the people in the crowd shouted "Amen!" to that, which appeared to startle Tim a little. The Methodist minister read a bit about tending vineyards and flocks and getting grapes and milk. "Is it about OXEN that GOD is concerned?" he thundered. ("No! Amen, brother, no!" someone near me said, half under his breath.) "Surely he says this for US. Whoever plows and threshes should share in the HARVEST." ("Amen!" the person near me said, louder this time. It didn't seem to startle the Methodist as much as it had Father Tim.)

There were also some poems, and then songs, but I didn't know enough of the words to sing along with them.

Then Debbie got up to deliver the eulogy. I was tired by now, and hungry, and it was hard to concentrate. Next to me, Thor took my hand and we laced our fingers together.

"Miguel is gone," Debbie was saying, "but the fight is anything but over."

There was something of a commotion and for a second I thought that despite all the kids, all the religious leaders, and everyone else who'd come, there was going to be violence. But it was someone with a note, which was passed up to Debbie to read.

She stared at it wordlessly for a moment.

"This says that a consortium of business owners has agreed in principle to providing health care as a standard part of every contract, effective immediately and retroactively," she said. "They're requesting a meeting to discuss details."

She started to go on, probably to say that the details might be important (for one thing, presumably the bond-workers would want it spelled out that they'd be seeing REAL doctors and not someone who got his medical degree by printing off an official-looking certificate) but her voice was lost in the ecstatic cheer.

Thor clapped, but he was looking at me, and I could tell that we were thinking the same thing: that was way too fast. Too easy. What are they playing at now ?

Thor walked me back up to my father's apartment.

"Are you sure about this?" he said. "I still think a night down on the bottom level would be a pretty cool adventure."

"Have you ever slept on a concrete floor?" I asked. "It's really uncomfortable ."

"Who said anything about sleep?"

My face flamed and he looked a little stricken. "I meant talking ," he said, hastily. "We could just, you know, hang out." He lowered his voice. "And I don't care what you said to your father, I still think you should get off the stead."

"He's worried about losing me," I said. "He wants me to come home. If I leave, I lose any power and influence I have."

"I don't trust your father," Thor said. "Not to keep his word, and not to keep you safe."

"Me, either. But I don't think he'll hurt me."

"Well," Thor said, "at least the stuff about eating kittens was always a joke, right?"

"Right."

We were about to turn down the corridor where my father lived, and Thor stopped dead. When I looked up at him to ask what was up, he bent down and kissed me. Then he broke the kiss and looked embarrassed. "Sorry," he said. "I just realized, once we're by your father's apartment.…"

"Yeah, he has a camera," I said. "Good thought." I wrapped my arms behind Thor's neck and kissed him back.

The entry code let me into my father's apartment this time. He was waiting for me in the living room.

"I wondered if that would be good enough for you," he said.

"Well," I said, "it sounded like a good-faith effort."

He didn't smile. Instead, he let out a long breath and studied me in the dim light.

"Do you have any questions about your mother?" he asked.

"Where does she live?" I asked.

"California somewhere. I'm not sure, exactly."

I thought about asking if I could write to her, but I knew if he knew I was writing to her, he'd be monitoring the mail. It might be easier just to keep sending letters through the embassy. I could have asked him why he lied, but we'd already covered that by phone, and I didn't really believe his answer anyway.

"Well," I said. "Now what? Do I go back to living here, sleeping in my own bed, going to school?"

"Yes," he said.

"Okay, then," I said, wondering why he was still looking at me that way.

"You'll be attending classes by video for now, though," he said. He had an abstracted look on his face—not angry, not the way he'd looked when he was grounding me. Worried . He raised an eyebrow at me, probably reacting to the look on my face. "I'm not punishing you," he said. "There was…there may have been an accident on Sal."

"What?" I whispered.

He laced his fingers together. "As it happens, the bond-workers' demand was something we'd begun to think we would need to provide anyway. There's an illness on the stead. It may be contagious, and it may be spreading. I'm not grounding you, Beck. I'm quarantining you."

The Assassin

By Albert E. Cowdrey
| 16667 words

There are many different sorts of rebellious acts. This story investigates some of them.

CONNIE'S LITTLE GYRO WAS crossing the Blue Ridge when Andy began to shiver. The city where he'd spent some of the worst times of his life was fast approaching. That was how he thought about Washington—it was advancing on him, not the other way around.

The plane entered the Potomac corridor and the wilderness of red brick and eroded marble inexorably took form. On the right, the grim gray hulk of the Pentagon appeared, surrounded by the white teeth of missile batteries. After the War, Americans had talked of demolishing the Puzzle Palace, yet there it was, now the headquarters for the world government's Security Forces. It's like the Sphinx, Andy mused. The ugliest things always seem to last the longest.

His companions ignored the view. Connie was reading some sort of printout, while Gomez sprawled across three seats, snoring. Andy wished he could do the same. Instead, like a man reading Braille, he fingered the ridges of scars hidden by his poplin shirt. Astonishing to think that today he was wearing the same uniform as his onetime tormentors. Connie had checked every detail of their getups—their regulation haircuts, clothing, boots, insignia—before they left Tuamotu. Their ID badges displeased her, for they bore the Roman numeral IX. She'd wanted to get them X's, which would have enabled them to go almost anywhere, but didn't try for fear of provoking an investigation. She, of course, had top clearance and wore it casually, as she wore her gold-washed name tag saying Griffin and the stars on her shoulder-straps.

The gyro banked and descended. The roof of the military terminal rose to meet them, displaying in giant white letters the slogan of the Security Forces, To Serve All Humanity . Andy wore the same words on a patch sewn to his right sleeve, and he remembered guards at the penal colony where he'd served his time who had it tattooed on their biceps, along with Mother and Born to Die.

With a small thump the gyro settled on the landing pad, the autopilot shut down, and Connie rose to her feet, stretching like a cat. Her skin had a yellowish tinge that sometimes made him wonder if she might be ill, yet her dark eyes glowed with all the old familiar fire. The waiting was over, the time for action close at hand. "Here we are, guys," she said. "Don't forget your weapons."

Better not, he thought wryly, considering that their mission was to kill the world's most powerful man—in Andy's case, to kill him for the second time.

Improbably, in view of what he had since become, Andrew Walden Emerson III had been a quiet boy, raised by his grandmother after his parents were killed when an errant missile landed on—of all unlikely targets—Great Barrington, Vermont.

In her quiet, ladylike home he'd become an obsessive reader, summoning books on his Omnipad from every surviving library. By the time Security reprogrammed the servers to filter out all writings on the Index of Subversive Literature, he'd already read such dangerous works as A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables, storing away old-fashioned rhetoric and quaint notions of honor and self-sacrifice he could hardly have learned from the world around him. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, young Andy liked to whisper to himself as he fell asleep. Yes!

But instead of going to the guillotine like Dickens's hero, he grew up and went to college. He decided to be a doctor, won a scholarship to New Yale, entered the pre-med program, and thought he'd found his calling. He was working hard, his fingers stained with chemicals from the labs, his life seemingly laid out before him, when he met an older woman—thirty at least—a blonde firebrand who called herself (revealingly) by the code name Faith.

He'd never known anyone like her, and went eagerly when she invited him to a meeting of a group she headed, Action for Anarchy. The members all had code names, which looking back was pretty silly, because the campus was such a tight community that they all knew each other's real names, too. The guys were Friedberger, Villeneuve, Swanson, Mbeki, and Nguyen, but at meetings they had to be called Karl, Max, Oliver, Mandela, and Minh. When Andy joined, he was assigned the name Thoreau, a man he resembled in little except a regional inability to pronounce the letter r .

Faith taught her boys that the politics of bygone times, like the faux-medieval towers of Old Yale, had been ground into rubble by the War. (They all capitalized the word, even in their thoughts, because to them it was the only war that mattered.) Under a dictatorship, she declared, death was the only way to get rid of a bad ruler, and that was why all politics had become the politics of violence. The first time she gave Andy this revelation they were in bed, and despite the place and the mood and the moment he retained enough New England skepticism to protest that he didn't really think people could live without any government at all.

Faith told him not to be so literal-minded. "We're not into fantasy," she said. "We want to tear down the monster the War created and see what emerges, once people are free." Then she became again a passionate and demanding lover.

Such horizontal lectures made her the inspiration of the young men of the AFA. She slept with each in turn, partly for the sex (good sex, they all agreed, was in itself an act of rebellion) but mainly to inspire them with her burning vision of a whole planet , for God's sake, set free by the death of World President Mahmud Alonzo Sol. When the War ended, exhausted humanity at last had formed a universal government with teeth, including nuclear teeth. Sol won the presidency by democratic means—a perfectly deracinated man, suave, eloquent, full of generous thoughts, not identifiable with any race or nation or creed. Then he used the newly formed international army (called the Security Forces to make it sound less threatening) to seize dictatorial power.

"It's like Caesar posing as the friend of the people, then overthrowing the Roman Republic," Faith declared. "It's like Napoleon coming on as the defender of the French Revolution, then making himself emperor. It's like Hitler getting power legally, then destroying free government in Germany. It's been tyranny's formula for 2,200 years!"

Exciting talk. The meetings of the AFA were noisy, fueled partly by cheap wine, partly by testosterone, but mainly by her fiery words. Her boys spread the message in every possible way, and yet they knew—for she had taught them—that words alone could never change history. Lanky, bearded Karl, aka Friedberger, liked to quote Goethe's line am Anfang war die Tat , in the beginning was the Deed. But it was Thoreau, aka Andy, and not his garrulous friends who finally volunteered to do what they'd all been talking about. That was when Faith became his alone.

Also when his life changed forever. He left the semiplast classrooms of New Yale, the crowded dorms, the smelly labs, the shoddy wards of not-yet-completely-rebuilt New Haven General Hospital, where he'd worked as an aide to gain practical experience. He really hated to go, and in cool moments wondered just why he'd volunteered to kill the President—how much was idealism, how much sex, and how much a yearning for action that had grown up inside him during his excessively quiet, bookish boyhood.

He told himself, It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, but maybe didn't quite believe it, for the day he left Yale a blinding migraine came upon him, forcing him to hole up in a darkened room while Faith put compresses soaked in cold tea on his forehead. After twenty-four agonizing hours the pain faded, and he walked blinking into the sunlight of a summer day. He felt nervous as a young boxer before his first bout, but determined to fulfill the promise he'd made to her, to himself, and to the enigmatic force called Destiny that appeared to be urging him on.

In the Maine woods north of Bangor he practiced marksmanship, making the resinous green glades echo with shots from an impact rifle Faith had obtained on the black market. Every day they checked a website that reported the activities of President Sol. They thought they'd have to go abroad to catch him, and were debating how to obtain passports when his visit to Washington was announced.

That made everything simple. They plugged Faith's little electro in overnight to build up the charge, and next morning headed south. The old capital on the Potomac had survived the War under an umbrella of geosynchronous interceptor satellites that diverted incoming missiles onto Pennsylvania cornfields and the Virginia hunt country. Amish farmers and the horsey set—such as were left—didn't think much of the arrangement, but Washington was saved, alone of the cities in the onetime Eastern Megalopolis. Andy's first sight of it was a confused impression of brick and marble, tall quiet elms and broad acres of greensward badly in need of a mowing, for the War had left the American government too impoverished even to cut its own grass on a regular basis.

Faith knew the city well and led Andy via mysterious ways—a closed Metro station, abandoned service tunnels, a collapsed wall opening into a nineteenth-century cellar—until they reached a dusty cast-iron staircase corkscrewing up inside the two-centuries-old Executive Office Building. At the top lay a small loft whose single dirty window gave a slanted view of the White House lawn and the platform—still noisily under construction—where Mahmud Alonzo Sol was to address his American subjects the following day.

Andy was astounded at Faith's professionalism, her uncanny ability to find the aerie, then to slip him and the illegal rifle into it through a gauntlet of electronic sensors and armed guards. How, he asked, did she manage her miracles? "Better," she smiled, "that you don't know," and he accepted that, for he was about to put his life on the line, and had no time to think of anything else.

TODAY AN OLDER, wiser, weightier, and infinitely more cynical Andy exited a black limo at the Pentagon, and with Gomez followed Connie past sensors that blinked at their IDs and banks of lasers that withheld their fire.

The trio entered a concourse with milling uniformed crowds and shops selling goods not available to the general public. To Serve All Humanity was everywhere, in every language of the earth, as inescapable as Koranic verses in a mosque—chiseled into stone, cast into steel security screens, woven into carpets, stitched into uniform patches like their own. Connie ignored a rank of golf carts offering rides in plaintive small robotic voices—"E Ring, sir or madam, I will take you to any place on E Ring"—and led the way down kilometers of musty corridors, past cubbyhole offices where uniformed clerks bent over flickering monitors, and up ramps eroded by a century and a half of shuffling feet.

Soon he was hopelessly lost. Despite its logical form of five concentric rings and transecting diagonals, the Pentagon was hell to navigate. Here a wall had been erected for no visible reason, while over there a battery of lasers stood ready to fry anyone whose ID didn't give him right of passage. Everywhere, posted against the walls like caryatids, stood guards in the red berets of the Spetsnaz —Security's own security force—thick young men and hard-eyed women wearing X badges and carrying weighty impact pistols.

Connie threaded the maze without hesitation. Locked doors were no problem, for her palm pressed against glowing sensor pads opened them all. Twice she made Andy try the same trick, for she'd entered his print into the system, and was pleased that the computer remembered it. Everyone was so indifferent to their passage that he began to feel like a ghost moving unobserved among the living. Or maybe the other way around. On Tuamotu he'd become used to ghosts, which the villagers saw everywhere and accepted as a part of life, and he began to wonder if the crowds were the ghosts of the men and women for whom the Pentagon had originally been built—fighters in a war against genuine evil that now seemed as remote and fabulous as the Crusades. Then Connie murmured, "Here we are," and all his fancies vanished.

They halted in a corridor outside a conference room. Twenty or so guards were lounging around—not Spetsnaz, just ordinary enlisted people with IX tags—peons assigned as personal aides to serve, protect, and grovel to a general officer, the same role that Andy and Gomez were enacting. All wore empty holsters and Andy learned why, when a sergeant wearing a red beret gave him and Gomez each a chit and removed their guns for safekeeping. "God, they're so paranoid, " Connie muttered, reminding him of the old saw that paranoid people sometimes have real enemies.

The double doors to the conference room stood open and the interior was banal, with a speaker's dais and lectern and metal chairs that were clamped to the floor so they couldn't be used as weapons. Only X's could enter, and even they had to pass through still more sensors able to detect the different kinds of plastic used in bombs, nonmetal weapons, and exploding bullets. Connie tucked an earbud under her short, dark regulation hair to catch the simultaneous translation, and walked past the gadgets without a glance to join the staff members already seated inside.

Gomez and Andy lingered, surrounded by a hum of gossip. The enlisted people all used the f-word as noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection, sometimes with comic results. "I told that effin effer, eff you, Jack, that's what I effin told him," said a guy, and his pal replied, "Effin A."

Then a tall, pale, blunt-featured man wearing multiple stars entered the conference room from a door outside Andy's range of vision, mounted the dais, and took his place at the lectern. Instantly the hallway quieted down, for the Chief of Security had appeared. The general officers inside applauded politely, and at the same time the doors—steel, Andy noted, and thick at that—closed slowly, like vault doors controlled by a timer. But before they clicked shut, he spotted an iridescent shimmer in the tall man's uniform, as if his gray tunic were woven not of cloth but of oily metal wires.

"We have our work cut out for us," he told Gomez in the nearly imperceptible whisper he'd mastered while in prison. He realized now that this plot might turn into a fiasco as total as the last one.

For a year or more after it happened, Andy had been able to remember his attack on Mahmud Alonzo Sol only in bad dreams.

Then, little by little, during his life with Esperanza on Tuamotu, he'd become able to remember it, though not with pleasure. Sometimes he lay half the night in her arms, shaking with sobs, while the baby Corazon slept peacefully in the crib he'd made her. Now he lived it again, the flashback signaled by an olfactory hallucination, the dry reek of the old mouse droppings that had littered the floor of the loft.

He could almost hear Faith pleading to stay with him and share his fate, and his own voice telling her no. She'd confessed to being pregnant with his child, so how could he allow her to run such a terrible risk? She dropped her clothes on the filthy floor and approached him, holding her little breasts in her hands like pomegranates on a plate. He pressed her back against the wall, all thought swept away by the rising of his own hot seed, and they coupled a last time, his hands holding her under the butt, her legs wrapped around his waist. She uttered a little mewling cry, and when he released her, wept like an abandoned child.

She dressed and left him, and the endless night began. While sunset faded slowly from the window, he sat with his back against the door, the impact rifle lying across his lap, the greasy magazine inserted and the first round already chambered. He kept checking his watch, but it appeared to have stopped, and after a while he gave up in sheer frustration. Instead, he closed his eyes and began writing the history of the assassination, like a scholar of the future looking back.

Boldly Thoreau struck the blow, and the President fell dead. Beginning at the White House and spreading outward like ripples on a pond, chaos enveloped the city. The brave assassin discarded his weapon and silently retraced his path down the spiral stair to the cellar. He climbed over the collapsed wall and entered the Metro tunnel, feeling his way in the darkness down the long-disused tracks, guiding himself by the cool and rusty third rail. He reached a station that had become a dormitory for the homeless, edged silently through the crowd of shadowy, ill-smelling forms, climbed a frozen escalator, and reentered the chaotic world above.

Dodging through alternations of flaring searchlights and pitchy shadows, he worked his way down alleys, hastened across streets and squares, and at last escaped from the city. For a week he hiked the open countryside, moving at night, pausing only to steal food from a kitchen or take a day's rest in an abandoned barn. He crossed parts of four states, all the way back to New Haven where his friends greeted him with cheers, tears, and embraces. Hidden in a safe house, he assisted Faith at the birth of their son (daughter?), and with her watched the child grow up, an inheritor of the new birth of freedom that her vision and his courage had brought to the whole world!

Maybe he fell asleep and dreamed part of this fantasy. Anyway, he awakened suddenly, propped in an awkward position with his neck wry and all his muscles stiff. When he stood up and tried doing deep knee bends, the cramps that shot through his legs almost made him cry out. That terrified him, for muffled sounds began to echo in the old building and he wondered if guards might be giving it a final search. But the sounds died away, silence returned, and he relaxed and touched his watch. After all, it was running, just very, very slowly. The green display said 0001—one minute past midnight—and he still had half the darkness to endure.

Dozing, stretching, shivering—however the building was heated, none of the warmth reached the loft—he endured hours that had lost all semblance of time, had become downpayments on a bad eternity. Shortly before dawn he had to take a crap, really had to, and the loft became more fragrant than ever. By the time faint daylight returned to the window and random noises outside the building told of a crowd gathering, Andy wanted to kill Mahmud Alonzo Sol, not so much for enslaving humanity as for making a boy gently raised in pristine Vermont spend the worst and longest night of his life in a closet that stank of rodent shit and his own.

Finally a wave of cheers announced the President's arrival. Carefully avoiding the deposit he'd made on the floor, Andy stretched out on his belly with his face to the window and used one sleeve to clean a spyhole in the dirty glass. Far below, a few faded-looking American dignitaries were taking their places on the first row of seats facing the speaker's platform. As a recording played the Grand March from Aida, the nation's honored guest appeared, a large smiling man with olive skin and glistening black hair, who moved confidently from the rear of the speaker's platform to the front.

Andy flexed his stiff fingers and used the rifle barrel to knock out a window pane. The breaking of the glass sounded very loud, but he never heard the tinkle that followed, because the shards had such a long way to fall. He wrapped the rifle's sling around his left wrist, put his right eye to the scope, tapped the aiming stud to enlarge the image, and centered the red dot of the laser on the third button of the President's dark double-breasted suit. He touched the firing stud, and the stock thumped the hollow of his shoulder in a muffled drumroll until the clip was empty.

And then—exactly then —the whole thing turned to farce. Andy's aim was good, a big black electronic module behind the President disintegrated into bits and pieces. But that was all. The speech went on, as if the President didn't choose to dignify with his notice anything as trivial as sixteen exploding bullets. Andy was still gaping when thunder resounded outside the loft, only it wasn't thunder but steel-toed combat boots echoing on the wooden floors. The door burst in and men with big hands dragged him out like dogs pulling a badger from its hole.

Andy's interrogation took place in the old prison on Hoover Square, in a fetid vault of stained concrete. The big guys stripped him and took him on in relays, like tag teams at a wrestling match. When beating and kicking failed to make him name names, they shoved a cold metal electrode into his anus and hit him with jolt after jolt. Every time they did he passed out, and the EMT required by regulations to be present at such sessions revived him to be jolted again. In time he broke, confessed everything, betrayed everybody—gave real names, Friedberger, Villeneuve, Swanson, Mbeki, and Nguyen—all except Faith, whose real name he also knew, yet managed to sew up in a place his tormentors couldn't reach, perhaps in a chamber of his heart.

For weeks afterward he lay in a crowded ward in the prison dispensary, shackled by one ankle to the frame of a steel cot. The nights were the worst, for then every man lay alone amid the wreckage of his life. During the day the chatter of the others and the restless jingling of their chains distracted him, while a wall monitor brayed continuous propaganda interspersed with martial music and weather reports.

One day a talking head announced a rare piece of reality TV—the confession of the would-be presidential assassin, Andrew Walden Emerson III. His black eyes had pretty well gone down by then, so he was able to watch as well as listen when Virtual Andy appeared in three glorious dimensions—four, if you counted time. The simulacrum looked pale but in good health, its boyish face perfect in every detail, right down to an enlarged pore in its nasal cartilage left by a zit Andy had popped at the age of fourteen. Speaking in tones that any voice-analysis software would have recognized as his, the image told its story and begged for death as the only proper punishment for its crime.

Meanwhile, Real Andy—the one with the sore bones, the scarred rectum, the broken nose, two missing molars, and skin a Jackson Pollock of varicolored bruises— that Andy started cursing as loud as he could with his lower jaw held together by screws and wires. A memory from his days at New Yale had come back to him, an after-midnight bull session with other science students, their tongues liberated by cheap wine and the fumes of Cannabis sativa . Some physics wannabe was boring him with news of a new system for projecting 3-D images in real space, and complaining bitterly because the technique (" really interesting, you know, Emerson") hadn't been licensed for production. Instead, Security had hauled the inventor off to a Preventive Detention Center to continue work under official supervision.

Andy knew then that he'd sacrificed his friends, his freedom, his youth, and his future to shoot a conglomeration of pixels. And now, standing beside Gomez in the Pentagon hallway, he felt the old humiliation and despair return, because that brief chromatic shimmer in the tall man's uniform had told him that his target wasn't real this time, either.

HE WHISPERED THE NEWS to Gomez. But that dark scarred man—older than Andy by ten years and even more experienced in disaster—only shrugged.

Something would turn up. Gomez had learned that long ago, growing up in the dusty streets of Laredo where he studied the secrets of crime and survival. He remembered a thousand fights, a hundred burglaries, and a dozen stays in jail. He'd lived like a stray dog, every man's hand against him, yet something had always saved him from death. Even when a weary judiciary sentenced him to Tuamotu Penal Colony for life as a habitual criminal, Destiny had given him the means to survive. Even to triumph.

By then he was a professional prisoner, what one of his judges had called "a perfectly institutionalized man." He knew the ropes and quickly became a snitch, alerting the prison cadre to fights and rapes and riots before they occurred, in return for food and favor. He wasn't surprised when his contact, a guard whose unique aura had won him the nickname Stink, pulled him out of the chow line one day and took him to a storeroom, ostensibly to clean it but really to receive a new assignment.

Stink told Gomez that a guy called Emerson had tried to shoot President Sol, had been condemned to death but later reprieved and his sentence commuted to life at hard labor. That hadn't ended the President's surprising clemency—an order had come down from HQ instructing the warden to make sure that Emerson survived in prison.

"Easy to say," Stink shrugged, and Gomez nodded.

They both knew the score. To the criminals, Emerson would be fresh meat. To the politicals, he'd be the fool whose ill-considered attempt on Sol's life had gotten them arrested during the worldwide roundup of subversives that followed. Because of the roundup the prison was jam-packed, with endless opportunities for somebody to plant a shank unseen. The crowding forced two men to share every futon, and Stink instructed Gomez to become Emerson's bunkmate, watch over him, and preserve him from harm.

"You can screw him if you want to," he added generously. "Just don't hurt him none."

At first glance Gomez saw that he could do as he pleased with Andy. The guy was small, skinny, badly battered, and so new to the system that he still wore a bandage on the back of his neck where his ID chip had been implanted. To judge from his collection of half-healed scars, he must be pretty dumb, too—probably tried to be a goddamn hero when they were using muscle on him, instead of saying whatever they wanted to hear at the beginning, and saving himself grief.

Gomez had no objection to prison-style sex when nothing better was available, yet didn't do what he could so easily have done. He had an abstract hatred of big shots, all big shots everywhere, and looked with something like awe at this skinny kid who had tried to kill the biggest shot of them all. So instead of raping Andy, he adopted him—called him Li'l Brudda, stuck close by his side, and warned anybody trying to mess with him, "Bet I pull your effin heart out and effin feed it to you."

Andy was surprised and grateful—becoming some guy's punk was the only humiliation life had so far denied him, so he'd rather expected it to happen—and he worked hard to learn the lessons Gomez taught him. They weren't easy to master. Gomez told him to watch out for a guard the cons called Sneak, but Andy was used to solitary musing and had to learn the hard way how the man got his name. One day when he was with a gang working in the cornfield, instead of pretending to hoe weeds like the others, he sat on the ground in a posture resembling Rodin's Thinker, brooding about the mysteries of life and fate.

That was when Sneak materialized out of the tall green stalks and used a bamboo cane he carried like a swagger stick to beat him bloody. The cons wore only straw hats, khaki shorts, and flip-flops cut from old tires, so he had a lot of skin to work on, and made the most of it. Andy was sore for a month, sorer because he'd burned in the tropical sun and already resembled a medium-rare steak when Sneak attacked him.

But he'd learned the hard way to stay alert every waking moment. Other useful lessons followed. Keeping the cons half-starved was the cadre's simplest and cheapest method of maintaining control, but Gomez taught him how to steal handfuls of food without getting caught when he was on kitchen police. Working in the rice fields gave him a condition called paddy foot that made him feel as if he'd been walking all day on hot coals instead of cool slimy mud. But Gomez rubbed his soles with an antibiotic ointment he'd scrounged from a trusty who worked in the dispensary, the skin healed, and in time Andy's feet toughened and became as insensitive as a pair of boots.

The rest of his adaptation to prison happened just because it happened. His sunburn peeled and healed, and all the skin not covered by his shorts turned to a kind of leather resembling cordovan, save for the white scars memorializing his past. They never changed color, as if the story of his life were written on him in cuneiform, like a stele. He often told Gomez that he hated prison and wanted to die, but he only shrugged. Andy was a survivor—Gomez recognized the breed, being one himself—who just couldn't release his grip on life, even if he wanted to.

By the end of his hard first year, Li'l Brudda had turned from a college boy into a creature of bone, sinew, and cordlike muscles, a sort of hairless two-legged coyote, wary and silent and almost unkillable. His gray eyes gazed out of his sun-darkened face as if through a mask, and when he needed to convey a message he did it with lips unmoving, like a ventriloquist. He began fighting his own battles, winning some and losing others, but gaining respect in a world where respect was everything.

Gomez felt pride at the transformation. His own life had been mostly cruel and selfish, and he felt an unfamiliar glow because for once he'd done what was right, helped a dumb kid survive until he was ready to get along on his own. Improbably, the Yalie and the Latino burglar bonded and became brothers—the only kind that matter, those who stand together as allies against fate. And so they remained.

One day Stink took Gomez aside and gave him a new and unbelievable order—so unbelievable that he made the guard repeat it twice, to make sure he'd heard it right. Yet it confirmed his feeling that there was something uncanny about Andy, something exceptional, raro, extraordinario.

For the time being he said nothing, because a secret known to two people is a secret no longer. When Stink passed over several cons with more seniority to select them for a gang working outside the wire, he merely remarked bueno, bueno, that meant they were now trusties and would get a little more food. About that he was right, for next day at the predawn shape-up they received a breakfast of beans with shreds of real pork in it. Andy and the others ate like dogs, eyeing each other with suspicion, swallowing quickly and licking their plastic bowls clean. Then they fell into line and marched to the camp's Sea Gate, flip-flops crunching on ruler-straight streets of red gravel that other cons had pounded from lava.

On the way they passed rolls of razor wire threaded with sensors and a gleaming catapult with a drone whose missile, everyone knew, homed in on the ID chips in their necks. They crossed a three-meter death zone where the earth had been plowed and raked to show footprints, and at last reached the electrified perimeter fence. Military lasers craned down at them from ten-meter watchtowers as they passed one by one through a narrow postern. Sneak counted them out, his clipboard beeping when he touched it; he was chewing something and his bluish lower jaw moved slowly, like a ruminant's.

Then, wonder of wonders, Andy was outside the wire, and gaping at the amazing fact that the world was still there. Beyond a white line of foam at the coral reef, the Pacific glimmered bluely, the same ocean that touched America, Asia, the world. The air blew fresh and salty, and he was inhaling it in gulps when Gomez spotted Sneak sidling up, poked him in the ribs, and saved him from another caning.

They set about the day's work, unloading supplies from a freighter at the dock, cleaning the warden's house and the barracks in the cadre's compound, sweeping the blinding white concrete of the gyro landing pad and hosing it down with seawater. They ate lunch on the quay and at sundown shuffled back to camp—stick figures, all burned mahogany except the Africans, who were burned ebony. In the latrine they showered in seawater, wearing their shorts to wash them, too. Finally they marched damply to the mess hall where they ate standing up, scooping dollops of brown rice and boiled cabbage into their mouths in handfuls.

Back in the barracks, Andy collapsed on the futon, too weary to gamble or quarrel or gossip or anything. But when the lights dimmed, Gomez pulled their thin cotton blanket over their heads and began to whisper. In the confined space Andy wondered why after all these years Gomez smelled peppery, as if all the chilis he'd ever eaten were still working their way out through his pores. It took him a while to realize what his bunkmate was telling him—they were going to escape. Remembering the wire, the sensors, the death zone, the drone, he wondered what the joke was supposed to be about, and in his minimal Spanish replied, " Absolutamente loco. " He turned his back and in ten seconds or less began to snore.

Meanwhile Gomez meditated. He'd rejected his first idea of escaping via the Sea Gate, even though the dense jungle lay down the beach only a hundred meters from the dock. But they'd have to swim, and the goddamn sharks nosed up close, hoping for a handout of mess-hall garbage, or maybe for an edible con. It's the Mountain Gate then, he thought, and fell asleep with a crescent of white showing beneath each eyelid, for even in dreamland Gomez never felt safe with both eyes completely closed.

A few days later, he and Andy were once more assigned to work outside the wire. On the camp's landside, jungled slopes rose to the heights of Mount Tuamotu, the extinct volcano that long ago had created the island. The peak above the treeline wore a small, neat cap of snow, and Andy gave a dry sob at the sight, for it reminded him of other snow-capped mountains near his lost home and vanished youth. Today's job was to clear a thirty-meter field of fire between the perimeter fence and the jungle. The gang received weed cutters—archaic buzzing devices with little hydro engines and spinning lengths of tough plastic—and moved west across the narrow neck of land that connected the prison to the body of the island. Then back east, toward a black-sand beach where the sea growled at boulders of broken lava.

There a con working in a patch of weeds suddenly screamed and vanished to his waist. Gomez grabbed the man under the armpits and Andy helped wrestle him out of a fumarole—once a vent for an ancient lava tube, but now invaded by the ocean and filled with its distant surge and murmur. Andy was staring into it when a sudden wasplike sting set him doing the dance the cons called the Bamboo Two-Step.

"Wake up, scum!" Sneak shouted, and swaggered away, a thick bandy-legged man, making his cane whistle through the air.

That night Andy didn't fall asleep as quickly as before, because of the still-burning line across his calves. Gomez was wakeful, too, but for a different reason—he had a message to deliver. After lights-out he turned on his side, again pulled the blanket over their heads, and whispered that Andy should prepare himself, for their escape would have to come soon. Andy replied concisely, " Merda ," and after a few more curses, this time in English, grumbled his way into slumber. Gomez lay awake for almost another hour, watching everything come together in his mind. After all, it was merely a question of the weather, and in the tropics the weather is nothing if not predictable. Bueno, he thought, está bien, and went to sleep as usual with half-closed eyes.

Tuamotu had two seasons, wet and dry. The wet was beginning, and the weeds outside the Mountain Gate grew a lusty thirty centimeters a day. So a week later, another party set out to cut them—ten cons to do the work, with Sneak and Stink to supervise. The guards stood in the shade at the edge of the jungle, watching them labor in the sun, and the lasers on the watchtowers turned back and forth, guided by biosensors, like spectators at a very slow tennis match. Andy went rhythmically about his task, mesmerized by the heat, the roar of the little engines, the steamy odor of fresh-cut greenstuff. He felt like a Whirling Dervish at his dance, for once totally mindless and at one with the universe.

Then during lunch break the intense yellow sunlight abruptly faded. Gomez stopped shoveling kidney beans into his mouth, nudged him, and nodded to the west, where a Himalayan sky—mountainous purple clouds, peaks of shining white—had silently taken form. A cool damp gust whipped by, driving a locust swarm of cuttings before it. Andy shivered, met Gomez's gaze, and shivered again for a different reason. He knew that they were about to run, lasers or no lasers, drone or no drone, and all he could think of was the old New England motto Live Free or Die.

Sneak shouted, "Okay, scum, fall in!" and just then the squall arrived. First came a barrage of fat droplets, and then a gray wall of rain bellying out like the spinnaker of a racing yacht off Nantucket, only thousands of meters high. In an instant, guards and cons alike turned from men to shadow-puppets. The world darkened, the noise of the storm rose to a drumroll, and when a violet-white flash of lightning split the sky, distracting the lasers, Gomez clamped a big hard hand on Andy's upper arm and yanked him headlong into the jungle.

After three steps, Tuamotu Penal Colony and everyone in it ceased to exist. The tangle blinded them, vines clutched at their legs, branches lashed them as they ran, and orchid-wrapped boles rushed at them like tacklers on a gridiron. They were both gasping for air when Gomez called a halt in a clearing, and they slumped side by side on a log cushioned with red fungi and emerald moss.

Here the rain beat down with buckshot force. A siren wailed distantly, and Andy blinked at the rags of gray sky beyond the threshing leaves, awaiting the drone, the missile, and death. Gomez had picked up a papaya downed by the storm and begun to eat, when something like a silvery fish flashed overhead. An eternal moment passed and the missile exploded in the distance with the deep, expansive note of a bass drum.

It missed us, thought Andy, and turned with a smile of incredulous joy. Gomez handed him a chunk of the sweet mealy fruit, spat out a barrage of round black seeds, gave a gap-toothed grin, patted him on the back, and finally told him the whole secret.

"Dat guy you shot at, Sol? He don't want you dead. Dis escape, it's wired, it's fixed. Stink set it up. All we hadda do was make it look good. Now dey gonna say da drone got us, and we gonna go in da records as dead. So how it feels, hah? What's it like to be alive and dead at the same time?"

He threw back his head and laughed, gulped a mouthful of cold rain and let it wash the pulp from the gaps between his teeth and go sluicing down his throat.

Here in the Pentagon corridor, recalling that sweetest of moments, Gomez smiled wolfishly. He'd never forget Andy's expression, as his lower jaw fell halfway to his chest. Muy dulce, Gomez thought, muy dulce. After all, Li'l Brudda wasn't the only one who was full of surprises.

Andy couldn't imagine what in hell he had to grin about. Personally, he felt merely ridiculous, an assassin without a weapon and nobody to shoot if he had one. When white-jacketed stewards set up a coffee machine, he nodded at Gomez and they joined the line for simple lack of anything better to do. They filled Styrofoam cups and strolled down the corridor, sipping and looking for anything that might give a hint of how to proceed. Pentagon décor didn't help—blank walls, a metal trapdoor covering a trash chute, To Serve All Humanity here and there and everywhere. Gomez opened the trapdoor, listened for a moment to the distant roar of an incinerator, and shrugged.

They moved on, turned an obtuse angle, and halted. The connecting corridor was blocked by the usual bank of sensors and lasers, but—two heartbeats suddenly quickened— this barrier bore a sign saying X.

Behind the gadgetry stood a massive, red-bereted guy with a concrete jaw and either a head too small for his neck, or a neck too wide for his head. His badge also said X, and an impact pistol filled his holster. Beyond the Spetsnaz the corridor stretched away between blank mahogany-paneled walls, like a study in perspective. Andy was eyeing the scene, while trying not to eye it too obviously, when a general officer brushed past him. Ignoring the enlisted men as if they were furniture, he passed between the lasers, stepped to a paneled wall, and pressed his palm against a sensor pad set in a recess. A concealed door opened, he walked through like an actor going backstage, and the door closed and vanished into the woodwork.

Huh, thought Andy. He suddenly realized the importance of where they were—A Ring, where the brass worked—and the significance of the paneling. To rate mahogany in the Pentagon, you had to, well, rate . There were more invisible doors here, and behind one of them worked somebody important.

A glance passed between him and Gomez. This was something they needed to check out. Andy was wondering exactly how to manage it, when he became aware that Gomez had left him, returned to the coffeemaker, and was filling the biggest available cup, a half-liter monster. He returned holding it with both hands, raised it to the Spetsnaz , and said, "Figgered you might need it, Brudda."

The guard managed a smile, or at any rate a slight elongation of the lips, reached past the lasers, and took the cup. "Effin A," he said, adding with an effort, "Thanks."

Contact established, Gomez asked, "Where dey keep da shithouse at, round here? I gotta go."

"Thataway," said the guard, pointing, and returned to his post, noisily gulping coffee.

Inside the enlisted men's head, Gomez first took a wad of toilet paper, wet it in a basin, and glued it over the lens of a security camera on the wall. "Prob'ly," he muttered, "all dis brass aroun', nobody be watchin' da peons piss. But who knows?"

He took Andy into a stall, flushed the john repeatedly, and under cover of the little Niagara explained his plan. In any security system, said Gomez, the weak point was the human. In his days as a burglar, he'd seen big shots pile a fortune in gadgets onto a warehouse, then hire a minimum-wage cretino to watch the monitors. Maybe the plan he'd formed wouldn't work, but at least it was simple and wouldn't hurt anything if it failed. "We can't get da bugga dis time, we get im da next," he promised, and sent Andy out of the stall while he lingered inside.

During the next forty minutes, Andy bellied up to a urinal at least six times when other enlisted men—always the wrong ones—visited the head. Fortunately, the Chief of Security must have been verbose, for at last the guy with the red beret ran in, gasping, "Gimme room, I'm about to bust."

He'd hardly opened his fly when Gomez stepped out of the stall and rabbit-punched him with a sound like a football being kicked. The guard's forehead whacked the wall and he rebounded, fell on his back, and lay there imitating a whale.

His beret had fallen off, so Andy scooped it up before helping Gomez drag him into a stall. They propped him on the commode and Gomez pulled his pants down, while Andy took his pistol and ID, both of which he donned along with the beret. He noticed that their victim was wearing an earbud, so he took that too. Finally, he pressed a thumb against the guard's columnar neck and felt the carotid artery throbbing deep inside. Probably a concussion , he thought. But the guy had a hard, thick skull—he'd live.

They left the stall, closing the door behind them. From the outside, two large feet in combat boots were visible, trousers bunched around the ankles—not likely anyone would barge in there.

"Good luck, L'il Brudda," said Gomez when they were back at the barrier. "You find 'im, give 'im one for me."

"I will," said Andy.

He took a deep breath, put up one hand as if to adjust the beret, and with face momentarily obscured, silently said good-bye to Esperanza, to Gomez, to everybody he knew and loved. Like a suicide stepping from a high ledge into midair with no hope of ever going back, he walked between the lasers.

GOMEZ, TOO, FELT a painful tug at his heart, atormentado por la pena, as he watched Andy press his hand to the sensor pad in the paneled wall and pass through the hidden door.

Gomez's home was gone, the first real one he'd ever had. His woman was gone. And now Li'l Brudda was gone, too, and might not come back. Life was hard, Gomez had always known that, and the demands of honor and vengeance were harder, yet had to be obeyed, for without honor a man was nothing. How many had he killed because of some insult to his honor? And now he could only wait helplessly and curse the cold witch Destiny for granting him happiness, then snatching it away again.

The good part of both their lives had begun on the slopes of Mount Tuamotu, at the moment when the missile detonated. For days afterward they trekked through the jungle. They climbed into open woods swept by chilly breezes off the snowcap, then descended into the familiar green tangle on the other side. Fallen fruit sustained them, flights of noisy green parakeets kept them company, birdlets peeped from the leaves and spoke to them in tiny voices. Wild pigs were enjoying the feast the storm had brought down, and boars with orange tusks and sows with broods of piglets gave them warning glances from small red eyes, but kept on eating.

On the third morning, Gomez stopped and sniffed the air, smelling woodsmoke. Half a kilometer farther, and they emerged into a clearing with a village where dark-skinned people turned to stare at them. He and Andy did not yet know that the place was called Hilo, or that two of the women in the little crowd that soon gathered to view the newcomers were Esperanza Aqui�o and her confidante and adopted aunt, one-eyed Susan Kapingamarangi.

Susan was the most accomplished gossip in the village, and later, when Gomez settled down with her, she told him everything about everybody, whether he wanted to know it or not. So he learned that a shark had killed Esperanza's husband, and that she had lived the last year with only her infant daughter Corazon for company. She'd spent a lot of time saying No to bachelors who were trying to nudge her into choosing a new mate and starting her life over. But she wanted something new, something—well, she didn't know exactly what. Maybe a man who wasn't totally Hilo.

She told Susan that she felt like a spider on a twig, letting threads of gossamer drift out and hoping one would catch. But everything was at the mercy of the wind, or chance, or Destino , and a year passed while whoever she was waiting for failed to appear. Then one day when she and Susan were tending the baby and exchanging gossip, people came running past her little house. Susan needed only a minute to learn that two guys had escaped from the prison and that George Satawan, the town's Big Man, was deciding whether to let them stay or drive them back into the jungle. So Esperanza hefted Corazon onto one hip and they hurried to join the gathering crowd, because when would anything this exciting happen again in dull little Hilo?

When they arrived, George—a Samoan, a short, weighty man wearing a scarlet lava-lava—had already made the decision to let the newcomers stay. Without asking her permission, he pointed at Susan and said, "You will take this one," meaning Gomez, then at Esperanza and said, "You will take the other."

Susan had learned long ago not to quarrel with Destiny, and merely looked at Gomez with interest, while he looked at her and wondered what it would be like to wake up next to a one-eyed woman. Esperanza was young enough to resent being ordered around, yet didn't protest because—well, because, speaking of eyes, Andy's were gray, something unknown in dark-eyed Hilo. The eyes proclaimed him an outsider, maybe the one she'd been waiting for.

"You will work for these ladies," said George Satawan to Andy and Gomez. "They need a man around. They will cook for you. What will happen between you, only God knows, but if you use force on them, I will kill you. Welcome to our town."

That night Gomez and Susan made love, for they knew by long experience that time is the only kind of wealth which, if you fail to spend it, spends itself. In the next house but one, Andy didn't try anything, and Esperanza—as she told Susan next day—wasn't sure whether she liked that or not. Yet it was nice to have a man snoring under her roof again. He slept in an old hammock, while she slept with Corazon on her marriage bed of wide boards. Heavy rain fell in the darkness, veritably the sound of silence, and all three rested well.

Next morning, George put Gomez and Andy to work in the town's communal garden. Except for the absence of guards, they might have been back in jail, hoeing weeds among a mixed botany of string beans, muskmelons, casabas, pineapples, and growths resembling alien beings that turned out to be adolescent artichokes. That afternoon, Esperanza visited the garden to gather a few things for dinner, and Andy walked her home. Once again nothing happened, and yet everything happened, too, for while waiting for his dinner, he took the baby on his lap and let her wrestle his fingers with her tiny hands. That was when Esperanza decided to keep him.

Susan repeated this story to everyone in town, leaving only Andy in the dark about his future. On Sunday she joined him and Esperanza in church, a large thatched house with pews of split coconut logs. Gomez stayed home, but heard what happened from his usual source. The Kahuna was a Fijian, an ebony statue except for a mane of coarse white hair, and Andy understood not a single word of his sermon except Jesus, amen, and "numba five," which turned out to be a hymn. There were no hymn books (Esperanza explained that they'd been eaten by ants) but everybody knew the words by heart and sang very loud, accompanied by gourd drums and a four-string ukulele strummed by a young woman in a gaudy skirt and much-mended bustier.

Other hymns followed. Andy finally recognized one and was caroling "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," when—observed by Susan, who was standing just behind them—Esperanza quietly took his hand. At the end of the service, she turned Corazon over to her friend, while she and Andy ducked into a thicket of fire ginger and made urgent love, flattening the stalks and crushing out the flowers' honeyed attar. She whispered to him that before they became lovers, she'd first wanted to make sure he believed in God.

"People like you," she explained, "sometimes be too damn smart for their own good."

"Actually, most of my life I've been too damn dumb for my own good," he said, and she smiled.

That night they waited until the baby was asleep, then made love twice more. The next day Esperanza had a long talk with Susan and told her almost everything about the experience, including the odd fact that Andy was circumcised. By noon the whole story, including the circumcision, had become public knowledge. Except for the bachelors Esperanza had rejected, everybody smiled at the new couple, and Andy, relaxing for the first time in a long time, smiled back until his face hurt.

In the days that followed he was so happy that Gomez enjoyed being near him, just for the glow he put out. After many false starts, Li'l Brudda had found a life, or rather had one presented to him on a plate, and he made the most of it. He worked and loved and played with the baby, made new friends in the village and with them caught fish and hunted pigs and swam in a nearby lagoon. He even found a use for his aborted education. Esperanza spread the news that he'd trained to be a doctor, and people started asking him for advice about their aches and pains. Most of his patients recovered simply because they were healthy and strong and had vigorous immune systems. But Andy got the credit, and his practice grew.

He and Gomez were becoming villagers, and little by little the life of the place absorbed them. The original Hilo had stood on the big island of Hawaii, but after a tsunami destroyed it some survivors came to Tuamotu, built a new town, and named it for their lost home. This Hilo was a jumble of small houses, some with wooden frames and clapboards, others with thatched roofs and no walls at all, for the sake of coolness. The fifty or so residents formed a Pacific medley of islanders with a few Africans, Orientals and Haoles thrown in for flavoring. Most appeared to have clothed themselves from a shipwreck in faded shirts and shorts, but small children ran naked and some older people wrapped themselves in lava-lavas like George's. Some women went about modestly in flowered print dresses, while others left their breasts bare—especially the ones with good breasts, as Gomez and Andy both noted. Everybody, old and young, male and female, decorated their hair with scarlet and yellow hibiscus flowers.

Though the villagers were mostly self-sufficient, they got things they couldn't make for themselves—toothbrushes, mirrors, aspirin, and so forth—from the prison staff. In return they provided the guards with fresh fruit, fresh fish they caught out by the reef, and fresh meat from feral porkers they trapped in the jungle. Some guards visited Hilo, including Stink—that was why he'd been able to give Gomez directions for finding it—while others met the locals in a jungle clearing near the perimeter fence called the Trading Post. The guards paid willing women for sex, giving them colored beads and cheap watches that decorated wrists and necks all over Hilo.

Living in a place where food was abundant and work far from excessive, Gomez developed a bit of a paunch, while Andy turned robust and chunky for the first time in his life. He began to love the island that had been his prison and told Gomez he never wanted to leave. Daily rainbows came and went, sometimes three or four at a time. Prevailing westerlies had carried most of the volcanic ash toward the east coast, forming the peninsula where the prison stood, but elsewhere near-vertical cliffs plunged into the cobalt sea. Their rough slopes bore forests of man-high ferns, like a cloak of green feathers that glistened with rain or dew and rippled in the gentle trade winds.

Esperanza showed Andy a path that twisted through the woods, climbed a spur of the mountain, and dipped into a narrow valley. It was a mysterious place where shade lingered even at noon, and a tiny silver waterfall left pearls on spiderwebs before cascading through a fissure into a cavern below. Strange sounds rose from the old fumarole, sometimes a booming like iron bells, sometimes cries as of animals or men. The Kahuna disapproved of all magic but his own, and declared the place taboo. But Andy loved it, and often walked the path with Esperanza, or with Gomez, or alone.

One day when the two friends were together, they topped the spur and paused to catch their breath on a rocky shelf. The sheer cliff rose on one side, the fern forest fell away on the other, and they were about to move on when Sneak stepped as soundlessly as ever into the path ahead of them.

He wore a holstered pistol and raised his hand to signal Halt. The ex-cons were standing paralyzed when a small woman wearing a Security Forces uniform emerged beside the guard, and Andy whispered, "Faith."

She told Sneak, "I have things to talk about with this man. Give us some space, and take the other guy with you."

As ordered, Gomez fell back a couple of meters, wondering if he should attack while the guard's pistol was still in his holster. Then he decided to wait and see what happened between Andy and Faith. You share a futon with a man for a year, you learn a lot about him, and Gomez knew that a woman named Faith had been Andy's lover, back in the days when he was getting ready to shoot Mahmud Alonzo Sol. He sensed a tale of betrayal and waited with ears twitching, hoping to learn more.

She led Andy down the path, and he stumbled twice, as if unable to control his feet. He couldn't speak either, and found himself listening to Faith— Oh hell, he thought, why think of her by that so-called secret name? Even back at Yale he'd known her real name was Constance Griffin.

"I know this must be a shock," she said, inadequately.

When he still couldn't find words, she explained, "I wanted to make sure those idiots at the prison really had arranged your escape." She seated herself on a boulder of eroded lava and gestured for him to sit beside her. But he preferred to stand.

"I'm not a complete monster, you know," she said.

He couldn't stop staring. Her face both did and didn't belong to the woman he'd known. Her hair was dark now instead of blonde with dark roots, as it had been. She still had a spark in her eyes, but the fire was different, he didn't know how. Three years had passed since they'd parted in the loft in Washington, yet she looked older by a decade. Still the lecturer, like Miss Birch his fourth-grade teacher imparting knowledge, she explained herself in tones that reminded him of the days when she was recruiting him for the AFA.

"I was working undercover when I set you up," she said, quite calmly, as if such betrayals happened every day. "The world government was having problems, still is. Security wanted to provoke an act that would justify a general crackdown, and they were looking for somebody to put on the kind of spectacular but harmless show they needed. Provocation is a very common ploy in my line of work, but it has to be done exactly right. The fake assassination was the first big action I was completely in charge of, and I owe my meteoric rise in the Service to doing it right."

She paused to take a small white regulation handkerchief out of her sleeve and wipe her eyes with it. "What I didn't count on was the way I started to feel about you. You were such a child, Andy, so helpless, such a—"

"You can skip that," he said, suddenly finding his voice.

"Sorry. It's not easy, you know, talking like this, as if I'd been the one in the wrong. There's no natural right to be a fool, and really, with your education, you had no excuse."

He looked away from her. Ferns, bird-of-paradise flowers, heliconia, fire ginger, all were growing nearby. For some reason, it suddenly felt important to call everything by its right name.

"I was shocked when I heard those bastards at Hoover Square had worked you over. I mean, I knew the whole story from the inside. They didn't need to get a single thing out of you, but sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I suppose it was pretty rough."

Again he said nothing. She frowned at the weighted silence, as if he'd accused her of something.

"Well, I'm truly sorry. But I never intended it to happen. After that I tried to look out for you, I really did. I got your sentence commuted, also those of the other boys. I saved your life, not that you'll ever thank me for it. When I had a chance to come to Tuamotu on official business, I jumped at it. There's a dirty job underway—ironically, it's called Operation Clean Sweep—but at least it gave me a chance to make sure you'd been released and see you one last time. I found you by that chip in your neck."

She dabbed her eyes again, and her voice changed from a somewhat strident major to a minor key. "You were kind of…oh, I don't know. My fling at passionate faith and youthful enthusiasm, all those things I'd never had, never really wanted to have in my own life. I'd never met anybody like you, ready to die for your beliefs, and now I never will again."

Andy had to ask her one question, even though he already knew the answer. "What about our child?"

"Well, of course there never was one. Getting pregnant would've been strictly against the regs. Anyway, I had my tubes cut long ago. You've never held a real job in your life, so you don't know the kind of things people have to do when they're fighting their way up in the world. Especially women—it's always harder for us. There's nothing like a pregnancy to take you out of the loop long enough for your enemies to knife you."

Finally he understood the fire in her eyes—it was the glowing coal of ambition. She got up and they started back.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Is she sensible?"

"Yes."

"That's good. You really need somebody to take care of you. You're looking great, by the way. You must be eating right. Well, here's my escort. Good-bye, Andy. Stay on your tropical island. You need a place away from the real world, while I—"

"While you go on serving Mahmud Alonzo Sol."

"Not really. He dropped dead twelve years ago. The fat old fool was partying with hookers and coke and brandy, and it finished him. There was talk about replacing him, but the technology's gotten so good there's really no reason to have a President any longer."

"Then who in hell's been running things?" he demanded, feeling new outrage because he'd not only shot an image, he'd shot an image of a dead man.

"You're not authorized to know. Good-bye, Andy. We won't see each other again. I don't think I could take it."

She and Sneak reentered the fern forest. A few minutes later a silvery gyro lifted, briefly backed up in midair, then spun, banked, and vanished. Andy watched it go, and Gomez, though palpitating with eagerness to learn what had happened, had the good sense not to ask. That was why, in his own good time, Andy told him everything.

BACK AT HOME, Esperanza took one look at him and demanded to know if someone had died. He answered that in the secret valley, the ghost of a dead lover had appeared to him and confessed that she had once betrayed him.

The lie—maybe because it wasn't all a lie—worked remarkably well. It was exactly the sort of romantic fable Esperanza loved and she swallowed it whole, including the ghost. Ghosts were common in Hilo—she often saw her deceased Mama, and every night put a small plate of fruit outside, in case the old lady felt hungry and wanted a snack. Of course she told Susan about Andy's encounter, and Susan told everybody else, so that his ghost became a part of village lore.

Next day he was called to assist the local midwife, and went willingly, hoping that work would help him forget. The birth was a breech presentation that went on for hours, and left three adults and a sore, squalling, purplish baby boy all smeared with blood and smelling like the bottom of a swamp. He was going home when Hilo's best fisherman—a thick-muscled man named Joe Aiaiea—passed him, a beautiful big tuna slung over his shoulder. Joe said he was headed for the Trading Post, because his girlfriend wanted a nice mirror and he hoped the tuna might get it for her. Andy only grunted, returned home, had Esperanza pour a bucket of water over him by way of a shower, fell on their bed, and passed out.

By the time he woke from his siesta, Joe had returned and so had the fish. That night he and his girlfriend baked it in a pit with sea salt and peppers and limes and other good things, invited the village, and served the food on chipped dishes and fresh-cut banana leaves. At the feast Andy learned that no bargaining had taken place, because no guards had appeared at the Trading Post. Puzzled, Joe had crept to the edge of the jungle, risking the lasers to find out why.

"Dey breakin' up da camp," he said through a mouthful. "Alla guards runnin' round like crazy. No trade for a while, damn shit."

That news was enough to send Andy, Gomez, Esperanza, and Susan next morning on a long walk up the mountain, to heights where the trees thinned out and winds blew cold off the snowcap. He and Esperanza shared the work of carrying the baby, until they reached a vantage point where part of the mountain had crumbled, leaving a sheer cliff. On the verge they rested, gazing out over the whole eastern end of the island, forest canopy and coves and inlets, beaches of black and white sand, the foaming reef, the encircling sea.

And the prison—an alien intruder on its promontory, the only place on Tuamotu where all lines were straight and all angles precisely ninety degrees. Cons were shuffling like columns of ants through the grid of red streets toward the Sea Gate. Offshore lay a missile cruiser gently rocking on the waves, while an old rust-bucket of a merchant ship towered over the quay. Even at this distance, flaking white letters that said Pelican were visible on the bow. The big portside cargo doors stood wide and the prisoners inched down the dock into the dark, cavernous opening.

Did the authorities, Andy wondered, intend to jam all those hundreds of men into that one ship? He tried to recall what Connie had said about Operation Clean Sweep. A really dirty job—but why was closing the prison and shipping the cons someplace else a dirty job? It sounded complicated, a problem in logistics, but that was all. Or—the thought came to him suddenly—could this be the reason Connie had arranged his escape? Did she want him out of the prison before something bad happened?

His head began to hurt as if another migraine were coming on. Some part of him already knew the score and Gomez knew it, too, for his face settled into grim lines and he began to mutter curses under his breath. Esperanza looked merely baffled, for she had lived her whole life among decent people and found acts of great cruelty unimaginable. But Susan was as old as Gomez, and—Andy noticed for the first time—her blind eye, an opalescent globe like a milky opal, had the thin pale scar of a razor slash leading up to it. This lady had lived hard, which might be one reason why she and Gomez got along so well. She sat tensely watching the scene, one hand over her mouth, the other closed in a fist between her scrawny breasts. Like the men, she knew what was about to happen.

Sunset was stoking a tropical effusion of red and yellow and green and purple fire in the west when the merchant ship left the dock. But not under her own power—the Pelican was under tow by the cruiser. About a kilometer offshore, the hawser either broke or was released, leaving the rust bucket to wallow helplessly in the waves. Andy could imagine the men in the hold, thrown this way and that, puking with seasickness and terror, maybe raving and fighting in the claustrophobic darkness. By now even Esperanza understood what impended, for she turned her back to the sea and lowered her face until her nose touched Corazon's belly. The others went on staring, unable to look away.

The first missile struck the old ship at the starboard waterline, causing it to shudder, list, and spin slowly around. A few seconds passed before the sound of the blast reached the watchers. The second missile hit astern on the port side, leaving the Pelican mortally wounded and settling fast. No more firing followed—missiles cost money, and the job had been done.

Punctured on both sides, the ship filled more or less evenly, the only drama coming when a hatch cover blew off amidships. For an instant the heavy metal square hovered like a kite, sustained by a geyser shooting up from the flooded decks below. Then it turned sideways and fell like a guillotine blade into the ocean. Within minutes the ship followed, its rust-stained sterncastle vanishing last of all. A whirlpool formed, then broke up into random turbulence, waves foaming and dashing and parting. Gradually the Pacific erased the maelstrom, and with it the last traces of the men who had lived and suffered in the penal colony.

Esperanza bent over folded hands, muttering prayers in Tagalog, her childhood tongue. Susan wept from both her live eye and her dead one. Gomez sat rigid, trembling with fury. Andy's head stopped hurting, but his heart turned to something much harder and colder than mere ice. All the failures and humiliations and agonies of his life fused into a single need to find vengeance, to strike back, to kill. He pronounced sentence in the tones of a hanging judge.

"Somebody will pay for this," he said, and Gomez growled, " Si. But who?"

Well, obviously, the man whose name Andy wasn't authorized to know, the name only Connie could tell him. He and Gomez kicked the problem around but reached no conclusion. How were they to get hold of her? And how could they make her talk?

For some reason, the fisherman Joe Aiaiea had been tapped as Fate's messenger. Two days after the Pelican incident, Andy was shelling beans for supper when Joe entered his house, bearing in his arms the stick figure of a man. He'd carried his burden all the way from the reef, yet wasn't even breathing hard as he laid him gently on the plank bed. "'Nother con like you," said Joe. "Damn shit, but he in bad shape, him."

He explained that when the hatch cover blew off the Pelican, the geyser must have thrown the man into the sea and the sharks, busy with the other bodies, hadn't wanted him. So he drifted with the onshore current and got caught on the reef, where Joe had been casting his net and found him.

"Enda da story," he concluded, shrugged, and walked away, leaving Andy to stare aghast at the dying man, his fellow conspirator Karl, aka Friedberger. He must have been serving time in the same prison, only in another barracks. The two had spent more than a year close enough to yell a greeting, yet like corpses buried in adjoining tombs, had never seen one another.

Andy dripped cool water into his mouth, watched him try to swallow but fail, and shook his head. Esperanza used a clean rag to wipe his eyelids, inflamed and crusted with salt, and then his bristly face. When his cracked lips moved, Andy put his ear down to listen. It was hard to tell what Friedberger was trying to say, maybe, They killed them all. What Andy heard was kill them, and he promised, "I will."

An hour later the man was gone. Andy called Gomez to help, and they buried him in the village graveyard. The Kahuna delivered another of his incomprehensible sermons, and the townspeople sang "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." Afterward, Andy went home and slept and slept and slept, as if he could put off the demands of Destiny by remaining unconscious. But his sleep was uneasy, beset by restless dreams, and he woke suddenly, smelling a goat.

That seemed odd, for Tuamotu had plenty of feral pigs, but no goats he'd ever seen. He raised his head from the bed of boards, and there in the brown shadows stood Stink, with George and Joe holding his arms. "Dis guy say he know you," said George. "We was gonna break his neck."

"It's okay," said Andy. "Let me have a word with him."

Stink sat down on the ground, holding a small paper-wrapped bundle in his lap and wiping nervous sweat off his face. For the first time in their long acquaintance, Andy took the trouble to read his name tag—Fowler. So the guard had a real name, possibly even a real life. When he spoke he sounded shaken.

"What'sa matter with these guys? I know 'em, we trade together, I get 'em things, they get me things, but today they wanna kill me."

"They blame you for the Pelican. "

"Why blame me? I didn't have nothin' to do with it."

Andy nodded. Of course that was true. To calm Fowler down, he summoned his bedside manner and asked about his family. Fowler had been born in Wyoming but grew up more or less everywhere, for his father had been in the American Marshal Service and the family moved often. "Law enforcement," he said proudly, "it's in my blood."

That was why he'd entered the world government's Prison Service, which paid better than anything impoverished America could offer. He took pride in his job. Guards were role models, he said, teaching cons by discipline and example how to live upright, honorable lives. Andy found this astounding. Sneak and Stink as role models? But Fowler was serious, and anger darkened his face when he spoke about the massacre.

"Here we take care of these guys, try to point 'em the right direction, give 'em some discipline, whack 'em when they do wrong, get 'em shaped up. Then somebody comes along and kills 'em. Without even a warrant! How can you execute somebody without no warrant or nothin'?"

He started to denounce Connie. "The one in charge was a little bitch come out of HQ. But when she's watchin' it happen, I look at her face and I know she's made a mistake. She did it, but she hated it—drownin' all those guys like rats! That takes somethin' she ain't got. I figure that was why she went and cut her wrists afterward."

For a few seconds the dim interior of the house spun slowly around Andy's head. "She's dead?" he whispered, filled with a complex of emotions he couldn't have named.

Fowler shook his head. "No such luck. Somebody found her and called the medics. Sometimes I wish those guys would just leave well enough alone, you know? Pretty soon she'll be fixed up and ready to kill a bunch more people, I guess."

"So she's still on Tuamotu."

"Yeah."

At that point, Andy's mouth opened and he heard himself make a request to which Fowler, though looking baffled, agreed. Then the guard picked up his bundle and stood, casting a nervous glance at the doorway of the hut.

"All I want is a nice fish, so the cook can fix it for dinner. I wonder if those guys gonna try and kill me again."

"They won't now," Andy promised, walked him outside, and nodded to Joe, who nodded back. Relieved, Fowler shook Andy's hand for the first time in their long acquaintance. A guard couldn't shake the hand of a prisoner, but the gesture was permitted with a man who was both free and—officially at least—dead.

"You look like you doin' good, Emerson," he said. "Funny, I never figured you for a survivor. It's hard to tell, sometimes. Big guys croak and little guys go on forever. It's really hard to tell."

He started unwrapping his package, which contained the usual mirrors and whatnot. Joe approached, and they squatted on their haunches and started to bargain, all thoughts of killing forgotten.

But Andy's thoughts were of nothing except killing. He'd finally accepted the harsh demand of Destiny, to leave a woman he'd come to love and a life where he was happy and content, in order to kill a man he'd never met. He could curse the burden, but he couldn't shift it.

When he told Esperanza, she surprised him by understanding. She'd seen the Pelican sink, washed Friedberger's face, sung a hymn over his grave. Like all her people she believed in honor and vengeance, so she wept but didn't try to stop him. As for Gomez, there was never any question that he would stand beside Andy if he could identify the target and find a way to reach him.

They met Connie together, choosing the tabooed valley because it was remote and private. Again Sneak accompanied her, and he and Gomez stood back to let the others parley head to head. But something in the atmosphere—maybe the way Gomez looked at him, as if he were personally responsible for the Pelican —made Sneak edgy, and after fidgeting a few minutes, he muttered, "You stay here," and followed Andy and Connie, maybe concerned for her safety as well as his own.

As ever, the valley was shadowy, lush with tropical jungle, blazoned with strange flowers, filled with the sound of rushing water and the echoes rising from the fumarole. Today they sounded sometimes like thunder, sometimes like cries and distant laughter. Connie's long-sleeved uniform shirt gave Andy only glimpses of the bandages around her wrists. She was pale, her face lined, her eyes enormous. She looked years older, and the first thing she said was, "I didn't give the order."

"No?"

"You've got to believe that. I was sent here as an observer, to make sure Tomsky's instructions were carried out. I had to do it. He's like Stalin. You have to become an accomplice in his crimes or he gets rid of you."

"Who's Tomsky?" Andy had never heard the name before.

"The Chief of Security. His name's an open secret, one of those secrets that everybody who's anybody knows."

"Why did he have them killed? Those guys were helpless, totally helpless. They couldn't have hurt him."

She sighed and sat down on the same boulder as the last time. She looked thin, weary, tallowy, used up. Either she was suffering from a wasting illness or she really had hated watching the prisoners drown. Or maybe both. More important, he saw that she hated the man who'd forced her to become his accomplice.

"It comes down to fear," she said. "All the worst things people have ever done have been caused by fear. They burned witches for fear of the Devil. They burned heretics for fear of new ideas. Hitler killed the Jews—well, I don't know why Hitler killed the Jews, but I bet fear was at the base of it.

"As I told you, the world government's in trouble. Rebellions are breaking out on every continent except Antarctica, and if anybody but penguins lived there, they'd probably be rebelling, too. And it's a shame, we really do need a government to prevent another war. But first Sol with his stupid dictatorship and then this fool with his policy of terror have messed things up so badly that it's going to fall. Tomsky's afraid of the future, he knows he'll be held accountable for his crimes, and the prisoners were the only enemies he could get at and destroy. It wasn't a rational action, but whoever said that people are rational?"

"Somebody did," muttered Andy. Somebody long ago, for whatever reason, had called the species Homo sapiens , rational man.

"Well, he must have been an idiot, whoever he was." She opened her hands and looked at the palms as if something written there could explain it all. "What's happened to my life, Andy? There I was, trying to do my job and get ahead, and first I lost you and then I lost my soul. God damn this island," she said with sudden violence. "For me it's the Isle of the Dead."

"Finished whining?" he asked.

"I suppose so, but—"

He wasn't conscious of hearing a sound, yet suddenly he spun on his heel and there was Sneak close behind him. Without a thought, Andy swung the heavy hand he'd developed during years of manual labor and wrestling fat infants out of tight wombs. His knuckles connected with Sneak's left ear and the guard's eyes spun around in his head. As he fell, Andy caught him by his uniform belt, dragged him a few steps, and threw him headfirst into the fumarole. He leaned over, rubbing his knuckles, and waited for the splash, which was a long time coming but came at last.

Connie was shocked. "Andy, he was just making sure I was okay!"

She'd risen, but he pushed her back down. For a few seconds he stood quietly, thinking of the man he'd turned into. Then he dismissed his first homicide with a shrug and got back to business.

"Let's," he suggested, "discuss the assassination of Tomsky." She continued to stare, said nothing, waited for him to go on.

"Think about it. You can arrange it—you're on the inside and he trusts you because you're his accomplice. Killing him will make the rebels love you, you'll be Lady Liberty who freed the people, and when they take over, you can move from the old government to the new one without a bump on the road. How's that sound?"

Slowly she loosened the fastenings on her cuffs, opened them, and looked down at the elastoplast bandages binding her wrists. So she had wounded herself, but whether her suicide attempt had been real or intended only to leave a scar, he couldn't tell. Maybe she'd felt real remorse; or maybe she'd merely been covering her tracks, preparing evidence in case of future need. With Connie, how could you be sure?

"It's an interesting concept," she murmured. "Actually, there's already a cabal inside the Forces that wants to get rid of him. But they need…well, they need somebody to do the dirty work. How'd you come up with the idea, Andy?"

"I didn't. It's what has to be."

She looked him over thoughtfully. "I'll need to find a uniform for you. And shoes." She shook her head over his dirty bare feet.

"You'll have to find disguises for two," he told her. "My friend's coming with me. He's a good man, wants revenge for the Pelican ."

"You trust him?"

"More than I trust myself."

She sighed. "In an action like this, there are always a million details to work out, and every one has to be done just exactly right, or the whole thing fails. It's not easy being a cop, Andy. You'll find that out."

"It's not easy being a con, either. But I survived."

She looked at him, really looked at him, maybe for the first time in their long, complicated relationship. Not as somebody to be loved, or betrayed, or protected, or destroyed, all the things he'd been to her in the past. Finally she was seeing him as just this…incomprehensible… other.

"You'd survive anything, wouldn't you?" she murmured. "If there's another nuclear war—which is possible, the way things are going—when it's over, there'll be nothing left but cockroaches and kudzu and Andrew Walden Emerson III."

Suddenly she jumped up, all her weakness gone, her eyes blazing at the thought of action. She'd already forgotten Sneak, as if he never had existed at all.

"'A good plot, good friends. An excellent plot, very good friends!'" she cried. "That's in Shakespeare. Give me your pal's name. Both of you were cons, so your vital statistics should still be in the computer—probably in the backup, since you're both supposed to be dead. I'll get the info out, enter it in the military records, create new identities.

"Isn't it nice the world's gotten so abstract? Anybody can fake anything, if they know how. And I know how."

WHILE GOMEZ LOITERED in the Pentagon corridor, remembering and fretting and hoping for the best, Andy had already passed through the hidden door in the paneling, and begun exploring what lay beyond.

He stood in a narrow passage with three other doors, the first labeled Men's Toilet—Officers Only, making him smile at the crudeness of Destiny's excremental joke. If the toilets hadn't been segregated by rank, the Spetsnaz guard could have relieved himself right here, and the whole plot would have come undone. The next door was unlabeled and opened into a storeroom full of quaint metal filing cabinets with rusty steel rods inserted through the handles, secured by padlocks that were also rusty. God knows , he thought, what war these date from.

Behind the final door, a voice muttered, becoming clearer when he opened it a crack. Inside was a darkened studio filled with formidable gadgetry. Bored-looking techs perched on metal stools, watching the tall man's image on three screens. Each showed him from a different angle, and Andy understood that when the images were fused by some digital process and projected in real space, they formed the walking, talking hologram that ruled the world.

But where was the man himself? The studio was a dead end, with no exit but the door where he stood. Maybe, he thought, Tomsky lived in a space warp inaccessible to the real world. He turned back into the passageway and was scratching his head when a voice—he was alone, so he thought at first it must be God's—commanded in harsh, emphatic tones that made his head ring, "Guard, get your ass down to the front office soonest."

Andy had forgotten the earbud. He returned to the hallway with the paneling and started down a deep-pile carpet with interwoven medallions showing the triumphant eagle of the Security Forces and their inescapable motto. Pour servir tout l'Humanité.
Der ganzen Humanität zu dienen. Besides the English, these were the only versions he could read, and the odd thought occurred to him that maybe Destiny had sent him here for exactly that purpose—to serve humanity, whatever language it spoke. But even its plans would hit a snag unless he could find the front office, for the hallway was as blank as an elevator shaft turned on its side.

Of course the office found him—that was Destiny's way. When you were playing its game, things came to you. A door appeared in the paneling, one that had no keypad and couldn't be opened from the outside at all. A frowning colonel standing in the aperture said, "Come in, Sergeant. I've got to leave, so stand at attention and wait till I come back."

Even the outer office was palatial, with a wide desk and all the usual equipment, including a document vaporizer to dispose of inconvenient memories. Andy assumed a ramrod stance by an inner door of creamy paneled wood until the officer, after gathering hardcopy from a file, left without ever actually seeing him. Something with a red beret and a X clearance and a standard-issue weapon had done what it was told, and for the colonel, that was sufficient.

Beyond the door a voice was speaking a language rich in consonants. Andy cracked it and peeped into a truly vast office, the biggest he'd seen in the Pentagon, or maybe anywhere. It lay mostly in darkness, except for the man standing at the center in a blaze of light. Andy had found his target at last.

Drawing the heavy impact pistol from its holster, he studied the man minutely, as curious as a lover studying his love. In the studio images, Tomsky had looked unlined, healthy, almost youthful. But those were corrections made by the software. Under the merciless lights he looked old, weary, and stiff as a creature of wood. Power wears out its human receptacles, Andy reflected, remembering how Connie had aged a decade in a third that time.

Directly in front of Tomsky stood a black module gazing at him with multiple eyes, like a spider. Shadowy people lounged here and there—techs, it appeared—plus two aides following the speech phrase by phrase on a green-lit prompter. Their concentration gave Andy his chance. He sidled through the shadows to the edge of the glare. Then, his whole body turning somehow dense and metallic, he slipped off his weapon's safety and with one long stride stepped in front of the transmitter. Tomsky blinked, seeing only a shadow emerge through the blaze of light.

"This is for the Pelican ," Andy said, and shot him point-blank in the face.

He stepped from the dazzle into the darkness, fired again at someone blocking his way, slid through the door and crossed the outer office. In the paneled corridor everything looked phenomenally peaceful. He holstered the pistol, returned to the barrier, stepped though, and changed caps and badges. The trash-disposal chute he'd noticed earlier now seemed to be there just for his benefit. He discarded his surplus equipment, and as the first signs of confusion began to spread—people yelling, answering, nobody sure yet what had happened or where—he rejoined the crowd outside the conference room.

Once again he was only a uniform among other uniforms, a IX among other IX's, an Invisible Man among the other invisible men and women. He felt his pulse and found it elevated, but not by much. His calmness at first surprised him, but then less so, as he reflected on what he'd done. He'd killed the most powerful man in the world, yet that was a mere anticlimax to the years of adventure and suffering that had preceded it. He'd avenged the dead, expunged his shame, rid himself of guilt—wiped his slate clean, in short. But something newly wise at the center of his heart told him that nothing really mattered now, except what he would write upon it in time to come.

He winked at Gomez, who gave him a nod, and together they waited for Connie and the rest of the staff to emerge. Through the steel doors came sounds of shouting and disorder, and Gomez gave him an evil grin and whispered, "You shook 'em up, Big Brudda."

Andy smiled at that, grateful for the only commendation he either needed or wanted.

An hour later he sat in Connie's office, having a drink—her big office on the A Ring, overlooking the five-sided patio with shade trees and jonquils in the garden beds spelling out To Serve All Humanity .

She gave him her version of what had happened in the conference room. How the general officers at first sat in stunned silence, watching the virtual back of a virtual man in uniform emerge from nowhere, shoot virtual Tomsky and make his virtual head virtually explode. Collectively the room gasped, and then came panic.

"Sound the alarm!" shouted somebody, "we're under attack!" Others yelled, "Lockdown! Catch the assassin! Make him talk!" One small plaintive voice was heard asking over and over, "Vhat is Pelican ? Please, does anybody know? Vhat is Pelican ?"

That was when Connie spoke up, her clear, sharp tones cutting through the noise.

"The assassin," she said, "is already in custody. He's made his confession, and he'll repeat it to the whole world on the evening news."

Some people weren't quick-witted. A baffled voice queried, "But who captured him? And how'd we get his confession?"

"It's a virtual assassin, you idiot," said somebody who'd been part of the plot against Tomsky. "His confession's in the can, been there for a week. You're out of the loop, that's all."

"Sometimes," Connie went on, in her lecturing voice, "the effect precedes the cause. It's unusual, of course, but it happens. Especially nowadays. Can we get down to business? A new situation has arisen and I suggest we consider how best to deal with it."

"Griffin is right," said another member of the cabal. "Tomsky's dead, he can't hurt us now, and he can't help us either."

"It's time to think about the future," she agreed. "Specifically, how to blame everything bad that's happened on him alone."

Anyway, that was the way she told the story to Andy. Meanwhile Gomez waited in her outer office with a driver she'd assigned them. She wanted them out of Washington quick, but at the same time she wanted Andy where she could find him again, in case of need. "I may have more work for you," she explained. "As I once told you, today all politics is the politics of violence. And you're so good at it."

He sipped his drink—how long had it been since he last tasted scotch?—and wondered if he should lunge across the desk and kill her. God knows, he had motive enough and opportunity beckoned. But then he and Gomez would never get away. So maybe he'd better just go home, kiss Esperanza, and let Corazon wrestle with his fingers again. That felt like a much better plan.

He finished his drink and left, saying he knew she must have a lot to do, now that she'd be helping to run the world. Within an hour he and Gomez were on a military flight to ruined and half-rebuilt Honolulu, and from there they flew on to Tuamotu. The whole journey took fourteen hours, and they slept through most of it.

At home Esperanza was nursing the baby, wincing occasionally when Corazon clamped down on her nipple. She smiled a greeting and wept when Andy kissed her. He tried to persuade the baby to grip his extended finger, but her tiny hands were far too busy clutching the breast. Warm milk was leaking from Esperanza's other nipple, and she caught the ooze on her thumb and held it out for him to lick. She asked how things had gone with his mission of vengeance, and he said well.

"So you killed that bad man?"

"Yes."

"Good. I'm glad he's gone. Will there be another war?"

"Maybe not. Everybody's terrified of the nukes, so the peacemakers have fear on their side. Maybe things will get better. But it's all up to Destiny."

" Destino, Destino ," she murmured. "Isn't it funny, it governs our lives, yet nobody knows what it means or where it's headed."

Andy, not knowing either, only watched the baby and smiled.

He expected to see Connie again—speaking of destinies, theirs were tied in so complicated a knot that only death could undo it. Yet two more years passed before the inevitable happened. By then many things had changed. Corazon had given up her all-milk diet and learned to walk, then to run with the other kids, all the time babbling freely and endlessly in a way that her mother considered maravilloso for one so young. With her nursing duties over, indications had appeared that Esperanza was pregnant again.

That was when Connie came back to Tuamotu. Not because she wanted to, but because her habit of playing both ends against the middle had finally caught up with her. When the new world government launched its great Justice Commission to ferret out the crimes of the past and punish the evildoers, the massacre that Tomsky's agents had carried out in prisons around the world was the first item on the agenda. What had happened on Tuamotu became a kind of poster child for all the atrocities of the old regime, and Connie—despite every handful of dust she could throw in the eyes of the judges—received the blame for it.

Her colleagues in the Security Forces made sure of that. To save themselves they needed a scapegoat, and since Tomsky was dead, she was elected. Yet for all the political byplay, the verdict was just. Contrary to what she'd told Andy, she had given the order to drown the men, though only under protest and with feelings of guilt that might well have been deep and genuine. The court weighed the question of her remorse—had her suicide attempt been real or not? On that point there was conflicting testimony. Prosecution doctors said that her wounds had been superficial, while defense doctors said the scarring reached the bone. In the end it didn't matter—the world needed a villain to punish, and she filled the bill only too well.

Condemned to death, she spent a year in the old prison on Hoover Square, most of the time in the dispensary where Andy had recovered so long ago. Then, in consideration of her failing health, the new World President reduced her sentence to exile on the same island where she'd committed her crime.

Since the penal colony had long since been closed down and demolished, she had to live in the village. Joe Aiaiea had recently succeeded the aging George Satawan as Hilo's Big Man, and he reluctantly allotted her a small house to live in and ordered her to work in the communal garden. She was not popular in Hilo—everybody looked at her but no one spoke to her, so that she moved about in a bubble of silence. Even Susan refused to gossip about her, for she said that Connie was nothing, and what nothing did was not worth discussing.

Andy saw her in his capacity as Hilo's general practitioner. He needed no complicated tests to conclude that she was suffering from widely metastasized cancer, probably originating in the ovaries but now invading blood, bone, and brain alike. He asked her why she didn't have the trouble taken care of, back when it was new and curable, and she said that her job always got in the way. Suppose her enemies had found out that she had a serious illness? She'd never have gotten another promotion—never!

Andy went to see Fowler. Not only had the guard survived all the upheavals, but his long, devoted service had won him promotion to the post of resident commissioner for the new world government. He lived in what used to be the warden's house, married to a village woman who made him wash every day in coconut milk to moderate his unique aura. He was friendly with Andy, allowing him to use the official computer to study for his medical degree on the recently restored Worldwide Web. But when Andy informed him that Connie must be evacuated for treatment, he flatly refused.

"I got my orders," he said. "You know, Emerson, I always do my duty, and my orders say she ain't never to leave this island."

"Then she'll die."

"Most people do, sooner or later. That's probably what the big shots want, anyway. She knows too much."

"I don't have modern painkillers. Her death will be slow and agonizing. At some point she'll become demented. It'd be kinder just to execute her."

"I can't execute nobody without a warrant. That's illegal. She'll just have to die the way nature wants, and if it hurts, that's tough shitsky. I don't have no pity for her. Nobody does, except you."

Andy returned to Hilo, sought Connie out—she was doing her washing—and suggested they take a walk.

For an hour they strolled along jungle trails, talking of small matters, jokes they had shared when they were young, people they remembered at New Yale. He asked if she'd ever read A Tale of Two Cities , and she said no, she'd never cared for fiction. So he kept to himself the amended line that was passing through his head: It is a far, far better rest that you go to, than you have ever known.

When they reached the spur of the mountain and began to climb, she panted and leaned on his arm, yet still had to halt every few steps to catch her breath. "Don't worry," he told her, "it's all downhill from here."

The cliff towered to the left of them, the forest of giant ferns bowed and murmured on the right. Showers of gemlike droplets fell. When they entered the tabooed valley, with its little waterfall and the sounds like cries and laughter rising from the ancient fumarole, she whispered, "Do you have to?"

He said, "It's better this way," put his heavy arm around her thin shoulders, and urged her on.

The Lost Faces

By Sean McMullen
| 10408 words

Sean McMullen lives in Melbourne, Australia. When not working for the government he writes, practices martial arts, and has an occasional rooftop adventure. Currently he is working on a short film adaptation of his story "Hard Cases."

Like the first story in this issue, "Lost Faces" features someone who hunts runaway slaves...but Sean McMullen's take on the theme is very different from Deborah Ross's.

ROME HAS BEEN STRUCK down. Only two of us have noticed so far, because there is no barbarian army pouring through its streets, nothing is being sacked, and only my house has been burned. Still, the blow has landed, the wound is deep, and the first blood has flowed. It could be said that I am responsible, but every Roman who owns a slave made it happen, so all of us will pay dearly. It is the tenth month of the reign of Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

The villa of Gaius Maximus Secundus was in the port of Ostia, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, and it was big enough to have a private pier for his ships to dock at. Maximus owned fifty merchant ships and was among the richest men in the Empire. His slaves made a point of not glaring at me as I entered, but I knew what they were thinking. I am a hunter of absconded slaves. Although the distance from Rome was only a score or so miles, Gaius took me straight to his bathhouse to sweat and wash away the grime of my journey. At noon we had a meal out in the peristyle. Maximus ate copiously, believing that a stout body declares prosperity, but I ate little. Sometimes being fast and lean is worth a lot of money to me.

For a time we chatted of this and that as we strolled among the manicured bushes in the autumn sunshine. We were masters of our spheres, not equally rich but equal in renown.

"So what is your worth today?" Gaius asked.

"A hundred thousand sesterces and a modest dwelling in the Sabura."

"I can't understand why you live in that cesspit."

"You'd be surprised how many runaway slaves hide there. I remember faces. Not a day goes past that I don't spot at least two or three."

"But have you no ambitions? What about an estate in the Alban Hills?"

"I have what I want. Respect from masters and fear from slaves. I live to hunt, Gaius, it makes me what I am. I could lose all my worldly goods, yet I would remain the finest of all slave catchers."

"I prefer this villa and my fleet of ships to declare who I am."

"Then we are both content."

"Not entirely," Maximus confessed, now walking with his head bowed. "Sometimes I rise from my bed in the early hours of the morning and walk out onto my pier. As I stare into the darkness I wonder what will remain of me when I die."

"You will become a shade in the underworld."

"But if there's no afterlife, what then? My son Crassus and I are very close, but in fifty years the children of my grandchildren will not even know my name. Only emperors, senators, warriors and philosophers are remembered, Marcus, not merchants. I want my name to live on and I want my family to be respected as well as rich."

"So you will study philosophy?"

"Philosophy?"

"No emperor would name you as his heir, and as for your skills as a warrior, the less said the better. The son of an Aventine tallyman could never enter the Senate, so that leaves philosophy."

"Wrong. I shall impress the emperor with a wonder that will delight him so entirely that he will make me a senator."

"Delight him? Gaius, you would not be allowed within shouting distance of him."

"But I have a scheme to catch his eye, and for that I need your help."

"I just hunt slaves. If you want to see the emperor you should get a senator to speak for you."

"A year ago I was very ill, but a slave woman tended me so well that I was up and walking within days. Now she has absconded and I want her back. Urgently."

"Urgently? Are you sick again?"

"No, but I depend upon her."

"You are in love with a slave, Gaius? That doesn't sound like you."

"I said depend . She can provide wonders, Marcus, and I need those wonders. Come along, I'll show you."

Maximus's son Crassus was waiting in the atrium with two slaves holding wooden pails. A long, rectangular pool dominated the room, and beneath the water were mosaics of his grain and slave ships. Maximus went over to one of the pails and gestured down at it.

"This is a navitar," he said.

The thing in the pail was a dull gray fish the size of a carp. It had no head. Instead it was trailing two long strings. At an order from Maximus, a slave lifted it out of the pail, but it did not struggle at all. He put it into the pool and tethered it to a toy boat. The other slave handed Crassus a pottery globe the size of a large apple. Crassus attached the strings from the navitar to it, then twisted something, left and right, left and right, at about the rate of a slow pulse.

The navitar began to move through the water with a rhythmic motion. I could see it expand to suck water at one end, then contract as it forced it out of gill slits all along its sides. This propelled it forward, towing the toy boat behind it. Crassus walked alongside, twisting the little lever on the pottery globe.

"What is that thing?" I asked. "A tame fish?"

"Crassus calls it the swimming machine," replied Gaius.

"Swimming machine?"

"Yes. The thing pulling the boat is both a swimmer and machine. I call it a navitar. Names of wondrous things need to be short and memorable."

"So it's machine? But it's made of flesh."

"Slaves are made of flesh, yet they can row boats that tow barges."

"Barges? Barges are big, and your navitar is as small as a carp."

"Navitars can be made to grow huge, Marcus. Imagine a navitar the size of a whale. What might you do with it?"

"A whale!" I gasped. "I suppose…something like that could tow a trireme into battle."

"Tow a trireme!" Maximus exclaimed, clapping his hands with delight. "I had not thought of that. My idea was to have navitars tow merchant ships out of harbors, whatever the direction of tide or wind. That would save time, and thus money…yet towing a warship is somehow glorious. Thank you, I'll mention that when I meet with the emperor."

The navitar neared the end of the pool and Crassus stopped twisting the lever on the globe. The fish-machine slowed until it was hardly moving at all and just floated, gently pulsing water through its gill slits.

"That thing will need years of growing before it can be harnessed to a warship," I said, fascinated in spite of my doubts.

"But I have another, which has indeed been growing for a year," said Maximus, turning away and beckoning for me to follow. "Come along, look upon the wonder that will make me Senator Maximus."

A FISHING BOAT was moored at the villa's stone pier. In front of this was a slate-colored thing that did indeed look very much like a whale. It was harnessed to the boat by thick ropes and was blowing water through its many gill slits. At the boat's bow was a large amphora, which had a lever at the top. Thick cords led down to the water and into the huge body.

"Forgive me for doubting you, Gaius," I said as I gazed. "Were I emperor, I would have you into the Senate so fast that your feet would not touch the ground."

"Do you wish to go for a ride?"

"Me? In that?"

"It's quite safe. I'll stay here; I have work to do."

I stepped onto the boat with Crassus and four slaves. Maximus stood watching on the wharf. Crassus took me to the bow.

"This is the whip that drives the navitar along," he said, gesturing to the amphora from which the lever and two thick, tarry cords emerged.

"What is it?" I asked, because nothing could have looked less like a whip.

"The essence of thunderbolts, according to the Greek slave who writes Father's letters and tallies his accounts. He thinks the Aegyptians devised these things, but who knows? When applied to living animals, the essence makes their muscles flex."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I, but it works. When the lever on this amphora is drawn to the right, the navitar's muscles flex mightily and the water is blown out of its gills with ten times the usual force. Move it left, and it draws in more water."

"How is it steered?"

"Like a chariot. The two outer ropes act as the reins of a horse do. If the slave on the right pulls, the navitar turns right. To turn to the left, bid the slave on the left pull on his rein. All the captain must do is call orders—which I must do now, so please excuse me."

Crassus ordered the slaves to their assigned places, then had those on the pier cast off the moorings.

"Caller, walking speed!" he said. "Right rein, pull!"

The slave on the right hauled on his rein and the caller slave began shouting.

" Draw , two, three, four, five! Stroke , two, three, four, five! Draw , two, three, four, five! Stroke , two, three, four, five!"

At Draw , the lever was moved to the left, and the navitar would take a great gulp of water. The command Stroke was akin to a rower pulling upon an oar. The lever was pushed to the right, and the entire navitar contracted and expelled the water within its body, pulling the boat along with an exhilarating surge of power.

"Right rein, slack!" called Crassus, and the slave on the right stopped pulling on his rein.

We were now pointed straight out to sea. From time to time the huge back of the navitar was exposed as waves washed across it. The ride was surprisingly smooth for a vessel so small.

"Timing is absolutely critical," said Crassus. "If the lever is allowed to remain on the right for too long, the beast will suffocate."

"Like if we were to breathe out but not breathe in?" I asked.

"Ah, you learn fast."

"The navitar seems simple to command."

"Yes, but it is strangely delicate for all its enormous power, like a team of chariot horses. These slaves had to be carefully trained in the art of commanding navitars. Caller, take us to canter speed."

The slave began to call a shorter pattern.

" Draw , two, three! Stroke , two, three!"

"What's all this about walking and cantering?" I asked.

"The navitar is a chariot horse of the sea, so I have devised command words like those for horses: walking, trotting, cantering, and galloping—but don't repeat that in front of Father, he wants people to think the idea is his."

Crassus winked. I laughed. By now we were being pulled along so fast that my hair was swept back by the wind. No oars were in use and the sail was furled.

"Such speed," I said. "And you say it can, er, gallop?"

Crassus nodded, then called, "Caller, galloping speed."

This was indeed like being on a huge chariot, and I felt as if we were flying over the tops of clouds rather than the waves of the sea. I cannot remember what I said, or even if I said anything. After all too little time, Crassus ordered walking speed, then had the slave on the left rein turn us around. As we began to change direction, I was astounded to see that we were miles out from the shore.

"Only four slaves and their master are needed to operate the vessel and its navitar," said Crassus. "Fifty legionaries could have been put aboard with us. Think of it. Ten legionaries could be transported for every crewman."

"But the navitar could just as easily pull a ship with four hundred men aboard."

"That is the whole point, Marcus. Use navitars, and there is no need for slaves with oars or sailors to tend sails and rigging. Remember, too, that it's quite independent of winds and currents."

"How did the beast get so big?" I asked.

"Feed it a moderate amount, and it is merely sustained. Feed it more than that, and it grows. Work it hard, and it stops growing. The navitar is simplicity itself, it's just a slab of muscle, gills and stomach. It has no mind, it does not even have a head."

"Is it dangerous?"

"Not at all, it's harmless. Too harmless…but Father will explain about that."

Once ashore again, Maximus supervised as the navitar was unharnessed and guided into a stone pool with a sea gate of mesh and bars. I watched, amazed at how docile the huge, headless beast appeared to be. With his precious monster safely locked away, Maximus and I set off for the atrium.

"I intend to voice it about that I devised the navitars, with help from my son," Maximus said as we walked. "The truth is that the slave woman was entirely responsible. She's from the very distant east."

"You mean Aegypt?"

"Farther than that, much farther. India. Do you know of India?"

I shrugged. "It will take you forty days to cross the great eastern ocean and reach India if you catch the Hippalus wind at Ocelis, on the Red Sea. Most ships go to a city called Muziris."

"Amazing!" exclaimed Maximus. "Few Romans have even heard of the Red Sea, let alone somewhere as remote and wondrous as Ocelis."

"Wondrous? Ocelis is a fleapit, just an anchorage for watering ships and a market full of wild Berber merchants. I once chased an absconder there, all the length of the Red Sea. I only stayed long enough to open his guts and take an ear."

"You chased a slave so very far?"

"It was for reputation, Gaius. Nobody has ever escaped the eye of Marcus Foldor, before or since. Back in Alexandria, Lapidus Querinta paid me five thousand sesterces for his slave's ear, pickled in vinegar. He had a reputation to protect, too."

"Querinta! I have bought thousands of slaves from his market. Is it true what happened to him last year?"

"Yes, I was in Alexandria at the time, hunting. He lost the entire length of his enjoyment to some pox."

"Poor man, what a fate. He had great carnal appetites."

"Now he's like a glutton who can't taste anything."

"How can he bear to live?"

"Fear of death must weigh more heavily than the relief death brings."

"Enough, enough. So, you have been to Ocelis but not Muziris?"

"Muziris, no."

"Pity. If one slave from Muziris can fashion such a wonder as the navitar, imagine what other secrets a traveler might note down and bring back to Rome. I must arrange to send someone there. Might you be interested?"

"My delight is in catching slaves, Gaius. When I travel, it is for no other reason."

We returned to the atrium with its long pool. The little navitar was still floating there, harnessed to the toy boat and pulsing gently.

"The fashioning and use of navitars is not easy," said Maximus. "The method of turning fish hatchlings into navitars is complex in the extreme, but Crassus has mastered that art. One last problem remains, however. Horo! Set the fish free."

The slave Horo tipped a pail of fish into the pool. They were small and unremarkable, sardines perhaps, and no longer than a finger. Once in the pool they milled around for a moment, then made straight for the navitar. I watched, astonished, as they tore into its unresisting flesh, churning the water as if it were boiling.

"It does not resist or try to flee," I said, putting my hands on my knees and peering down as the navitar was shredded and eaten.

"Navitars do not feel pain or fear, Marcus. They do, however, taste exceptionally good."

"But this doesn't make sense," I protested. "The giant navitar was at sea for at least an hour while it towed the boat, yet no fish swarmed about to feast on it."

"A type of oil must be mixed in with a navitar's food, a very bitter oil. This oil is exuded like sweat through its skin and repels the fish that might otherwise feed upon it. We don't know how to make the oil. Only the slave woman, Vishesti, can do that, and there is very little left. Find her. Please."

That was not as easy as it sounded. I attended the slave markets and noted the faces and names of every slave. My memory was exceptional. Once I had a face, I had it forever. My head had in excess of a hundred thousand faces. When a slave absconded, I only needed to know the name to spot the face. Maximus had given me a name, but not a face.

"You know my talent, Gaius," I said, shaking my head. "I don't have her face."

"I can describe her."

"No. I need to have seen her face."

"She has children. They are also slaves."

"Children? There might be enough resemblance in their faces to give me her essentials. What do you know of them?"

"There's a boy, twelve years old, named Ravindra. A girl of seventeen, Marhavi. The eldest is Takshar, a youth of nineteen summers. They were captured in Muziris eight years ago, by privateers."

"As far away as that? The allure of Roman wealth reaches a lot farther than its legions and warships."

"Querinta bought them in Alexandria, but all are now in or near Rome. This scroll has the names of their masters."

I scanned the list. They were all important men.

"Was Vishesti captured with her children?"

"I…I don't believe I ever asked her!" he said, scratching his head. "When I fell ill, the physician Titus Rofula had her sent after he failed to help me."

"Where did he buy her?"

"We'll never know. Poor Titus, he fell from a bridge and drowned while I was recovering. I bought Vishesti from his widow."

"Can you show me where Vishesti slept and worked? This may sound like fancy, but the essence of slaves can linger in their workplaces and suchlike. I once caught a slave in the Sabura after only seeing the kitchen where she had cooked. The stall where she was selling food smelled just like the kitchen."

"Vishesti's chamber is filled with secrets," said Gaius, suddenly frowning. "Only Crassus and myself may enter."

"Then my work will be harder."

"Oh, very well! Come with me."

Gaius had built a large room for Vishesti's use, although Crassus worked there now. The walls were lined with shelves bearing little jars of green, blue, and red glass, spiral glass tubes, pottery lamps, and finely wrought tools such as physicians might use to operate upon eyes. There were three stone pools where navitars no bigger than frogs were pulsing in the clear water, each with a little sac tied to its back. Resting against one wall was an amphora with OIL OF BITTERNESS painted on it in black ink. There were three work benches of oak, all bearing glass spiral tubes, little braziers, glazed pottery urns, and clear glass jars filled with curdled, milky fluids. She had an impressive collection of dried herbs, and the jars were labeled with some flowing script that I had never seen before.

Gaius left me at the door, after telling Crassus not to leave me alone in the place. Crassus was a thin and amiable youth who had been educated by the very best tutors in Rome, and was a lot more intelligent than Maximus. I thought that even if Maximus failed to become a senator, he might well be remembered as the father of an outstanding philosopher.

"Your father says you have mastered the art of fashioning navitars," I said as I looked around.

"That is true, but I'm not really sure what I am doing," he admitted, as if embarrassed.

"Ugly thing," I said, looking at one in a pail of water.

"But useful."

"What's the manner of its feeding?" I asked. "It has no head."

"It has a stomach and gullet. We just pour food down the gullet."

"Ridiculous! How does it eat when there are no humans about?"

"It doesn't. Without humans to tend them, navitars die."

Vishesti had made tools of the strangest kind, and Crassus now showed some of them to me. One was just a droplet of water on a plate of glass, but it would magnify the image of anything below it. Two such glass plates placed one above the other would magnify all the more. Aided by enlarging devices like these, he reshaped the bodies of tiny fish. I looked through the enlarger at little fish that had no heads or fins. To the unaided eye they were barely visible.

I watched as Crassus grew tiny whiskers of metal in glass beakers, then used them to hold and reshape the little fish. Cut the head from a fish and the fish dies, but Crassus used oils, extracts of seeds, and sharply scented philters to keep the headless bodies alive. He could make cuts upon their flanks that would grow to become gill slits. Such cuts would kill any normal fish, yet these deformed, mangled things thrived.

The electral jar was beyond my comprehension. The juice of that bitter eastern fruit called the lemon was within, as were strips of copper and iron. Very fine silver wires coated with wax led away from it to a vat filled with clear water. I finally began to grow suspicious of this chamber of wonders.

"Vishesti reminds me of a priestess in her temple," I said. "Priests and priestesses hide behind scrolls, amulets, oils, and holy daggers. They have nothing of substance to offer those who come to pray."

"The gods would be angry to hear that," said Crassus uneasily.

"Our gods need no more than the prayers and offerings of the pious. I think that the secrets of Vishesti's navitars are very simple, and that all these jars are a hunter's blind to fool the unwary."

"May I have your knife for a moment?" asked Crassus.

"My knife? Why?"

"To show you something real."

I handed my knife to him. It was a good knife, nicely balanced and made from some eastern steel that held its edge well. Crassus dipped the blade in a beaker of clear fluid. After a few moments he drew it out again.

"Nothing has changed," I said.

"Correct. I wanted to show that Vishesti's mechanism is the wonder, not the fluid."

He attached silver wires from Vishesti's electral to my knife and to a copper bar. As he lowered them into the beaker they began to bubble.

"That's nothing magical," I said, although I felt strangely apprehensive.

"This will take some moments," he replied. "Come here, learn other secrets."

He showed me a jar containing very small navitars, then tipped what smelled like fish meal into their water.

"When the navitars are very small, they can only be nourished by swimming in broth. Now see here, in the pool. These navitars are as big as my fist, and each has a sac tied to its body. The sacs are fashioned from the bladders of rabbits, and the rabbit urethras have been inserted into the gullets of the navitars. By this means food is passed directly into their stomachs."

"Why not continue to add their food to the water?"

"This way, much more food can be crammed into them, making them grow faster. Besides, they must eventually swim in water where no food is suspended."

"And is the oil of bitterness mixed with their food?"

"Very sharp of you, Marcus Foldor. Were I a slave, I would not want you chasing me."

I WATCHED AS CRASSUS removed a bladder from an unresisting navitar, filled it with soup by means of a glass tube, then reattached it to the little fish-machine. If there was any trickery, I could not see it. Now we returned to the beaker where my knife continued to bubble. He detached the wire and drew it out. The blade had turned to bright, gleaming copper. I gaped at it, utterly astonished.

"Your blade now has the guise of copper, yet it remains steel," said Crassus, folding his arms and looking very smug.

"Another wondrous trick. No wonder your father wants Vishesti back."

"Just as she can disguise steel as copper, so too can she disguise herself. What did Father offer you for her return?"

"Ten thousand sesterces."

"A million would be a bargain for her."

"A million!" I exclaimed, then laughed.

Crassus did not even smile. Instead he gently lifted a navitar out of its pail and held it before me in both hands.

"This is but one type of navitar, Marcus Foldor. Vishesti told me of many others while I worked as her apprentice. One of them can enclose a man's body in its flesh and dive deep to where sunken ships lie. Just imagine what treasures there are on the sea floor, ready for the taking. Another type of navitar can enclose ten legionaries and carry them long distances underwater. With a hundred of those you could land an entire legion on the shores of, say, Britannia with no warning at all."

"Nonsense," I said uneasily. "How would the men breathe?"

"I asked her that very question. Navitars can purify foul air beneath the water."

"Astounding."

"Vishesti can make a multitude of different navitars. I can only make one."

"I don't understand why she fled. Surely your father would have kept her in greater luxury than the emperor's sisters."

"That he did, but it was not enough. She left a message chalked on that wall. Father had a slave clean it off, but I copied it down first."

Crassus took a roll of paper from among his scrolls. It bore the words ROME WILL SUFFER DID SPOILING MY CHILDREN. The clumsy text was in sinuous, flowing letters.

Rome would suffer for spoiling her children. That was absurd. Rome was the mightiest empire that had ever existed. Rome was invincible, and ever expanding. In a thousand years, Rome would rule the world, all the way to India and Cathay. I shrugged and handed the scroll back.

"One slave cannot destroy Rome," I said.

"No? Might she not teach some barbarian nation the art of shaping navitars? Imagine a navitar as big as the one outside, with great iron blades strapped to its back. Imagine it slicing through the hulls of Roman war galleys. Just one could sink an entire fleet. Get her back, Marcus Foldor. Get her back, or the consequences may be truly dire."

"She's just a slave—"

"She's not human!" said Crassus sharply. "I have a very bad feeling about her. We should return her children to her and pack them all back to Muziris."

"Impossible. The children are owned and prized by a tribune, a senator, and a consul."

"If the emperor commands it, the tribune, senator, and consul will return her children without charge, on silver platters, clothed in Cathay silks and dripping with rubies. Father thinks only of Vishesti's value, but I know better. She's unspeakably dangerous, but if we are nice to her, she may not harm us."

Crassus was afraid, I could tell that from the high, fearful tone of his voice and the way he cowered whenever he spoke of Vishesti. By now I was eager to begin the chase and match wits with her.

I returned to Rome the next day and visited all my informers. I learned nothing of Vishesti, so that left her children. Ravindra was the favorite of a tribune, while Takshar had killed another slave in a fight and had been sent to die in the arena. Here he had survived to become a gladiator of some note and was now owned by a consul. Marhavi was owned by a senator and was kept at his villa on the Capitoline Hill.

I contacted Senator Vintus through a quaestor that I knew and was granted an audience. I dressed as a merchant and was received in the atrium of his house. He was a small, sprightly man with bulging blue eyes.

"Marhavi's beauty and skills in dancing have brought me both delight and advantage," said Vintus as he conducted me around the frescoes of his dancers on the walls. "I have had astonishingly good offers for her but have refused them all."

"That's why certain traders have commissioned me to seek out more like her," I lied. "Agents will be sent to the very distant east to find them."

"More of her kind!" Vintus exclaimed, seizing my arm. "Could you put me down for a dancer of about her age—no, a little older. Say five years?"

"I shall add your name to the list."

"Marhavi's dancing is superlative, and by means of her I have persuaded many associates to favor my interests. Would you be inclined to mark me at the top of your list if I were to…favor any of your own interests?"

"My dear senator, I shall put you at the top of the list for merely letting me speak with her," I said, turning to face him and spreading my hands wide. "She may be the key to this entire venture."

"Ah, if only more Romans were so intent upon their duties." He sighed, then clapped his hands.

A slave who had been standing as motionless as a painted bronze statue now came to life and bowed.

"Have the dancer Marhavi and the musicians made ready," said Vintus, then he turned to me. "Soon you shall see why I value this slave so highly."

The villa had a small theater built inside it, with one side set up as a triclinium so that guests could feast while watching Vintus's dancers perform. The musicians were settling themselves in a corner as we entered. They were from somewhere east of Syria and played a wild, sinuous type of music. A girl swirled into view, one with black hair and dusky, golden skin. She was able to hold the top half of her body absolutely still while swaying her bottom in the most enticing, sensuous manner. She seemed to float across the marble floor, her arms undulating like waves on the sea. Her black hair reached all the way down her back swaying in opposition to her body. Something about the way she pouted, simpered, and glanced slyly at me with her green eyes almost averted had me giddy and perspiring. All too soon the music ended, and Vintus beckoned her over.

"Marhavi, this is a famous slave merchant, Marcus Foldor," he said, inclining his head in my direction. "He has questions for you. Answer them."

"Tell me of your homeland," I said.

"I remember little, sir. I was very young when slave catchers brought me here. Our city was called Muziris. It was always hot. My father traded ivory and cloth from Aegypt in return for teak wood, precious stones, and black pepper. He was killed by the slavers who caught me."

Her Latin was good, but she put unusual inflections on words.

"Where is Muziris?" I asked.

"Beside the Erythraean Ocean."

"How far away is it?"

"I saw two full moons and a new moon while the trader ship carried me to Aegypt."

Two months, perhaps a little more. That was about the distance from India to Aegypt, depending on the winds.

"Where did you learn to dance as you do?"

"My mother taught me most of what I know. Then a Roman master showed me how girls dance here."

"You were only nine when you were caught. How could you learn to dance so well while so young?"

"I do not dance well. The ladies of my homeland dance much better."

"You can see why I want an older girl, better tutored in their dancing," said Senator Vintus. "Imagine what a delight to the eyes she would be."

"Marhavi, tell me of your mother," I said guardedly. "What sort of woman was she?"

"She was not a woman, sir. She was an ifryt."

"Ifryt?"

"A daemon."

Her answer was so open and sincere that I found myself strangely unsettled. Runaway slaves sometimes claim to have magical powers when cornered, but they are always fearful and desperate. Marhavi was no absconder. Ifryt , the very word conjured images of wispy, swaying things, deadlier than an asp yet no more substantial than smoke. If Vishesti were an ifryt, what then? Why had she lived as a slave in the house of Gaius Maximus? I fought back irrational fears. There are no ifryts , I told myself, only clever and devious slaves .

"Would you like to see your mother?" I asked.

"My mother would not like me now."

"What about your brothers?"

"My master says that one has become my sister, and the other only cares for killing."

"All true," said the senator. "The older boy is a gladiator, Takshar the Invincible. He's quite spectacular in action if you like that sort of thing. The other belongs to a rich tribune."

"I plan to visit Takshar next. He may remember more."

The senator sagged a little, but there was hopeful pleading in his eyes.

"So it seems that my precious Marhavi is not much help," he said sadly, asking an unspoken question.

"Ah, but you will stay at the top of my list," I assured him. "May I ask her a final question?"

"Please, do so."

"Marhavi, did your mother do anything more wondrous than dance?"

"Yes, many things. She made water elephants to tow my father's ships out to sea, melded men with fish to swim underwater, and could turn flowers into gold. She had command of the demons that bring sickness—"

"Enough!" snapped the senator. "You know how these boasts about your people anger me."

"No, please let her go on," I said soothingly. "Boasts may conceal a scrap of truth."

"Oh, very well. Just one last wonder, Marhavi! No more."

"Once my mother showed me pox marks on the face of the moon, and four little gods attending mighty Jupiter."

"What spells and charms did she use to do this?" I asked.

"None. Just a mirror of polished silver and droplets of water on thin slices of glass."

I left the villa with my head whirling. Crassus had been right. Vishesti had secrets hidden within her head worth enough gold to buy the whole of Gaul.

TAKSHAR WAS NOT hard to find, and his master was also interested in getting more slaves like him. His hair was black and thick, and like Marhavi he had green eyes and skin like gold rubbed with fine sand. There was a most impressive scar on his right cheek. A beard would have hidden it, but the consul insisted that he be clean-shaven. The scar declared that Takshar was a gladiator, and it gave rugged strength to his strangely fair face. His accent was like Marhavi's, very fluid, with odd inflections.

"My mother?" he exclaimed when I asked what he remembered of her. "She was clever, yes, that is true. She commanded plague spirits to come and go, and built horses to ride under the sea."

"Under the sea!" I exclaimed, feigning surprise.

"Ah, you do not believe me?"

"I might. Tell me, how many lesser gods attend mighty Jupiter in the sky?"

"Four."

I smiled and nodded. The stories of the children tallied. The consul was not present, so I decided to walk down stranger paths.

"Your mother is not human," I continued.

"Some would say that," replied Takshar with a slow wink.

"Tell me more, I'll not laugh. I have traveled widely. Travel opens the mind to strange and unlikely ideas."

"Mother is an ifryt. Some say they are daemons, others think they are human sorcerers. Whatever the truth, she is very, very learned."

My fears dispersed, like bats out of a tower. Vishesti was human after all, and no human was a match for me.

"Do you like it here?" I asked, but only from idle curiosity. "Is there anything in Rome that your homeland lacks?"

"Gladiators. In Rome I can fight while thousands of people cheer and shout my name."

"So you want to stay in Rome?"

"Yes. I live to raise my sword before the crowd. Only gladiators face death with cheering all around them."

"But the next death may be yours."

"Until now, it has not been. Besides, I fear losing the crowd more than I fear death."

I hired a horse and rode to the tribune's estate in the Alban Hills. I had an introduction from the consul and I presented this to his guards, but he did not want to see anyone. Guards barred my way and his slaves began to toss stones at me.

"One word!" I called to the guards. "Has a woman of the slave Ravindra's race come looking for him?"

"Be off with you!" shouted the primulus.

"I want the woman, not Ravindra. She's an absconder. She's his mother."

That made all the difference. He ordered the others back, then walked out to where I was standing with my horse.

"Are you hunting her?" he asked softly.

"There's a reward. Rewards are my profession."

"How much?"

"Ten thousand sesterces."

I expected him to be impressed, but he just looked glum and nodded.

"My master will pay you twenty thousand for her, alive."

He wanted Vishesti alive. That meant he knew something of her skills.

"Vishesti is a physician. Is your master sick?"

"Sick at heart, yes, but it's Ravindra who needs curing. She came here, she came all the way into the villa without being seen or challenged by any guard, hound, or slave. My master was in the bathhouse when a shadow appeared amid the steam. A woman's voice cursed him and cursed Rome. She said he took what was most precious to her, so she would take what he thought most precious. Can you imagine it? She cursed my master, who never harmed anyone."

"She cursed your master, yet Ravindra fell sick?"

"Not deathly sick, boys' disease. Pimples."

I fought down the urge to laugh.

"Why is that such a problem?"

"Don't you understand, each pustule is like a death blow to such a beautiful youth!" he exclaimed. "He won my master prizes at every contest of eunuch beauty. Now his perfect, golden skin is flawed, and my master is inconsolable. That witch did it, the pustules erupted not one hour after she cursed my master."

"And she escaped?"

"Yes, she came and went unseen. I gave every guard, hound, and slave a good whipping for that—my arm still aches from the exertion. Spread the word, Marcus Foldor, tell every slave catcher in Rome: twenty thousand sesterces for whoever drags the witch back here so that we can torture a cure for Ravindra out of her."

There was one other explanation: some eunuchs are not entirely qualified to be eunuchs and are betrayed by the journey to manhood.

"Is Ravindra definitely a eunuch?" I asked.

"Of course. His balls are in a jar of sweet wine on an altar to Venus in the larium. The slave physician Oscata was treating him with powerful oils and philters that enhance beauty and keep the skin clear. No eunuch tended by Oscata has ever raised a pustule. The master beat him to death this morning."

The tribune had killed the great Oscata. Even I knew that was like sitting beside the Tiber and tossing sesterces into the water all afternoon. The reward for catching Vishesti was what a tinsmith of middling skill might earn in a lifetime. As I rode back to Rome, I thought on Vishesti's words. She would take what the tribune thought most precious. He had prized the boy's fairness more highly than frankincense or Cathay silks, so Ravindra was blighted by pustules. Vishesti had indeed taken what the tribune thought most precious.

I was lying in bed when Vishesti came. It was the light that woke me. A thumb-lamp had been lit and placed on a table between us. In its weak glow I could see the dim form of a woman's body swaying to the beat of finger cymbals. She wore very little and danced like Marhavi, but with a grace quite beyond the girl.

"See, twenty thousand sesterces, dancing," said Vishesti.

Her voice was too soft to be a man's, yet too deep to come from a woman's lips. Her Latin was broken and halting, like that of a slave who had been in Rome only a year or so. Her accent was that of her children.

"Are you Vishesti?" I said.

"Myself, twenty thousand sesterces. Try collect."

I sleep with a silken net weighted with lead pellets wrapped around my hand. It is a very compact version of the type that retiarii gladiators use, and I have it with me always. It lets me seem unarmed until it is too late for those who would escape me. With a single movement I threw back my blanket and flung the net at the lissome shape amid the shadows, then launched myself after it. The lamp winked out and my arms closed on nothing. I crashed heavily to the floor.

A foot caressed my leg. I lashed out with a kick but my foot struck only the table. I got to my feet, cusring loudly and trying to ignore the pain in my toes.

"Lycius!" I shouted.

"Lycius, myself, try stopping," said a voice to my left. "Failed."

I spread my arms and lunged but caught only air. My own net of fine silk descended over me, then my foot was swept from under me and I fell with great force, unable to put out my entangled hands to stop myself. A body with silken soft skin over iron muscles descended upon me and Vishesti's legs entangled mine, pinning them firmly. The ifryt was warmer than a real person, but I could only see a deeper blackness just above my face.

"I curse you, I curse Rome. Mortal husband, of mine, killed. Our children, stolen. What I love, you taken. What you love, I taken."

"I never touched your children. I'm trying to return them to you and—"

She dug her thumbs into my neck, just below the jaw. It is one of the pressure places we slave catchers use to inflict agony on runaways without adding bruises to their skin. As I gasped and writhed in pain, Vishesti exhaled into my face. Her breath compared badly to pig shit mixed with garum in a vomitorium's pail.

"See, only, Gaius Maximus Secundus," she hissed.

Again she made me gasp, again she breathed into my face. My senses deserted me.

A month had passed by the time I awoke. My illness was a brain fever, according to the physician. Askar, my personal slave, had looked after me for the whole time.

"You've changed something," I said as he sat beside me, feeding me lentils in hot wine. "Your hair, perhaps…or did you once have a beard?"

"I have always shaved my face and head, master."

"Have you lost weight, or gained it?"

"Not that I have noticed, master."

I was suspicious of everyone. All could be Vishesti in disguise, and Askar was the same height as her.

"You say Lycius fell and broke his neck?" I said, waving his spoon away and closing my eyes.

"On the very night you became sick, master. His body was cold when I found him."

"And you didn't hear me cry out?"

"No, master."

Some hours later, I had another visitor. Askar tapped at the door and asked whether I was fit to receive Gaius Maximus Secundus. I greeted Maximus warmly, more out of relief than friendship. When he presented me with ten thousand sesterces, my surprise knew no limits.

"Vishesti returned to my household and told me how you brought her children to meet her," he said as he paced before my bed, too excited to sit down.

"I don't remember doing that, but who am I to say? I have been very sick."

"The first thing I did was have her tell Crassus how to make the oil of bitterness. Imagine my delight when I tried it on one of the small navitars and saw that fish were unable to attack it. I had forty amphorae of the stuff made that very day. It never hurts to have a reserve, whatever the goods may be."

"So, have you sent word to the emperor?" I asked.

"Yes, yes, and I was summoned to meet him!"

"You were?" I gasped.

"Yes! Can you imagine? I owe it all to you, Marcus. That was three weeks ago. He was charming to a fault, the best of all emperors. He's staged wonderful games and races, canceled the treason trials, and burned the court records. He—"

"Gaius, I live in Rome, I know the young emperor's a just and popular ruler. Did he like the navitar?"

"He's only seen a little navitar pulling a toy boat in a palace pool. He had intended to come to Ostia to ride the sea chariot, but then he fell sick. He's only just recovered."

"I thought emperors were protected by the gods and never got sick. Augustus and Tiberius reigned sixty-four years in good health."

"Ah, yes, but the gods also smiled on our glorious third emperor, so he's well again. He still wants to ride my sea chariot. That's why I'm in Rome, to make the arrangements for his visit. It's tomorrow. I received a scroll with his very own seal impressed in the wax. Why, I could hardly bring myself to break it."

Maximus invited me to Ostia to see the emperor ride the sea chariot and perhaps meet him, but I had to decline. Although I was recovering, even the short trip to Ostia was beyond me.

I WAS STILL UNSTEADY the following morning, but I decided that I needed to be seen. Rumors spread so easily in the Sabura, and if it was being said that I had died of my fever, clients would go to other slave catchers. Askar walked with me, and I noticed that there were a lot of unfamiliar faces in the crowd.

"Salve Foldor."

"Salve."

The man was tall and his voice familiar, yet I did not know him. Once he was past, I turned to Askar.

"Who was that man?"

"Titus Polibius, the quaestor."

"What!" I exclaimed. "Titus is one of my best friends. That man is nothing like him."

"I have known him for five years, master."

Again I began to suspect that Vishesti had taken on Askar's form and dumped his body into the Tiber. I stood aside while Askar spoke with the slave of a nuntius about declaring my recovery. Several people greeted me, but although I recognized none of them, I waved and smiled.

"Marcus Foldor, so you're back from the underworld," said a man wearing the colors of the Aventine College around his neck. "What happened? The ferryman refuse to take you?"

The man knew me. Clearly I should have known him.

"He sent me back to catch a runaway slave," I joked. "What brings you to the Sabura?"

"The attack on Senator Vintus. Are you the only man in Rome who's not heard?"

Marhavi's master. Imagine two icy hands reaching into your body and squeezing your stomach, and you will appreciate how I felt just then.

"I've been sick," I managed. "Tell me."

"It happened last night. Some say that a single man stole into the senator's villa, killed five of his guards, then ripped the eyes out of his head and nailed them to his door with iron spikes."

"Truly?"

"As I live, breathe, and fart, it's a fact."

"What was it about? Revenge? Politics? Women?"

"How should I—Oi, the nuntius is getting up."

The nuntius was dressed colorfully so that crowds might focus upon him as he made his announcements. His face was not familiar, but his clothes were.

"Be notified that Senator Titus Vintus has offered one hundred thousand sesterces to any citizen or freedman who provides information leading to the capture and crucifixion of the vile intruder who blinded him."

By the time the nuntius got to the announcement about my return to health, most of the crowd had hurried away. The senator had existed to take delight in the swaying bodies of his dancers, but now he was blind. Ravindra had lost the perfection of skin that his master prized so highly. What those great Romans valued most had been taken. Vishesti had attacked me, but had taken nothing. Her curses don't always work , I thought, but I could not believe my own lie. I am cursed, but the blow has not yet fallen . The day was unseasonably warm, yet I stood hunched over and shivering.

"Master?"

An unfamiliar slave was standing before me with a scroll.

"I'm not your master," I said, waving him away.

"Master, it's me, Askar."

It was only then that I realized the truth. I could not recognize faces. It was not fear that gripped me so much as horror. Even though I continued to go through the motions of living, I could not be truly alive without faces.

I was lying on my bed when someone tapped at my door. I remembered drinking a cup of wine when I got home, to stop my hands shaking. I drank another cup. I remembered running out of wine some hours later, then I must have fallen asleep. Now the room was in darkness. The tapping at the door sounded like thunderclaps and my head felt like a bag of broken glass.

"Go away," I mumbled, wincing at the sound of my own voice.

"Master, it's Askar."

"Let me die."

"Master, please. It's important."

"Show yourself. Bring a lamp. A dim lamp."

"You won't recognize my face, but hear my voice and know me. You have a visitor. Gaius Maxiumus Secundus. He's in the atrium."

"What…what's he want?"

"The emperor burned his villa. The smoke was blowing over Rome all afternoon. You were insensible by then."

Fear revived me. Besides, there was something important about Maximus…his face! Since my fever, his had been the only face I recognized.

"Go to the roof, Askar, attach the fountain's pipe to the rain vat."

In spite of the pain in my head, I managed to get up, vomit, drink some water, vomit again, then shamble out to the atrium. Maximus was sitting on the edge of my little fountain, staring at the flame of a pottery lamp. He was dressed in rags and reeked of fish.

"Askar says you can't recognize faces," he said, standing as I entered. "I'm Gaius Maximus Secundus."

I decided not to tell him that I knew his face, alone, out of all others.

"Sit by the fountain and keep your voice low," I said. "Splashing water muffles words."

"Can't your slave be trusted?" he gasped, already backing away for the door.

"What Askar does not know can't be tortured out of him. Just sit, keep your voice low, and tell me all. I lost the afternoon. I was drinking…quite a lot."

"I walked here from Ostia," said Maximus as we sat down. "Walked all the way, in rags, reeking of garum. Children threw stones at me."

"What happened?" I asked, my head in my hands.

"The navitar! Damn all navitars. Damn all slaves."

"Gaius Maximus, tell me! Start at the beginning."

"The emperor arrived. Can you imagine? Rome's emperor visiting me, Gaius Maximus Secundus. It was my greatest moment, but I did not know it. I thought even greater glory was to come. I ordered the big navitar out of its pool and harnessed to the boat, then went inside to check that the food, wine, dancers, musicians, singers, and poets were ready."

"What went wrong? Was it Vishesti?"

"No, it was…it was the emperor himself. Something about him had changed over the three weeks past. There was mania in his eyes, and those around him had a look of fear only lightly concealed. He babbled about riding my sea chariot, and about waging war on Neptune. When a slave came in bearing a tray of roast fish, the young emperor screamed something about Neptune's spies, snatched a sword from one of his guards, and struck the slave dead. I was in absolute terror as I led him out to my pier. I whispered prayers to Fortune, but she did not listen."

"Had Vishesti slain the navitar?" I guessed through a fog of pain.

"The navitar was being torn apart by a churning mass of sharks and lesser fish. Every damnable seagull in Ostia was swarming above them. The repulsive properties of the oil of bitterness were gone. The beast that should have lifted my family as high as any in Rome was as useless as a dead whale. Was I so very wrong to aspire to greatness, Marcus? The great and noble Pompey was born to plebs, yet he became a consul."

"So, the emperor dipped you in fish sauce, burned your house, and went on his way. You escaped lightly."

"Lightly? Marcus, he had my entire household slaughtered. I fled to the kitchens, hoping that Vishesti could perform some trick to distract him. I found the two slaves who had been guarding her lying on the floor, dead. She was still there, pouring my amphorae of Spanish garum into a vat. Only now did she say that the oil of bitterness retains its potency for just a few days. My stores of the oil were now three weeks old, and as useful as frog piss. I cursed her for deceiving me. She laughed. She said I might escape the emperor's guards were I to immerse myself in the vat of garum and breathe through a hollow reed. That's what I did."

"She helped you escape?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"How should I know? I lay submerged in fermenting fish guts until I began to choke on smoke coming through my reed. When I got out, the place was on fire and everyone was dead. My son, daughters, wife, guests, guards, slaves, every last one of them. Crassus had been stabbed more times than Caesar in the Senate. Bodies lay everywhere. Nobody dared come near the place, not even to loot it. I slashed my clothes into rags then crawled away, hidden by the smoke."

"And Vishesti?"

"Vishesti? Damn her to Hades or wherever her people's dead go. I hope she's dead. Marcus, if I had a copper for every dog and cat that trailed after me on the way here, I'd have my lost fortune back. Not my son, though. Poor Crassus. I managed to leave my very last sesterce in his mouth. No father should have to give his son a coin for the ferryman, Marcus."

"Why did you come here?" I asked, even though I knew.

"Not sure. If Crassus had lived, I might have found the strength to flee to some wild, barbaric place like Britannia and rebuild my fortune trading in tin or woad or whatever the Britons value, but without him there's no point. As it stands…the weight of misery on one side of the scales does not yet exceed my fear of death on the other. Tomorrow, who knows?"

"You can't stay here."

"I know you're a hard man, Marcus, I expect no favors."

"Then what do you want?"

"Just advice. Tell me how absconders stay out of sight and earn a living."

"That's easy. Bind a cloth over one eye, cease shaving, and keep your face and fingernails grubby. You speak smatterings of a dozen languages, so you can lurk about on the Aventine docks, translating for foreign sailors."

"Ah, yes! Yes! And I can tally accounts, and write lists of—"

"No! An educated man on the docks would stand out like a horse in the Senate. Just help sailors to find whores, wine, and money changers. Say you're a freedman who lost everything when some insula burned down. I'll have Askar take you to a tavern where you can sleep on straw in a corner, with no questions asked."

"But—"

"Go! Get out of my sight before my honor weakens and I hand you to a magistrate. Gaius Maximus Secundus, the man who made a fool of the emperor. Your head must be worth quite a lot."

"No! Please!"

"Then go. Askar!"

I winced at the pain that stabbed through my head from my own shout. Someone dressed like Askar hurried in.

"Take Maximus to the kitchen. Give him bread and a few coppers."

"Yes, master."

"Then return here."

I had to blot out all associations with Maximus. Were he caught he would certainly be tortured, and my name would spill from his lips as soon as the first hot iron touched his skin. Askar returned from the kitchen.

"Take Maximus to the Aventine," I began.

"Now? In the dark?"

"Yes! In daylight, only blind people won't recognize him."

"It's night—we'll be set upon. This is the Sabura!"

"You survived two years in the arena, you can handle the Sabura at night."

"Yes, master. To what house will I take him?"

"To the nearest sewer."

"I—oh."

"And report back to me when you return. I want to see the blood on your knife."

I waited, sitting up in bed with a lamp burning. An hour later, there was a tap on my bedroom door. It creaked a little as it was pushed open. I did not expect to recognize the slave who was standing there, and of course I did not.

"Is it done, Askar?" I whispered.

"Askar riding with ferryman. Gave coin."

The voice was Vishesti's. I swept up the pottery lamp and flung it at her, but she dodged out of sight and the lamp smashed against the wall beyond. A billow of flame erupted in the doorway. Now she would have no advantage from darkness and shadows. I unbarred the window shutter and tumbled out onto the grass of my tiny peristyle.

"Maximus must live, suffer."

I slashed out with my spatha but cut only bushes. Light from the fire within my house glowed through the window behind me. Already, distant voices were shouting about fire.

"Maximus owned market, where sell children. Ravindra, made eunuch. Pretty human statue."

The voice seemed to come from all around. She was above me! I leaped into the air and slashed up at the darkness, cut nothing, then fell heavily.

"Marhavi, is dancing toy."

The voice whispered in my ear, but when I slashed at a shape beside me the spatha struck sparks from a small statue.

"Takshar kills, for make crowd cheering."

This time I could make out a dim shape from the increasing glow coming from my house. I flung the spatha with all my strength, but the shape did not collapse. I realized that it was a tree. The blade snapped as I tried to pull it free.

" Four children, mine. Londar to die, forty days."

Londar. I knew the name only too well. Londar was the slave I had sliced open on the ship at Ocelis. I had hunted him down and killed him to make my reputation, but he had not died then and there. Forty days was the time it took to sail to Muziris.

"In my arms, Londar die."

The voice was behind me. Turning, I saw a dark shape in the bedchamber window, outlined against the flames. I dashed back and leaped through the window, my dagger in my hand, but Vishesti was gone and the doorway was a curtain of bright yellow flames. A leg was missing from my bed. It was the hollow leg, where I kept my gold coins.

Again I escaped through the window, then helped my neighbors break into my house to fight the fire. We threw pails of piss from the nearby laundry, water from my peristyle's pool, and dirt from the garden, we even beat at the flames with wet sacks, but the place burned like a shipload of tar. Perhaps Vishesti had splashed olive oil from my kitchen on the floors. Very soon the house was beyond saving, and people just made sure that the fire did not spread to their own buildings. I stood in the crowd, watching all my years of slave catching burn.

"To me, Londar tell everything."

I drew my dagger and stabbed back and up, in the direction of the voice. I turned to see a man beginning to collapse. Realizing my mistake, I sidled into the crowd before those around us began shouting and screaming. An old man with a stubbly beard looked me in the face.

"Everyone who slave, spoil, defile my children, must to suffer," he said.

His stare was blank. He did not know me. Suddenly I had it! Vishesti had enchanted the minds of other people to speak her words.

"But slaves are the foundation of Rome," I said to him. "There's not a Roman alive who would not have traded your children for a bag of sesterces."

He turned away without another word and pushed through the crowd. I looked back to my house. I was ruined. I had lost my gold and my house, but worst of all, I had lost faces. A boy tugged at my tunic. I looked down at him.

"Every Roman, am making suffer," said the boy, picking his nose.

"Not possible!" I exclaimed at him. "Even your magic can't defeat the might of Rome."

He ran off into the crowd. I thought to follow him, but Vishesti was sure to have planned for something like that. The roof of my house collapsed, sending a cloud of sparks into the night sky. The men and boys on the neighboring roofs went into a frenzy of beating and dousing.

"Yourself knowing, brain fevers twist brains. Easily cast."

The speaker had one arm that ended at an iron hook where the elbow had been. Suddenly I had it, and the sheer boldness of Vishesti's scheme made me giddy. The emperor! She had twisted the mind of the most powerful man in all the world. There was no doubt that our just and generous emperor had suffered a brain fever like the one that had robbed faces from me. Would it have been any harder to warp the emperor's mind so that cruelty replaced his goodwill and generosity? All Romans were in danger. Maximus had just been the first to cross the path of our newly insane ruler.

What Vishesti had done was magnificent, a far greater feat than growing navitars, or making astounding devices from lemon juice or drops of water. Reluctantly, I made a very important admission to myself.

"Whatever you are, I salute you as Rome's conqueror," I said, saluting the one-armed man. "It may not sound like much, but we Romans do not give salutes lightly."

His face remained blank, but he turned away and left me.

I wondered if Vishesti had seen my salute. I wondered if she cared. It mattered to me. A woman came up to me and spoke another message. Was it Vishesti herself? It no longer mattered.

"See, only, Flavius. Dancing master." I nodded. Flavius had tutored Marhavi. "See, only, Seresta. Physician." The man had castrated Ravindra.

Now I understood. I had been given Maximus's face to teach me a lesson. These two faces came with orders.

NOW I WORK on the Aventine docks, alongside slaves, loading and unloading. Everyone knows that I have lost everything, including faces. Without wealth, I must work. Without faces, I have nothing but my muscles to sell. Still, there is something to live for, because I have been given the faces of Flavius and Seresta. I shall cut off Flavius's feet, because they are most precious to a dancer. Seresta will lose the first joint of every finger and never again wield a scalpel. After all, what else is left to me but to serve Rome's conqueror?

Some must suffer quite specifically for what happened to the ifryt's children, but all Rome will be punished. Such is the might of Rome's army and navy that we had felt invincible, yet now the man who has absolute power over us all has been fashioned into a murderous, deluded maniac.

It is the tenth month of the reign of Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also known as Caligula.

The Cave

By Sean F. Lynch
| 6849 words

Sean Lynch has been writing fiction for decades and his work has appeared in Thought Magazine, Cold Drill, The Coe Review, and Boise Weekly. He says, "A couple years ago, when I started writing this story, I decided research was called for. Ergo, a family trip to Idaho's Craters of the Moon National Monument. My twin sons, who were ten at the time, rollicked in 'the tubes,' devouring every moment. For me, the experience was a tad claustrophobic." He thinks the research was superfluous, but your editor suspects that the experience—like much of this story—had more going on below the surface.

THE BOY TOSSED A STONE into the darkness.

"One…two…three," he whispered. "Four, five, six." From somewhere far below came a faint splash.

The boy stepped back and looked at the bearded man.

"Let's go the other way," the man said.

He whirled and swung the torch in the opposite direction. A narrow tunnel loomed.

Their breaths cleaved the silence.

"I can scout it," the boy volunteered.

"Alone?"

"I'll be careful, Papa."

The man—his name was Aaron—considered this. He could hear his own heart beating.

"Besides," the boy added, "a rest will do you well."

"I suppose I can't argue," the man said, kneading his beard. "My legs don't feel…the same."

"Then it's settled," the boy said. "Give me the fire."

The man handed over the torch.

"Just remember." He paused. "Last time you were gone—"

The boy sighed. "I know—"

A rumbling emanated from far off, a stirring from deep in the earth, and then it was gone.

He touched the boy's shoulder. "Go with God. If you see the devil.…"

"Papa?"

"Give him my best!"

The boy's eyes sparkled; he nearly smiled. He hugged the man quickly and then, with the torch, crouched and entered the passage.

Aaron stooped over his walking stick and watched the flare of the torch illuminate the tan-colored tunnel, and he saw the shadow of the boy larger than life, and then gradually the torch-light withered and his son's presence could only be ascertained by the crunching clomps of bootsteps against gravel or rock and the splashing of puddled water.

Then there was silence, utter and complete.

Letting out a long breath, Aaron shrugged off his knapsack. He raised a half-full bota bag to his lips and drained a meager amount before gingerly lowering himself to the cave's floor. The ground was dry where he sat and he traced his fingers just beyond his body's perimeter. Without a torch, visibility was nil. One could be standing inches from a calcite dagger or on the icy ledge of a two-hundred-foot-deep chasm and feel no discernible difference. Sometimes the temperature gave a clue. The ravines, the abysses, the nether depths—they were often cooler.

From somewhere far off, another rumble boomed, a deep sound felt as much as heard. When they were younger, the cave's rumblings made the boy cringe and huddle up to his father—but the boy, Kaleb, had outgrown that.

He wiped his muddy fingers against his pants and stroked his beard. His back ached.

Sitting, tailbone against solid ground, didn't help.

He wanted more than anything to rest, to lie down, but he feared the consequences of sleep in this cave—how seemingly you fell asleep one man and woke up another, possibly not in mind, but in body. The flesh. And whether this was true or not—how could it be?—he did not want to risk it.

He lay, knees bent, head on the blanket.

Ahh, better. I'll just lie here and relax.… Kaleb will be back soon. And the news he brings, for better or for worse…either way it will be the truth…and better than doing nothing. One has to move forward, one has to try. Sometimes all you have is the trying.

BEFORE THEY EVER SET FOOT in the monstrosity—back when Kaleb was an infant—a starving man had stumbled into their hamlet. He was pale and old, his skin pocked and scabbed, and although many villagers feared he carried the plague, he was allowed a bed in a remote barn. For a week they took him water and hearty meals, and surprisingly he regained some vigor, and the villagers' fears were greatly lessened if not entirely banished.

The night before his departure, everyone gathered in the town hall. There were fireplaces and oil lamps, while outside it rained. The villagers dined on the autumn harvest: vegetables, mutton, quail, and bread. For dessert there were pies and pudding and, afterward, music and dance. Women and children sang; men told stories and drank. Aaron and a few others sat at a long table with the outsider. His face had recaptured some color and a few of the scabs were healing. Moving slowly and deliberately, he produced from a small pouch a shining gold nugget and pushed it across the table to the mayor. He expressed gratitude to the villagers for saving his life. The mayor examined the nugget, as a dozen others looked on, and shook his head, saying: "We have done what anyone would do—what our Maker would have us do."

"You've saved my life!" the old-timer replied.

The mayor pushed the nugget back across the table.

The old-timer returned the gold to the pouch and more spirits were brought to the table, and after a while he shared a curious tale that later some attributed either to drink or delirium—although his somber expression and stony delivery made Aaron wonder if the embellishment contained elements of truth.

He said he was a prospector who had traveled far and wide in search of treasure, though rarely discovering enough to pay for more than a few weeks' lodging.

Producing a wrinkled piece of parchment paper, he explained it was a map to a cavern with passages inside that an ancient race had mined, though it had long since been abandoned. For a small price, he'd bought it, he said, from a dying man.

The villagers snatched the paper and passed it between them, shaking their heads. The ink had long since faded. Someone cussed softly.

The prospector insisted it had once been legible. It had brought him to this village. Eventually he'd discovered a cavern. He added that he'd stayed in the village a fortnight—less than a month ago.

A few of the men laughed.

One said: "Stranger, how is it that you were 'ere—in our little parish—a month ago and not one of us 'ere remembers ye?"

The stranger's weary gaze circled the onlookers. Face flushed, he poured himself more drink and imbibed. Breathing heavily, he said, "For me a month has passed. I marked the days off on me calendar. But I spent twenty days in that hole. When I walked in I was a young man twenty-two years old. And now you see me—I must look seventy if I look a day."

A man in the back cleared his throat and spat.

The prospector continued, "When I was here, thirty days ago, I sat at this very table with Agnes and Samuel Heathe and a man named Jurgens."

"Liar," said another, lunging and grabbing the prospector by the throat. Reflexively, Aaron pulled off the attacker and got elbowed in the nose.

Then there was chaos, swearing and shouting. Drinking goblets were hurled and men wrestled on the floor.

In his foggy memory, he can't remember seeing the prospector again. He's unsure if anybody saw him leave. He does remember one more occurrence that evening, standing outside in the rain with an old woman. She recalled a handsome young man fifty years earlier, a prospector who stayed there a fortnight. That's what she said.

Several years later on a springtime noon-hour, Kaleb—now a short and sandy-haired boy of six—and Aaron sat on bluff two miles from the village and picnicked.

In nearby trees birds squawked and a brook gurgled from a rocky outcropping. Smells of grass and blossoming trees sweetened the air. Wildflowers were abuzz with bees. Kaleb was devouring a peach, his face smeared with juicy pulp, his eyes giddy with the innocence of youth. A few farmhouses dotted the valley below, and a clay road divided a grassy field—a pair of squiggly lines twisting through golden-green. Crossing the valley, a group of stick figures walked slowly beside a wooden cart drawn by three goats. The Hawthorne clan. The daughter, Anna, a raven-haired lass a year younger than Kaleb, was skipping and swinging her arms, little puffs of dust rising in her wake.

"They're tiny as toys," Kaleb said, his voice a cheerful squeak.

"Yes," said Aaron. "This is quite the vantage point."

"If we had wings we could fly down to them in seconds."

"Perhaps," Aaron replied. "Maybe someday you can build something that will have the same effect."

"You could do it at home, Papa. All you need is wood, rope, and paper."

Aaron beamed. "I haven't the skill."

"You do, Papa!"

"I can imagine it, Kaleb, but I don't think I'd be successful."

"You can! You can do anything, if you try.…" His eyes were wide. "Will you just try?"

A breeze blew against them, more invigorating than unpleasant.

"I have a better idea," Aaron said. "Tomorrow, we'll build a kite. Would you like that? Would you like to fly a kite?"

"Not just a kite, Papa. A real flying machine. Please, Papa! Please!"

"Let's rinse our hands in the stream," Aaron said, changing the subject, "and then explore this area a bit. Maybe we can find a bird's nest."

A few minutes later they discovered the cave's mouth—a crack the width of a man's body, an almost unnoticeable hollow in the moss-covered rock, camouflaged by ferns and flying insects, and a small waterfall cut with sunlight producing a colorful mist.

"Look at that!" the boy shrieked. "A rainbow."

Aaron awoke, startled. A trail of phlegm was dripping from his mouth to the cave's floor. Shivering, he spat and wiped his hand across his lips and beard.

Somewhere far off was a repetitious beat.

Footsteps.

He hauled himself to his feet.

In the dark void a light flickered, no larger than the glow of a firefly, swirling and bobbing in the blackness. After a while, the glow waxed and a flame illuminated the approaching torchbearer, a lanky figure hunched over to fit the narrow confines of the passage.

"Is it you?" Aaron cried. "Kaleb?"

"Whom were you expecting?" came the reply. "The devil?"

The torchbearer's voice was deep, unrecognizable. A moment later, a tall youth stood before him, the face gaunt but familiar.

"This is the passage," the youth said. "From everything you've told me…this is…the way."

Aaron reached up and grabbed the other's shoulders.

"My my, Kaleb, it is you!"

"Yes, Father. We must make haste." Smoke from the torch was staining the limestone ceiling, blackening it. Kaleb stooped to one knee. "I saw daylight."

"How far?"

"Together—maybe two or three hours."

Aaron groaned.

"This is our only option," Kaleb insisted.

"Okay," Aaron said. "Okay."

"Father?"

"Yes?"

"What is that? Near your eye?"

Aaron stroked his face and touched a small round growth. He felt a similar pustule on his cheek.

"A boil or abscess of some type. Nothing to worry about."

"Then let us go now."

Hunched over, they marched through the shoulder-high, nearly cylindrical passage which was the color and texture of bronzed marble—glistening and dripping in places, like a giant's throat, wet with saliva.

For a good while they traveled like this, following the tunnel as it gradually ascended, and by and by, the air was warmer, the cave less damp, and the ceiling high. They no longer needed to hunch and they swung their arms freely.

The slope leveled. Now the walking was even easier, and Aaron thought: He has grown fine and strong. I am proud. Glad for him. Proud to have him. Proud to know him. But this—this is all we have. As good as it gets. Maybe he doesn't know this yet, maybe he does. Surely things can only grow worse. If by some miracle we get out, the cave will attempt to draw us back. That's its nature. Or perhaps my faculties are diminishing? Maybe forces in this cave have possessed me and made me a part of their sickness ?

Trying to guide his thoughts to a pleasanter tableau, he whistled a tune he'd heard in childhood. His breath was weak but the whistling was amplified by the limestone walls—any being within a few hundred feet would hear it—and he believed this category only included bats or albino salamanders: they'd found very few living things. Once, at the bottom of a cliff, they'd found a human skeleton, some bones broken but mostly intact. They'd also stumbled upon scattered staffs of straight timber, sometimes in bundles, that they had used to replace the torches when they were burning low. Kaleb had found artifacts of stone, arrowheads or spear tips, perhaps from some ancient race. Whether other living beings still inhabited this cavern, larger animals or humans, he was undecided, but there were times when a gust of air or unidentifiable sound from far off would make the hairs on his neck rise, and he'd feel sweat trickling down his back.

They arrived at a chamber, twenty feet in diameter, with a dark ruddy hue.

Four passages snaked off from the center, like the lines of the letter "X." The passage opposite them appeared to be as level as the one that brought them here. The third passage, to the right, ascended gradually, while the fourth passage, to the immediate left, led downward, and from this, a cold draft emanated.

"This looks familiar," Aaron said, trying to remember as he removed his knapsack. "I suppose you know the way?"

"I only explored the tunnel opposite," replied Kaleb. "I would have tried the other routes if I'd had more time."

The older man drank from his bota bag, just enough to wet his throat, and held it out to his son, who declined.

The chamber appeared empty but Aaron sensed the area had been occupied by others recently.

"Is it your opinion," said Aaron as he inserted the water bag into his knapsack, "that the other avenues at this junction do not need to be explored?"

"The path I took," Kaleb said, pointing with the torch, "leads to daylight…eventually."

"Might it make sense—and I am simply asking, not telling you, for, Kaleb, you've grown up quickly, nay, far quicker than my ability to understand, and I trust your judgment as much as I trust my own—therefore I ask if it makes sense to spend any time, even just a moment or two to see if the other passages may yield a less strenuous or quicker avenue toward our salvation than the one you know to be true?"

"Father, I do not know. I only know how hard it has been to find a way out, and I know the way I scouted will lead us out. I have never been more sure."

Aaron leaned uncomfortably against a rock standing between the passage they had come from and the one that descended. Cold air from below blew against his perspiring hairline. He felt a chill.

"I understand," he said. "I just need another moment."

"To rest?"

"No…I sense there's something important I'm forgetting. I do not want to leave in haste."

"Of course."

From somewhere far off, Aaron thought he heard rushing water and the light tinkling of a bell.

"Kaleb, how difficult is this next part of the journey?"

His son sighed. "It is difficult, Father. I think we can do it in two hours. But I have never felt stronger—and though you seem.…"

"I seem how?"

"Perhaps less fit than the man who used to carry me on his shoulders."

"Ha!"

"I still feel confident."

"But this brings us back to my idea—what if there are several exits? If we investigate the other routes, we should be able to quickly ascertain whether they can also lead us out, and if they're less difficult, that's to our benefit. On the other hand, if they appear to bear no fruit, we'll simply take the option you have discovered."

Kaleb turned away from his father. "We've no time for such a diversion."

"What if we split up? You take the upper trail; I'll take the downward. We'll go for a length.…" His words trailed off as his son stooped at the edge of the chamber to examine something. There was a small stack of timber, maybe five or six pieces of wood no longer than a man's arm. With the torch, Kaleb lit one of the logs and handed it to his father.

"As you wish, Father. Let us go no farther than a hundred paces or longer than a quarter hour and meet back here."

"Now you sound like me." He glanced at the passage before him and then back at Kaleb, who was already traversing the upward passage. "Go in God's name. If you see the devil, tell him I quit."

His son's torchlight receded and Aaron turned and entered the passage. Suddenly, he held slim hopes for the endeavor, and now, away from his son's presence, he felt a foreboding gloom. Shadows clawed at him, poking at his face and eyes, as each step took him downward. (That's what they were: steps. Crude but functional. Possibly carved centuries ago, for they were worn and bore no footprints.) He began to curse, his voice barely a whisper, and he berated himself for convincing his son that this dangerous tangent was worthwhile.

Step.

Step.

Step.

Kaleb was right. This stratagem would bear no fruit. Kaleb had grown quickly; his mind was sharp. Now, as a father, Aaron was no longer so quick or strong. He tried not to think about what lay ahead at the bottom of these steps, or if there was a bottom. Instead, he thought: Do we age faster when we're apart, or only when we sleep? What will we be to each other next time we meet? He traipsed on. A cold draft blew against him and he could feel it finding his bones, penetrating his body as if he were a cold sponge. The steps turned back on themselves in a cylindrical corkscrew; he knew this descent would be easier than going back.

Down…down…down.

A few icicles hung from the ceiling.

He stopped and removed his knapsack. As he drew out a leather glove, a thunderous rumbling shook the stairway and an ice-shard crashed near his feet. He clutched the rock and held the torch Kaleb had provided—a branch with enough fire for a half-hour.

When stillness and quiet returned, he took another step.

He would continue with the charade.

Into the bowels , he thought.

Step. Step. Step. Before he realized the steps were iced over, his feet slid out from under him, landing him painfully on his side. Groaning, he wondered if he had broken a rib. Two minutes passed before he was able to stand. With the pain somewhat lessened, he gingerly descended the next few steps. The staircase ended.

Stretching into the distance was a narrow arch, a bridge bordered by two hollows. Chasms . If Kaleb were here, they would drop stones into the gorges to gauge the depths. To hell with that. To venture farther alone across an icy bridge would be crazy. This was certainly not the route to take. But it felt familiar, as if he had crossed the bridge in the past. About waist high there was a rock with a flat surface on which an arrow had been scribbled—an arrow pointing to the bridge with sloppy lettering above it that said NO WAY OUT. It looked like the lettering a small boy might make, and then he wondered if Kaleb had done it long ago and they had forgotten, and he began to get scared, not from the surroundings but for fear he was losing his mind.

Several minutes later, he found himself back in the chamber with the four trails. Kaleb was there waiting.

"I was beginning to wonder if you were lost," Kaleb said, hopping from one foot to the other, looking alarmed. "I told you no more than fifteen minutes. You were gone much longer."

"I fell on the ice."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. But there's nothing down there. Was there anything your way?"

"It's caved in after thirty paces."

"Well," Aaron said, wincing at the pain in his rib, "I should've listened."

"Ready to go on?"

"Onward."

"We'll rest soon," Kaleb said, entering the passage. "There's a wonderful spot up ahead. Fifteen minutes."

"Amen."

After ten paces, the tunnel constricted. A crevice confronted them.

"It's good we're skinny," Kaleb said.

Dangling the knapsacks at their sides, they squeezed into the slot, stepping sideways, Kaleb in the lead. The old man's torch had expired. He tossed it and winced, and let Kaleb get farther ahead, out of earshot of his groans.

The crack narrowed and the wet walls pressed against him. The tip of his nose and back of his head brushed rock. His ribs scraped against stone; he thought his chest might collapse. And then he was stuck. Torso, legs, and boots wedged. Trying to shake free, he slammed his head. Everything slowed. From an odd angle, he spied a dreamy, almost frozen image, the back of a woman's head— long straight hair. She's alone. Empty chairs. A crackling fire spitting orange sparks above the blaze.

The image faded. Nuzzling his lips was wet rock, soaking his beard.

He struggled to breathe. Tilting his head slightly, he inhaled as deep as he could and, with the knapsack hanging precariously from his fingertips, he exhaled and dug his fingernails into the limestone and push! push! lifted his legs and rammed his knee into the other wall and pointed the toes of his worn boots sideways and push! push! lifted himself into a wider slot of darkness. A moment later, the cave was ten feet wide and he was stumbling, his heart pounding.

Kaleb held the torch close. "Father? How're you holding up?"

He breathed harder, wiping the sweat from his brow. "Fine," he croaked.

They continued. The ground was shiny; water puddled here and there.

"I hear a brook."

"Yes," Kaleb said. "There's a nice place ahead."

"Rest is what I need—"

"But only briefly." He stared at his father. "We can't have the daylight outside waning—we may not be able to see the opening."

"Understood."

"Unless we wait for the sun to come back up."

"No need to repeat yourself." He paused and tilted his head. "Stop. Shine that fire over here."

The young man directed the torch and illuminated a tiny pool on a limestone ledge, fed by a tongue-sized ripple. Each took turns holding the torch while the other drank deeply and then they rinsed their faces and hair. Stalactites ivory and amber dripped onto stalagmites which fed into smooth interstices. Beyond the pool were other pools, and the water cascaded from one pool to the next in a sweet melody, while the walls of the cave appeared bathed in a faint iridescence.

"Let's fill the water bags," Kaleb said.

They filled the bags and the older man drank from his and refilled it.

"Let's rest," he said.

The young man sat, and the old man lay on his back, his head propped on a stone.

"Is this the place you were talking about?"

"Yes."

"Heavenly. If there were sunlight I could stay here a long time."

"I saw the light, Father, a few hundred feet from here."

"That's all?"

"It's tough going."

"How tough?"

"Some climbing, and some narrow passages—but we have been through far worse."

"I am not as nimble as I used to be."

"Together we can do it. Are you ready to go on?"

"We've just arrived. Let's enjoy this place."

Kaleb held his tongue and leaned on an elbow. The old man stood and stepped over to the fountain. He pulled a dirty linen handkerchief from his pocket and with his back to Kaleb sopped it in the water. He rinsed it and wrung it half-dry then reached inside his shirt and wadded it over the sensitive area.

He sat near Kaleb.

"Is there anything to eat?"

"Check your pack," Kaleb said.

He loosened the leather straps of his knapsack, pulled up the canvas flaps, and stuck his hand inside. The coarse texture of canvas. Then: something small and round. He pulled it out.

"What's this?" He handed the sphere to his son.

"A radish," Kaleb said.

"I'll be damned. I thought we had jerky."

"We did, Father. Eons ago."

"Eons!"

Aaron laughed and coughed and laughed again, painfully, while Kaleb laughed and howled and the echoes ricocheted and collided and bounced back on themselves.

From his mud-encrusted trouser pocket, the old man pulled out a pocket knife and handed it to his son who divided the radish into two equal parts. Unhurriedly, they crunched their portions between their teeth and reveled in the tang and watery goodness.

"We were here before," the old man said.

"Here?" asked Kaleb.

"Eons ago."

"This place?"

"You were a little boy. It may have been that day. We had climbed down a cliff, and.…" His voice trailed off. "How deeply I regret it. It was an adventure, and to see you, you were so happy, so heroic."

"The way I remember it," Kaleb said, "you were the hero."

"You were so full of life—"

"You caught me on the cliff," said Kaleb. "I was falling and you caught me by the arm."

"And then we were happy finding this—"Aaron gestured to indicate the grotto surrounding them "—this place...." His words melted into the music of the nearby water show. "There was a game we use to play—"

"We should be moving on soon, " Kaleb said quietly.

"With the Hawthorne clan," Aaron said. "I wonder how they're doing. I don't suppose you remember them."

"Neighbors?"

"Village folk. Their daughter schooled with you in that little house at the end of the road. Black hair."

"Anna."

"Yes."

"What was the game?" Kaleb asked.

"Don't you remember? We're still playing it. We've always been playing it. And the stakes, oh, the stakes! When we were here last we had beef jerky. I wonder if I deposited it in a spot for safekeeping. Under this stone, perhaps."

Kaleb stood and reached high with the torch. "The sunlight awaits, Father. Let's make haste!"

The older man looked away and absentmindedly stroked his beard. "Thirty more minutes," he mouthed quietly.

"Father—"

"Aren't you tired?"

"It's a question you've told me not to ask."

"I was wrong then and I've been wrong since. But don't you need to rest? You've been exploring on your own. Now you're dragging me around. You're young and vibrant, but we must be alert for the final stretch."

He needs rest , Kaleb thought, fighting a sadness that had crept up on him suddenly. He's more worn than I've seen him. "Go ahead, Father, rest. I will wake you in a quarter hour." I mustn't base the schedule on emotions, though. And since there are no timepieces, and no way to be certain, I will err on the shorter side of the hourglass. "Go ahead, Father."

"Amen. Wake me in an hour." Aaron laid his head down and was asleep instantly, breathing quickly, as Kaleb watched and listened to his breaths and the water gurgling, Bubbling and babbling little twists and lies. Oh!—does the lord blame me for understating the difficulty of the path ahead? Father remembered the cliff, the same one I scouted. Without enough rope—they had just twenty feet in one knapsack—maneuvering would be difficult. And after the cliff, the crawl space, half-deep with water. Surely there'd been no water in it when they first entered.

The hypnotic melody of the nearby stream reminded him of birds singing, those flying beasts a cat might chase through trees, and Kaleb remembered trees and valleys with snow in the winter and dry golden grass in the summer, and he closed his eyes and remembered a farmer's field with wheat, and tall animals people rode; he pictured these though he didn't remember the names and sometimes with names there was no use, a thing was a thing if you used it, his father once said, maybe yesterday, but once you stop using it and being around it you forget it. You only remember if it means something. He remembered Anna, one of the few names he could remember. He no longer remembered his mother's name, just her sweet smile and joy when she was around. And now he did something else the old man had taught him to do: imagine he was somewhere else, and he went to that place and did what he had to do, he knew what it was, he did it every day, and he kept doing it, in his mind anyway, until he forgot.

A rumbling shook him from an evolving dream and he fought to keep from slipping back into it. Rousing himself, he stood. His joints cracked and he felt the nagging discomfort of an empty stomach. He shuddered with a sickening feeling of guilt. Never should have slept. The sun may have dropped out of sight—and we need her, the sun, to guide us down the last stretch of the tomb's interior.

He yanked the torch from the rocks where he had wedged it earlier and turned to face the snoring body—white-bearded, scabbed face. The limbs filled the clothing like twigs.

Kaleb patted his shoulder.

"Father," he said.

The elder's eyelids cracked like an animal wakening from hibernation, eyeballs sliding in sockets, skin riddled with boils. With effort, he sat. Wiped his lips on the back of his jacket.

"Let's go, Father," Kaleb said gently.

The old man smiled, both corneas glazed over, almost white. "Do you have the goods?"

"What do you mean?" said Kaleb.

"Did we get what we came for? What are you taking out of here?"

"You," Kaleb shouted.

"No, you're not," the old man said, standing up. "Where's the swill?" He turned and zigzagged into darkness. Soon Kaleb heard slurping and groaning, and felt himself struggling for control. He was in charge and it frightened him. But this place had always frightened him; the cure was to stay focused. Think . To reach the cliff, they had to negotiate a path next to a crevice. When he scouted the route earlier he had dropped a broken stalagmite into the crevice and listened for ten seconds and heard a splash as faint as a teardrop. For much of its length the crevice divided the passage down the middle; they'd have to straddle it, with barely enough room on each side for a man's foot. Then the crevice widened and there was just a narrow ledge to walk on near one wall.

The old man returned.

"Ready, Father?"

Aaron nodded.

When they reached the mouth of the crevice, Kaleb described the upcoming terrain as his father stood and listened. A heavy bellow, which began as a slow ripple from far out, ran under their feet for part of a minute, and they stood, four eyes with expressions of forced meditation.

"Understand what I said?"

"Lead the way," the old man muttered. "I'm right behind you."

" You'll lead ," Kaleb said, removing a coil of rope from his knapsack. "If you slip—I'll be there to pull you up."

He wound the rope under the old man's armpits. Tied the other end around himself. Bound together they muddled along, skirting the crevice by inches.

At first, the old man whistled, but then his breath came in gasps. They stopped. He hacked and spat into the abyss.

"I can't see."

"Keep hugging the wall, Father. You're doing fine."

They ambled onward. Now the cave was too quiet and Kaleb felt tortured by the silence. He remembered when he was a child, standing with his father next to a creek. Two fishes, pale as moonlight, were swimming against the current, trying to find a way upstream for reasons he could only begin to wonder at.

THEY ARRIVED at the foot of the cliff, a chamber with ground enough for several men to lie flat on. His father bent over and coughed, then slumped to his knees.

The cliff wall would have to be scaled. They had come down it long ago. Now they would have to climb back up. When Kaleb was here earlier, sunlight had been shining through a breach in the ceiling. Now there was just darkness and dripping water.

"Father, I'll untie the rope," Kaleb said gruffly.

Standing behind his father, he blinked tears as he untied the knots that bound them.

"Who are you to untether me?" his father asked.

"Who do you think I am?"

"You're me, when I was your age."

Kaleb held the torch and glanced at the cliff as his father braced himself near a sloping column of limestone.

"Doesn't look good," Kaleb said.

"You don't have to tell me. I can see for myself." He reached into his pack and pulled out his water bag. "Or I cannot see it! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"The sun is gone."

"Gone with the sun."

"It's not…good."

"Time to greet the devil."

"That's always been a poor joke."

"I'll admit that.…" His words trailed off. "I tried to be the village joker; I didn't succeed. I need to nap now."

He draped a thin cloth over a rock and lay down and rested his head against it, his eyes barely open.

"Father? Should I…get help?"

"Do what you have to. You're the torchbearer."

"The cliff is tricky. If we had more light and more rope, and maybe another strong back, or two, or three we could carry you out of here…I can make it out myself. The village is not far."

"The village," the old man muttered, contemptuously.

"That's been our goal."

"Ha!" croaked the old man, coughing into the dark. "I'm in no rush. If there's one thing I've learned, its patience."

Kaleb stroked his father's wrinkled brow. "I'll be back, soon."

"Go with God." The old man closed his eyes. The ground shook, and from above a cloud of dust drifted down. They both coughed. A powdery residue coated their faces, and crusty phlegm dirtied the old man's beard.

"I'll leave you my water, Father—"

He mumbled something Kaleb could not hear, and the old man crooked a finger at him. Kaleb leaned in and the old man whispered:

"If you see the devil—"

"I know—"

"Give him my best."

It took Kaleb ten minutes to reach the top of the cliff, and when he peered back over the edge the sweat on his back and under his arms chilled him. He saw darkness and heard…snoring.

The last passage was a crawlspace and he snaked his way through water—holding his breath several times before resting in water up to his elbows. The torch was dead and the cold water paralyzing; he shivered and his teeth chattered.

He pictured his father and forced himself to go on, groping blindly, discovering dead ends and turning back, until finally, after one last underwater swim, he emerged. Moonlight sifted through an opening in the very near distance, atop a scree of boulders. On hands and knees he crawled, one rock at a time, sensing vibrations beneath—water flowing somewhere below. Reaching the top, he brushed aside hanging roots and vines and straddled the lip of a creek. He was out—outside!

Free!

Sensations. He was happy and sad, weak and giddy, all at once. He nearly laughed and nearly wept.

The air smelled of pine and fir, and felt fresh against his face. A light snowfall shimmered in the moonlight and he squinted, allowing his eyes to adjust. Feeling unsteady, like he might float away above the earth, he followed the hillside. Down. Down. Down. Hopping over fallen trees and propelling himself off rocks, he let gravity guide him. The snow was shallow, only an inch or two deep, and the air was pure and invigorating. He heard a hoot and then a bird swooped and flew into the distance. An owl , he thought. Then he saw a large rodent. Badger ? Skunk?

He wondered how it would be to sit and wait for the sunrise, but checked himself. He stared back in the direction he had come from. He could roughly make out the path, and the ledge where the cave was hidden, where his father was waiting. Committing this to memory, he pranced downhill, turning back every few moments to further solidify in his mind the cave's location.

Soon he was on a field without rocks or trees. A million stars, the universe endless. Wheel ruts. Snow covered them lightly along with scattered hoofprints. Going east, he soon found himself between tall trees and a wooden fence. He smelled a wondrous smell, the aroma of smoke from a wood-burning stove.

A small cottage stood before him, with a wooden porch in front and a smoky wisp curling from a chimney. He felt joyous but also cautious. He was unsure how the inhabitants might welcome his nighttime calling.

He strolled up to the front door and knocked, feeling lightheaded. He waited a moment. He knocked louder; heard voices. A bilious wave rippled up from his gut and the world started spinning. Someone on the other side of the door asked, "Who goes there?" His legs buckled and the landscape tilted. Out of his peripheral vision, the porch approached. He felt a clapping crunch and swirled into blackness.

THE ROOM was dark. He was in a bed. Pillows, sheets, blankets. A young woman was asleep next to him. He closed his eyes and drifted….

Later, he awoke, alone. The room drenched in sunshine. On a wooden box was a pitcher of water, and a glass half-full. Through a window: evergreens, shrubs. Scattered patches of snow, glistening blue at the edges.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His stomach ached and his head throbbed. He put on his pants, shirt, and socks. Where were his boots?

Opening the bedroom door, he shouted, "Hello?"

He heard rustling elsewhere in the house, and a beautiful woman with black hair appeared. Dark eyes, his age.

"My name is Kaleb."

Tilting her head, she looked at him oddly. "That's what you told us…last night."

"I don't remember."

"You didn't say much," she said, leading him down the hall. "We were worried."

They entered a larger room, with chairs and a fireplace, and a sink and table and cupboards. He smelled food. An older woman with white hair looked up from a rocking chair.

"He's awake," the young one said.

"Kaleb," the older woman said. "You must tell us your story. After you eat."

Kaleb ran his hand through his hair. "Are there any strong men in the village? My father must be rescued."

The women exchanged glances.

"I beg of you," Kaleb said, "we must get help at once."

"The food's getting cold," the young one said, draping her arm around his waist. He felt good and a little lost; it was a strange and cozy feeling, being touched this way, and he wanted to sink into her for support and hold her tightly, but he was hungry. Starving. He needed sustenance.

He sat. The old woman smiled and picked up some knitting needles.

He was given oatmeal with butter, and he spooned it in gulps. There were sausages. He picked them up one at a time and ate many, sucking his fingers after each one.

And later he would remember the view through the window: a shapeless cloud blotting out the horizon.

It snowed that afternoon as he and four men from the village finally set out down the road. Two women came, too, the wife of one of the others, and Anna, the beautiful dark-haired one he had stayed with last night. He was glad for all the help. For a time he felt part of something larger than himself, a tribe united in a purpose; but then the wind died and the snow turned to rain, a drizzle at first and then a steady downpour, and almost imperceptibly the mood changed. Night came. The women prayed, and then, after saying farewell, headed back to their cottages.

Under curtains of rain, the men left the road and trudged up the mountain while clouds obscured the moon and mud sucked at their boots.

When at last they found the cave, a raging creek was feeding it, and there was a debate as to who would enter.

The oldest man stayed back with the one horse while the others, in single file, squatted and descended the scree on hands and rumps as water gushed underneath the boulders they were clutching.

At the bottom of the rocks, they huddled together in water up to their thighs; the tunnel going forward, which had been partially filled with water yesterday, was now completely submerged.

He remembered standing with them, as they each held torches, illuminating their wet hair and dampened spirits, as they discussed the options. They made tentative plans to return the next day, and then the next, but it rained for a fortnight, and the cave was not mentioned again. Kaleb left the village.

He wandered alone, living off the land and by his wits. In his travels he came across other villages, and sometimes found work for a few days, to buy food and shelter, but he rarely spoke and was looked on as a ne'er-do-well; some even considered him deaf and dumb.

When summer came, he returned to the cave but did not enter. He spent several weeks nearby, never venturing far. During the days he strolled about naked, and at night he made fires, which eventually one of the villagers spotted. They sent out an emissary—Jibbs—who visited him and urged him to return to the village. "It may not be the place you have in mind," Jibbs confided, "but you might be able to make a contribution of sorts that will, in turn, yield its own rewards, in a manner of speaking."

And so it was that Kaleb returned to the village, and eventually fit in, more or less, as one of its inhabitants.

Some years later, during springtime, he hiked back to the area near the cave and lay on a parcel of grass. Closing his eyes, he smelled sweet pollen and heard birds, and the gurgle of a nearby brook, and then he felt a pleasant peacefulness, a sensation as if he were comfortably falling into a dream. He awoke to a sound of shouting and for a moment he felt disoriented, as if what was about to happen had happened before, or maybe it had never happened and this was the first time.

He squinted in the sunlight. A boy with black hair was running toward him, a boy with a gleam in his eye and a face brimming with excitement. "Papa, Papa," the boy said, "I have something to show you…Papa! Papa! Come quick!"

Code 666

By Michael Reaves
| 6921 words

Almost a decade ago, Mike Reaves told us the tale of the Midnight Cruiser. Now he spins a new tale of life and death on the roads...but this time, the vehicle is an ambulance and the Emergency Medical Technicians staffing it are looking to save lives.

Those of you who share F&SF with younger readers probably shouldn't pass along this story on account of the adult situations and language in it.

1

THE FIRST THING JACK noticed, as his shocked senses came back on-line, was a considerable amount of pain in his neck and shoulders. Next, almost nauseating in intensity, were the smells of antiseptic and blood. The antiseptic he was used to; it was part of the rig, every bit as much as the shiny chrome, the compartments filled with syringes, saline flushes, catheters, and tourniquets, the drug box holding norepinephrine, atropine, insulin, and dozens of other protocols.

The blood scent he wasn't all that used to, seeing that it was his own.

The wagon was rolling at a good clip. Jack felt it slow, heard the siren snap out a brief warning rasp before it accelerated again. Too light outside to see if the rack was lit, but he suspected it wasn't. Code 2, then—expedite, but not a hot response.

So he probably wasn't dying. Good to know .

Claire, his partner, was sitting beside the gurney. She smiled at him. "Ironic," she said.

Jack shook his head—or tried to. That was when he learned he was wearing a whiplash collar. "No," he said. His voice sounded far away and echoing to him, and his mouth felt stuffed with cotton. He looked quizzically at Claire. "You gave me morphine?"

She snorted. "Right. I'm gonna dose you Sked One after a suspected TBI. Dream on—or rather, don't."

"I never went under, though I was swirly for a couple of minutes." But his arguments were pointless, and he knew it. No EMP-T with the sense to spell "malpractice" was going to give a possible concussed patient any chem that would potentially put him or her out, because from there it could be just a short stretch down the track to comaville.

Claire leaned in close; he could smell the tart sweetness of the gum on her breath and felt another surprisingly strong surge of nausea. "Listen close, Mobley—you will not fucking die on me. Understood?"

"Yes, ma'am." He didn't know what else to say. He had to drop something into the intensifying silence, however. "Anyway, like I said—it's not ironic."

Claire looked puzzled. Her improbably red hair shimmered as she cocked her head quizzically, unwrapped a second stick of gum, and slipped it into her mouth. Then she meticulously folded the foil and tucked it into the watch pocket of her black 501s. "You're an ambulance driver whose rig was totaled by a DUI. I'd call that—"

"Ironic. I know you would. But it's not." He forgot his circumstances again, tried to sit up, fell back with a groan. "'Irony' conveys a concept that's the exact opposite of whatever you'd expect," he told her. He searched his aching head for an example and, not surprisingly, couldn't think of one. He tried anyway: "Like if I said, 'Yesterday I rolled on a fifty-one-fifty,' and you said—"

"'You're an asshole,'" she finished. "Would that be ironic?"

Jack smiled sheepishly. "No, that would be the truth."

The two of them had started together; Jack Mobley and the rig. Jack couldn't be sure that it had rolled off the assembly line the same time he had completed 1-Basic, but he liked to think so. It was oddly comforting.

He remembered seeing it for the first time in the ER lot, gleaming bright and otherworldly in the halogen glare. The paint job was crisp and clean, the company logo almost three-dimensional; the chrome grips and stanchions unblemished by fingerprints and smudges; the aluminum diamond plate innocent of so much as a single molecule of blood, vomitus, urine, or serous fluid. Even the tread on the tires was brand new.

This pristine condition hadn't lasted long, of course.

Claire Jefferies was already an experienced EMT-D when she'd been assigned to the new truck. The idea of riding a wagon that still had—however briefly—that showroom smell had appealed mightily to her, but the rookie who came with it, not so much. It wasn't that she disliked Jack personally—it was simply the same impatience and vague contempt the seasoned pro always feels for the amateur. Once she felt confident that Jack had fully assimilated what she called "The Awful Truth"—that their job had little, if anything, to do with saving peoples' lives—then she knew that the two of them could face together the ninety-eight-point-six percent bullshit that EMTs had to wade through every day. So that was all right.

The first few calls had been fairly routine, albeit with their share of stomach-churning moments for the new guy. Jack quickly learned about such things as the unofficial but all-too-descriptive Code Yellow and Code Brown, and the importance of seatbelts—graphically illustrated one night by the convertible full of drunken teens that had hit a tree at seventy-five. When they'd arrived on scene there were only two bodies in the car—the other three were impaled on the branches overhead like macabre fruit. One of the boys had been flayed of his pants by the impact and subsequent impalement, and his bowels had let go as part of the universal atavistic fight or flight response. His underwear, stained and still dripping, hung from his shoe. "Hey, look at that," Claire had deadpanned. "Fruit of the Limb underwear."

The choice between losing his lunch and laughing in shocked astonishment had been surprisingly hard. But he'd made the right decision.

You had to laugh.

Then there were the absurdly grotesque cases, such as the man who'd hired a prostitute to blow him while he was riding in a limo. Things were going pretty much okay until the lady of the evening, for the first time in her life, had a grand mal seizure and clamped down, her jaws locking in a convulsive spasm that probably clocked in at over 300 psi. The limo driver, distracted by the client's sudden blood-curdling screams, drove off the road, down an embankment, and into an oncoming lane, where the limo was hit three times and rolled 200 feet. The driver was killed, the prostitute miraculously uninjured, although thoroughly traumatized, and the client suffered considerable injuries from ricocheting around the compartments; not the least of which was an almost-severed penis.

You had to laugh.

You had to laugh because it was either grow a shell thicker than the carapace of a hundred-year-old sea turtle or go fucking insane. Those were the choices, and there wasn't a lot of room for nuance. The door stayed shut or swung wide. It was either TV or real, and, not surprisingly, most of those who lasted opted for the former. EMTs, doctors, firefighters, police, morticians, and all the other professions that dealt with the dead on a quotidian basis…they all had one thing in common: an irreverence for those cooling pieces of meat that had once been animated by personalities, souls, or whatever you wanted to label them. Their humor was mordant, tasteless, shocking…and, ultimately, their salvation.

The situations weren't always that bizarre, of course, but what they did have in common, pretty much all of them, was a life-or-death urgency. It was called by various names: the Golden Hour, the Sunset Hour, or, perhaps most tellingly, the Magic Hour; whatever the nomenclature, they all meant the same thing. If the patient could be stabilized and "lifted" (the term used to apply to medevac helos on a war line; now it simply meant getting the Dump to the ER STAT) to treatment within an hour of First Response, his or her chances were about as good as could be expected for survival. The survival probability dropped precipitously after that first sixty minutes; Jack had seen patients go from "Stable" or "Fair" to "Critical" in less than five minutes. They'd once brought in a knife victim who'd had his femoral artery cut. They'd got him stable (they'd thought), but had neglected to notice a very slight nick in the brachial artery from the same blade. The latter had popped during offload; the guy was dead before an intern had noticed the rapidly spreading red stain beneath the shock blanket and the corresponding BP drop from the bleeder.

"Look at it this way," Claire said. "We did our job."

Jack stared at her. "How so?"

She shrugged. "We delivered a stable patient to the ER."

Jack shook his head in disbelief. But in a manner of speaking, it was true: you couldn't get more stable than dead.

Like they said in ICU: "Bleeding Always Stops."

2

CLAIRE WAS GOOD at her work, and apparently enjoyed it. She seemed never, or at least hardly ever, at a loss for what to do in an emergency situation. Once, when they were both 10-10 and had no equipment, Jack saw her save the life of an assault vic with a crushed windpipe by using a rusty razor blade to give the guy a voodoo tracheotomy and the hollow barrel of a ballpoint pen to hold the ragged incision open until the responders arrived. The more dire the situation, the calmer and more collected she was. Jack thought she had a great potential career in Emergency Medicine, and told her so once.

She'd agreed, but not with the enthusiasm he might have expected. "Money's not bad, God knows," she'd answered, "and there's job security."

"Plus you'd be helping people—always good for karma," he'd responded.

Claire had looked at him for so long he'd started to wonder if she'd had a microstroke or a TIA. Then, in a voice as dry as cremated ashes, she'd said, "Karma. Right."

They never spoke of her career again.

They didn't speak of Jack's, either, because they both knew that he didn't really have one. He was cool in a crisis and he could pilot the rig well enough. He was a decent paramedic who could, as one of the nurses once said, tell a spleen from a bladder without having to refer to a diagram scribbled on his palm, but that was about the extent of it. Everyone knew that Claire had the spark. Jack was just the driver.

Or so it was until that day when the drunk in the classic Fairlane came from out of nowhere while they were Code 3 through an intersection and sprayed styrettes, ampoules, bandages and meds—not to mention a copious amount of Jack's blood—all over the glistening black asphalt at three P.M. on a scorching summer day.…

It's pretty much an uncontested truism that doctors, nurses, et al., make the worst patients, and Jack Mobley did nothing to subvert that particular paradigm. He was a pain in the ass about taking his meds. He kibitzed whatever they injected into his shunt. He bitched about the food, the temperature, the bathing.

He had a broken leg, a punctured lung secondary to a shattered rib, and a concussion. "And you're lucky that's all you have," Claire told him. "He hit you dead bang at nearly thirty-five. So stop being such a prick to everyone and be glad you're alive."

Claire herself had suffered nothing more than a mild concussion and a Technicolor ear; she'd been riding in back with the victim, getting his vitals. That poor bastard, splinted and strapped to the gurney and bound for the ICU for nothing worse than a dislocated patella, had come out by far the worst; he wound up a quad, with his spine severed in four places. The drunk driver in the Fairlane survived with hardly a scratch, due to two reasons. The first was that he was drunk, which, as everyone from the twenty-year department head down to the rankest intern knows, often lets you squirt and slither like Plastic Man through accidents that could put a sober man in a cast from his toenails to his hairline. The second reason was that he was driving a 1954 piece of Detroit iron that could take on a German Tiger tank without breaking a metaphorical sweat.

Jack was, he knew, indeed lucky.

He didn't feel lucky, though. He just felt scared, because he shared one more prejudice in common with just about everyone in the various fields of the medical profession: that hospitals were the last places on the planet one should be if sick.

3

In the last forty-eight hours before he was discharged, Jack was upgraded to "stable." This meant several things, the most important of which was that, by the strange logic of the ICU, he was no longer accorded the comparative luxury of a room to himself. The official designation of his new room was "semiprivate," which meant there was room for one other patient.

When they'd gurneyed Jack in, the privacy curtain was open and the other bed empty. He hoped it would stay that way until he was discharged, but no such luck. He was awakened just after midnight by a hoarse whisper coming from the other bed. The curtains were closed now and the lights dimmed. But someone was obviously occupying the bed, and judging from the stentorian rasp of his voice, he was much older than Jack.

"Do you see them?"

His new neighbor's voice had the phlegmy congestion of one who spent a good deal of his life prone. There was another accent as well, which Jack couldn't place, one which clipped the consonants and the ends of sentences sharply and precisely, like neatly trimmed fingernails.

There wasn't even a question of Jack responding. The last thing he wanted to do was open himself up to an endless dialogue in the midnight hour with some old fart who was at least semidelusional, judging by his opening conversational gambit. Something told Jack that the old man was a "frequent flyer"—a term applied by staffers to those who checked in with imaginary illnesses because they craved the attention. Jack had hauled a fair number of such folk in the rig to the ER over the past few months. What they did with them afterward wasn't his problem. But it was beginning to look increasingly like this one was.

"Do you see them?" The voice was louder, the tone more preemptory. Jack reluctantly realized that it was no good pretending he was asleep. The old guy was on to him.

"See who?" he asked.

"Ein krankegeisten."

The foreign words crystallized the accent for him: German. He didn't recognize the subject of the sentence, however, his experience with the language being limited to a semester in college three years ago. Curious in spite of himself, Jack made a vaguely interrogative grunt.

" Bitte , the…" The old voice, full of creaks and hesitations that, for some reason, made Jack think of a sun-dried piece of leather, paused, searching for the right word. "The…sick spirits…spirits, nicht wahr ?" The voice was silent for a moment; once again, Jack presumed, leafing through the pages of an unfamiliar mental dictionary. When he spoke again, his tone held an unmistakable certainty.

"Ghosts. The sick ghosts."

Jack had no idea how to reply. He supposed that if one might see sick ghosts anywhere, a hospital would be the logical place. And one thing he'd learned about psychotics was that, contrary to popular belief, their fantasies were nearly always logical— if you were willing to give them their initial delusion. David Berkowitz's compulsions to kill, for example, made a twisted sort of sense once you accepted the admittedly hard to swallow premise that his neighbor's dog was possessed by a demon who controlled him. Or take the granddaddy of all psychopaths—Charles Manson. Once you were across that particular Rubicon of irrationality that equated killing pregnant starlets and other members of the Hollywood elite with legitimate protest of the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex, a certain bizarre logic followed—and there was probably already a bunk with your name on it at the old Spahn Ranch.

But Jack wasn't willing to take those leaps of faith, no, thank you. He'd heard of poltergeists, of course, but he suspected that krankegeisten was just some bizarre Teutonic portmanteau word that the guy'd invented.

He made no reply, and heard nothing further from his mysterious neighbor; not even the raspy breathing he'd noticed earlier. For a moment Jack felt concerned—what if the fellow had suffered an MI or something similar?

He located the station buzzer, wondering if he should page the night nurse. He looked at the wall clock and realized with a shock that it was 2:40. He'd taken a Vicodin for the leg-pain over an hour ago, and a half hour after that he'd been given a milligram of Clonazepam to help him sleep. It was as if the one-two punch had just been waiting for the realization.… Jack abruptly felt a huge load of cotton bricks hit and bury him.…

4

At the behest of his professors, in his last year of college Jack had read several novels of classic horror: The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , by Robert Louis Stevenson; and of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus .

He'd enjoyed Wells's book the most. He hadn't expected to like Dracula , as he'd never been fond of epistolary storytelling, but the book had surprised him; it had an unexpected humor, and it moved along at a steady pace and kept him immersed, whether in exchanges of letters, diary entries, or whatever other medium the author had chosen.

The only one of the four that he had found incredibly, unremittingly dull was Frankenstein . Perhaps he was used to the inarticulate pathos of Karloff in the old cinematic versions of the tale; certainly Boris could convey volumes more with a poignant look, even concealed under the thick slabs of Jack Pierce's mortician's clay makeup, than the acres of exposition that Shelley had her character declaiming on every page. To make matters worse, she used pronouns that were archaic even in her day: thou, thy, thine, and so on. The result, as far as Jack was concerned, was a slow, cumbersome, and decidedly non-scary book. He remembered scenes from the other three tales quite vividly—Dracula crawling up the wall of his castle just after feeding, bloated and corpulent as a gigantic leech, for example; he'd even had nightmares once or twice as a result. But the only things he recalled from Shelley's magnum opus were the ending in the Arctic and the scene where a weary Dr. Frankenstein is awakened abruptly by the sight of his hideous creation standing at his bedside, silently appraising him. That was powerful stuff, he'd thought.

And so he was understandably upset to find himself suddenly awakened in a replay of that scene, with himself as Frankenstein.

It was a sudden jangling sound that jerked him from his drug-induced sleep, and the jolt of adrenaline that immediately followed nearly put him into cardiac overdrive. The rattling that had awakened him had been the metal hooks on the curtain's runner being suddenly and violently yanked aside to reveal the creature that now loomed over him, glaring. In appearance it did somewhat resemble Frankenstein's fictional creation: the corpse-like pallor, the emaciated limbs, the long, patchy hair. An oversized gown hung from the skeletal frame like a houserobe on a drying rack. After an eternal moment of blood-freezing terror, Jack realized that this apparition had to be the old man from the neighboring bed, who had evidently grown tired of waiting for an answer.

"Ein krankegeisten!" the revenant hissed at him.

Although he'd figured out who it was (any lingering doubts were dispelled by a quick sidelong glance at the room's other bay; the curtain had been pulled back there as well and the bed was empty), the knowledge did little to reassure Jack of his immediate safety. Even though the old man looked like he weighed about ninety-five pounds and his age could match his weight, still, the incredible malevolence in his face sent Jack scrambling back the length of the hospital bed. Instinctively he groped for some kind of weapon or alarm and his fingers found the station buzzer. His brain screaming like a smoke alarm, Jack closed his eyes and pushed the button.

Silence.

In retrospect, he realized, everything had been pretty quiet all along; it was, after all, the graveyard shift in the Stable Care Unit. Save for the usual background noises, the almost unnoticeable hum of the ventilation system and the muted pings and beeps of monitors, it was very quiet. He remembered the nightmare of a few moments ago as loud and terrifying, but now he realized that ninety percent of that had been in his head.

Impelled by some obscure sense of renewed safety, he opened his eyes. The curtain completely shielded the bay, as it had when he'd gone to sleep earlier. The old man wasn't in sight. Even as Jack registered this, and realized also that he would surely have heard the distinctive rattle the curtain made when it was pulled closed, it was yanked open again. Jack flinched, but it was only the night nurse.

She noticed his wariness. "You okay?"

Jack nodded. He didn't trust how his voice might sound.

She looked at his clipboard. "You're due for more Clonazepam."

"Okay." His gaze involuntarily followed her as she ran the curtain back around the bay, and he noticed for the first time the old man's bed.

The curtain was wide open. The bed was made up, the sheets neat and clean. Hospital corners , he thought.

He realized she had said something. "What?"

"I said, 'Anything else?'"

"How 'bout some bourbon to wash it down with?"

She raised an eyebrow and snorted, then yanked the curtain the final few feet. Jack sat in an upright fetal position, resisting the surprisingly strong urge to rock back and forth. He very much did not want to see her look at him with that look that says, Maybe this one belongs over on the Psych Ward.

When the nurse brought him the small green pill, he took it with a swallow of tap water. He nodded his thanks. He was very much afraid that if he spoke, if he said anything at all, he would find himself asking what had happened to the old man. And the possibility seemed equally real that she might ask him what he was talking about, the last patient to occupy that bed had been discharged weeks ago. And Jack didn't want to hear her say that, or anything remotely close to that. Not at all.

5

TREAT 'EM AND STREET 'EM —that appeared to be the prevailing policy in every hospital across the land nowadays. As soon as one was adjudged to be mobile and relatively infection-free, it was, "Here's your hat, what's your hurry?" Jack was issued a pair of adjustable aluminum crutches, a booklet of exercises for his broken left tibia, and a scrip for more Vicodin (two refills). Never mind that he couldn't walk more than a city block without waves of fiery pain thundering down his leg. Never mind that if he inhaled more than moderately he felt as if someone was knifing him in his lower-right quadrant. (It wasn't like he was even allowed to breathe shallowly; to do so was to run the risk of a lung infection and possible lobar pneumonia. "You're young and in good shape; you'd probably survive," the discharge nurse had told him, but Jack couldn't help but notice the tiny spin of doubt she'd put on "probably." The unspoken codicil seemed to be, "If you're too dumb to follow directions and die as a result, don't come whining back to us.")

Ein krankegeisten.…

He was halfway across the parking lot before he saw it, parked with spaces on either side, as if the other rigs were only too happy to accommodate its privacy.

It was the start of another long, slow summer evening in Los Angeles, and Jack thought that, in the sanguine hydrocarbon light, the vehicle before him looked almost as if it had been painted with blood. Its true color, he would learn later, was a soft eggshell, but that wasn't how it appeared at first sight. It had a long, sleek chassis with scalloped fenders and the flowing lines of classic Art Deco. The hood ornament, tilted at about thirty degrees, was a Rod of Asclepius: a snake twined about a staff. One of the first things he had learned in medical school was that this, not the caduceus, was the universal symbol of medicine.

"Wow," he said, stopping to admire it.

"Meet the new rig," Claire said. A Santa Ana, the dry desert wind responsible for most of the city's destructive fires, began to blow softly, rustling palm fronds far overhead. "Definitely not the same as the old rig."

"Helluva lot older than the wagon we had," Jack said. It was, he guessed, easily ten years older than the Fairlane that had done its best to obliterate Jack's previous rig, along with Jack.

"Like it?" There was a sly undertone to Claire's voice that should've warned him.

"Yeah." Jack strolled around it, admiring it. There were three red Grecian crosses painted on it; one on the rear door, which opened like a hatch; one on the top, between the light rack and the growler; and one on the spacious hood. Beneath this last one was the word AMBULANCE painted in mirror-reversed text.

Nowhere could he find any indication of the make or model, or even the year. The engine under the hood was undoubtedly a V8, and he noticed that seat belts had been bolted to the leathern front seats, no doubt as part of the vehicle's restoration. Jack had to suppress a snort of laughter when he saw the electric coil lighter and ashtray, which were part of the console just beneath the CB radio. He noticed no cab bags, or indeed any sort of trauma-response equipment, not even a doctor's "black bag." In the glove box, perhaps, or under the dash.

Jack went around to the back and peered through the rear window. He was surprised at how relatively spartan the interior was. On the left side were two cot platforms to which stretchers could be affixed; on the right side was a fold-up bench with restraints. On the floor next to the right wheelwell were two small wooden rectangles with leather straps. Their purpose mystified him, although after a few moments he tentatively assigned them the role of wheel blocks.

On the forward wall, just above the door to the driver's compartment, was a clock face with large Arabic numerals. Below that was a small pump-action sink with a mirrored cabinet above it. Clamped to another cabinet beneath the sink was an antiquated blood-pressure cuff and bladder, a stethoscope, and a headstrap reflector.

"Jesus," he murmured. "Where are the leeches and the miasma sticks?"

"Don't worry. We've only had it for a day. We'll get it stocked up as much as possible before we roll with it."

Jack turned and looked at her. "I cannot help but notice an inappropriate pronoun in those statements."

"'Inappropriate'? I'm not the one who got a practically brand-new truck turned into modern art."

"Oh, and this be my punishment? I'm cursed to ferry sick ghosts across the Styx in this motorized skiff?"

Claire looked thoughtful. "Interesting image," she said. "But, as usual, it's all about you. What about your partner, who's being dragged along in your wake? It's two to a rig, remember? That's why they're called—"

" Pair -a-medics." Jack finished the hoary old joke in unison with her. Neither of them laughed.

"Tell me you're kidding," he said. He waved a hand at the ancient vehicle. "Even if you could bring it up to code, there's no way we could stock it well enough to—"

"Okay, I'm kidding."

"—meet even basic—" he stopped. "Wait, what?"

"Kidding. It's part of an exhibit on the history of medicine. When I saw it parked here, I couldn't resist." She peered closely at him. "What, did you really think they'd put us on the streets in a rig like this? It's one step up from a horse and buggy."

Jack eyed her suspiciously; before he could pass judgment on her sincerity, however, he noticed Claire was suddenly paling. Her hair, a ginger-burgundy, became even more vivid in contrast with her white cheeks. She staggered, then sat down on the curbstone, putting her head between her legs.

"Claire? Hey, are you all—"

He didn't get to finish the sentence. His own vision collapsed into a black hole. Time slowed and stretched, and sounds Dopplered down to match. He was vaguely aware of having fallen to his hands and knees beside Claire, asphalt warm and sticky beneath his hands, but before he could try to speak, the tiny black-and-white image at the bottom of the well in his head shrank still more and then winked out completely. Jack started to wonder if Claire had blacked out as well, but before he could even finish formulating the thought the blackness around him was complete.

6

AS CONSCIOUSNESS slowly returned, Jack found himself thinking of one of the orderlies, an Hispanic in his early fifties named Jesús Alvarez. He'd been employed by the hospital for nearly seventeen years when, late one night while emptying the trash, he'd quietly dropped dead of a myocardial infarction.

He couldn't have chosen a better place to have a heart attack—literally just outside the doors of the cardio unit. Less than three minutes after an intern watched him fall and called Code Blue, a doctor was putting the paddles on Alvarez and cranking him up again. They'd kept him overnight for observation and had found no irregularity. He'd asked to be discharged; as he was walking out of the ICU he keeled over again. Again they shocked him back to the land of the living; this time he made it all the way to the parking lot before dying a third time.

That had been the last one. Alvarez's heart, jolted back to functionality once more, had kept beating for the last three years. He'd been told to cut out his two-pack-a-day habit, and his wife's beef taquitos fried in lard, among other dietary insults, and it had been strongly suggested that he walk the eight blocks to work rather than drive his old VW. He had followed none of these suggestions, and his EKGs and MRIs had shown no change. Members of the staff looked at him, scratched their heads, and smiled uncomfortably the few times he made eye contact.

The only other difference, of course, was that he was no longer addressed by the staff as "Jesús." The Hispanic pronunciation had been changed to the Anglicized form of "Jesus." It didn't matter to Alvarez; he answered to either pronunciation.

Jack was back in Recovery, lying on a gurney, a glucose-saline drip stuck in his arm, and outside of a dull headache he felt pretty much as he had before he'd passed out. His neck was relaxed, his head lolling somewhat to the left, so that when he opened his eyes he was looking at the wall. It was bare save for a grounded wall socket. Jack stared at it, noticing abstractly that, like all three-prong outlets in hospitals, it had been installed upside-down so that the grounding-bar receptacle was on the top and the two parallel slits for the polarized poles were underneath. He'd asked, back when he'd first gotten the job, why this was apparently de rigueur not just in this hospital, but every one he'd ever been in. An orderly had explained that it was done due to the admittedly remote possibility that a scalpel or some other metallic bit from a surgeon's tray, or any facile conductor, might fall and land on the plug in such a way as to bridge the poles and so short out the circuit.

Jack had not known, initially, whether to be impressed or amused at this extreme evidence of bureaucratic tunnel vision. Later that same day, however, when he brought the rig back from his latest call, he very nearly ran over an old woman lying in a crumpled heap on the blacktop about thirty feet from an old beat-up Nissan, the front bumper of which was wrapped around a lamppost. The car was still running and the driver's door was open.

She'd thrown a brain embolism while driving past the hospital. She'd managed to steer most of the way through the parking lot before hitting the lamppost, after which she got out and crawled. She'd died less than twenty feet from the ER entrance. No one, evidently, had heard the crash or seen the old woman trying to crawl to the doors until she'd stopped moving. More precious moments were wasted arguing the legal ramifications of carrying her through the doors, since no one was there to speak for her. During the argument, she had died.

She was eighty-two years old.

The old saying "penny-wise and pound-foolish" did tend to spring to mind.…

7

"Hey…partner."

Claire smiled somewhat wanly up at Jack. "Hey," she whispered in reply. She poked one hand out from beneath the blankets and he caught her fingers in his.

"How are you?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Me? Fine…except for this pesky problem of passing out whenever I try to stand. Not sure what's up with that."

Jack nodded. Nobody else was sure either; she checked out fine in every other way, but she kept going orthostatic when she raised her head higher than her heart. As long as she stayed prone with her feet elevated an inch or so, she was fine, her BP solidly within normal limits. The minute she started any aspirations toward the third dimension, however, it was like someone opening a petcock in her occipital area and draining the blood from her head. Her MRI showed no signs of a fistula, TIA, or other trauma.

"Maybe you pissed off the rig by calling it a horse and buggy," he suggested, with an uncomfortable laugh.

Claire laughed, too, but hers was even more uncomfortable, and he could've sworn that, for a moment, a look of absolute terror crossed her face.

She pleaded exhaustion, and he apologized and left the room. When he looked back from the entrance she was already asleep.

Jack was worried about her. Her hypotension was completely idiopathic and frustrating as hell because there was nothing further anybody could do . Not even a surgeon, to whom every problem usually looks like a steak, waxes overly enthusiastic about unzipping someone's head without a specific reason. In Claire's case, however, there was no indication for any procedure. All they could do was let her take up bed space while they monitored her and waited for any change, either for better or worse. After a while, one began to look as good as the other.

And then she died.

It made no sense, and there was no point to it, as is usually the case with death. Jack hadn't even been there for her final moments; he'd been off-campus, choking down a Whopper at Burger King. When he'd returned, one of the candy stripers at the nurses' station told him that "Carrie" had flatlined forty minutes ago, and they'd been unable to resuscitate. She'd named him as next of kin, he was told, the worker's breezy tone punctuated by a startlingly loud crack of the gum she was chewing with bovine enthusiasm, so would he mind signing for her?

Jack scribbled his name on the forms, his mind utterly stunned, like a poleaxed steer at the slaughterhouse. They asked if he wanted to see her, and he shook his head. He wandered the corridors for a while, noticing at one point that he was at the Oncology station, and then, after what felt like only a couple of steps, standing bemusedly before the doors of the fMRI department, which was on the other side of the hospital. There's a lot to be said for shock , he thought.

His mind grayed out again; when he snapped back to reality once more he was near the ICU exit, and Claire was sitting in the waiting room.

She was in the front row, her legs casually crossed. Her skin was pale, slightly cyanotic on her face and upper body. Her gown had been torn open in front and he could see the conducting fluid that facilitated the defibulator's current still glistening on her flat breasts. Her legs and lower thighs were a mottled blue-black with purple highlights. She looked like she'd been brutally beaten, but Jack knew it was only lividity—the settling of blood in the body's lower extremities, gravity's triumph over a heart finally and forever stilled.

Jack simply stood there, staring at her. He noticed that she was slightly transparent, like a double-exposure effect in an old film. The example that came to mind was Topper , although Claire, it must be admitted, was a far cry from Constance Bennett. But as far as that went, he wasn't exactly Cary Grant either.

He suddenly realized something else unusual about her: Claire was gradually growing more solid in his vision. When he'd first noticed her he could clearly see the blue plastic of the chair beneath her thighs and the scuffed linoleum beneath her feet. It was gradually becoming more difficult to see them. As she sat there, staring at the floor, she appeared to be regaining her corporeality.

There were several other people in the waiting room, Jack noticed, as well as standing in line before the Admittance window, who were solid but who, as he watched, began to fade away. The various sounds of their speech and movement slowly grew softer, fading out along with their solidity. And there were others—quite a few, actually—fading into view from nothing at the same time. He saw the old German, the animated cadaver who'd scared the living shit out of him about a week ago, along with the old woman who'd died in the parking lot.

The German saw him as well and approached. He was still wearing the gown, but now he looked more like someone aged and pathetic than the terrifying visage Jack had seen when the curtain had been savagely pulled back.

In fact, he seemed almost humble. "My apologies," he said, his congestion and accent making the words almost as incomprehensible as his German had been. "I did not know at the time who you were."

"I don't understand," Jack said. "I'm nobody special. I—"

But the gaunt man only smiled and slipped away into the increasing crowd, so quickly that Jack couldn't follow his path.

Nevertheless, he felt that he almost understood the rationale behind it all. He realized then that they were all looking at him, all the sick ghosts, as if they expected something of him.

At a loss, Jack looked again at Claire. This time she looked up and met his gaze. "There you are," she said, as if he'd been keeping her waiting. "Come on, let's get to work."

She stood and headed past him for the sliding doors with EMERGENCY on them in big red letters. He caught her arm, stopping her. He wasn't surprised by how it felt—cool, but definitely alive.

"Please, Claire," he said. "Where are all these people coming from? What do they want from—"

He realized suddenly that her arm was rapidly becoming warmer in his grasp. Painfully so, in fact. He released his grip just in time to keep from being burned.

He noticed something else, too: her hair was beginning to burn.

At first he thought it was a trick of the fluorescents, but after a moment's thought that made no sense either; they tended to bleach color out, not intensify it. He stared at her in utter disbelief. Each strand of hair was a slightly different shade now, and all were writhing upward as if trying to escape her skull.

He looked at her eyes. Normally they were green, a pure, steady, level green. But now, looking closer, Jack could see tiny flames, almost too small to see, dancing behind the irises and in the darkness of the pupils.

He'd smelled the acrid scent of burning hair many times. He caught no whiff of it now, but her hair was still on fire.

Claire grinned at him. Jack was afraid of looking too closely at her teeth, at how unnaturally white and pointed they were. Her skin was also a subtle but noticeable shade of red—although, in this case, he had to admit that any color would be an improvement on the lifeless fishbelly white she had been before.

Claire saw the look on his face and frowned; it was only a slight frown, but for some reason he felt his marrow chill.

"Too much?" she asked. He noticed that her skin was not as vibrant as before; her hair, also, wasn't burning quite so "hot."

"Why, Claire?" he asked. "Why us?"

"Why not you?" a familiar voice asked from behind them. Jack turned to see Jesus Alvarez, the maintenance guy. The Latino shrugged. "They didn't take me for the job because I was too terco ; I wouldn't stay dead."

Jack noticed, without much surprise, that of all the revenants trying to attract his attention, Alvarez was by far the most insubstantial; it was like looking through an unwashed window.

The sick ghosts clamored around him like Third-World tourists importuning a bus driver. "Too many," he found himself saying. "You won't all fit!" Desperately he turned to Claire and asked, "Where are we going, anyway?"

"Does it matter?" Claire asked. "They have to get there. And you're the one who'll do it. As many trips as it takes."

Jack understood, then, finally. And it made sense. After all, all he was—had ever been, actually—was the driver.

As he took the first wave out to the rig, Jack saw Claire get into the seat beside him. She grinned slightly, shrugged. Jack noticed she had put another piece of gum in her mouth, and was rolling the tinfoil wrapper into a tiny ball between thumb and forefinger.

"Like you said once," she told him. "Job security."

Jack watched, fascinated, as the ball became a drop of molten silver that fell from between her fingers to splash on the floor mat.

What the Red Oaks Knew

By Elizabeth Bourne and Mark Bourne
| 6467 words

"We drove north from Russellville to Fayetteville," says Elizabeth Bourne of the trip that sparked this story, "and then came down again following the Pig Trail. We passed through Mountain Home, Heber, Valley of Shadow. On a whim, we turned off the main road—maybe it was the time of year (fall) or maybe it was the lonesome nature of that leafy trail. We hit a cross roads with a sign proclaiming, 'Red Star, Arkansas' with no population and we stopped for a 'look-see' as Mark called it. There was a beat-up airstream glinting back in the woods, and a dead raccoon by the side of the road. The road uphill disappeared in fog. The way south was paved in golden leaves. We fell in love with Red Star and right off, began building a mythology. 'What the Red Oaks Knew' is part of a vaster tale of strange doings in Arkansas."

THE WAY THEY TELL IT IS, Jimi Bone was just a punk kid in Texas when he stumbled, literally fell shoved down on his ass, into that which no man was ever meant to see, much less get caught up in. Just a screw-up, is what his pa, who should know, said to the TV interviewers the night Jimi Bone lit out from Port Arthur followed by a tail of blue and red flashing lights.

Course, he wasn't Jimi Bone then. That happened after his beat-up '98 Ford Focus, smelling like old Taco Bell, rattled into Dallas, after he traded it for a superior model still equipped with its new car perfume (its owner discovered the trade the following morning), and on his way east decided he liked the name "Jimi Bone." It sounded dangerous, like a knife edge. Just twenty-one and knowing his limitations (drilled into him from birth), Jimi needed all the spine he could talk himself into. Especially with what was in the trunk.

The new silver Impala high-geared it onto Highway 30, blowing across the dust bowl of Texas east into Arkansas. Past the dried-up rice fields of Texarkana, Hope, and Arkadelphia. After the Ouachita Mountains (still blanketed by smoke from that last fire) he ended up in Conway.

Now, Conway's a college town, maybe 50,000 souls, settled in by the Arkansas River. They have a local festival there: Toad Suck Daze. Good a place as any to look for a beer, then hide out among the thrill-rides and fresh-painted booths offering homemade jams, jugs of water, quilts, dousing rods, and a Verizon stand that seemed confused finding itself in such a native assembly.

At a counter laced with blinking Christmas lights, a girl set out handmade decorations. Feathers glued together, some with bones attached—delicate mouse skulls, or the skinny femurs of some small animal. Satin ribbons bound them. The constructs sparkled with craft-shop glitter. The girl didn't notice Jimi's approach, or maybe she didn't care.

"What are these?" Jimi picked up one fragile bunch with a tiny jawbone nestled among blue sequins and owl feathers. He thought it might suit his new name to have a totem piece stuck on his dash. He wondered if the jaw had once belonged to a squirrel.

The girl looked up. Her lashless eyes were rabbit-red. Her hair was ivory white, her skin bone white. "They're my play-pretties. Five dollars will get you a small one. Ten for the big ones. Don't matter to me if you buy one."

The less interested she seemed in his purchase, the more dear the feathered bit became. Jimi said, "Why you make 'em if you don't care if you sell 'em? Is this one five?"

"I make 'em because that's what I do. It's five. What's your name? I'm Pink."

"Pleased to meet you. My name's Jimi Bone." It was the first time he'd said it out loud.

She studied him. "You Cherokee?"

Jimi's mouth twisted down in disappointment as he stared at his feet. Though why he'd hoped she'd know better wasn't yet clear to him. People made that mistake all the time. "Nope. Chinese. Part, anyway."

Her gaze didn't waver. "Name don't sound it." With a deft movement she switched out the item he held for a blue and gray piece in whose center curled a snake's tightly wound spine. Pink said, "This one's yours. It's ten, though."

It felt right in his hand. When he looked up, Pink stood serious as stone, waiting. The tattoo on the back of Jimi's neck tingled. He winced in surprise. The tiredness drained out of his body. If his lucky mark spoke to him, he should listen. His mouth dried up as he realized he was going to tell her, this girl, about what had happened back at Port Arthur. "I got something to show you. Can you come?"

Pink grabbed a jar of green liquid, Jimi thought it might be Gatorade. As she slipped from behind her booth, he asked about it. She said, "It's where I keep my colors. They're safe in the jar." The viscous stuff sloshed within the glass. It changed hue from grass-green to turquoise as Jimi watched. He couldn't think of anything useful to say so he just nodded, then headed for the parking lot. She abandoned her booth and caught up. Her white lace dress, no paler than her skin, occasionally brushed his black jeans.

At the car, Jimi popped the trunk. The thing seemed bigger than in Port Arthur. Pink took a breath before whispering, "That's a damn sight." She reached in to touch it. Too late, Jimi grabbed her wrist, saying, "Don't. Maybe it's poisonous. I seen 'em kill people." Her fingers left a violet smudge on its jelly skin. She scrubbed the goo from her hand while he gave over his secret. Jimi said, "I was working out on the Gulf. This one barge, it had a load of dragons got loose. Most of 'em were pretty big. The big ones attacked folk. They were rounding up the little ones, babies they were, maybe. This one got killed after it bit up a man. I grabbed it and run."

When he was done she said, "Let's get out of here. There's a Waffle House on Highway 40 where we can think." Having Pink beside him felt strangely companionable though she didn't say a word. Some folks have the gift of comfort and Pink was one of them.

Inside the air-conditioned restaurant, the waitress slapped down laminated menus on a rickety table as Jimi and Pink slewed into the red plastic booth. Jimi's shoulders bunched up as the Waffle House congregation's gaze slid over him like warm grease. He was uncertain if he'd be recognized as the fugitive he was. Pink tapped his hand with a chalky finger. "It's not you they're minding."

Over bitter coffee and waffles and buttered grits made from a packet, Pink outlined a plan. "You can't go back. I got no reason to stay. There's a place we can go, up in the hills. A feller there owes my daddy a favor. He'll take us in."

Doubtful, Jimi thought, but didn't like to argue. Besides, wouldn't Pink's father, or mother, or someone, come looking for her? That was misery he couldn't afford. He stirred the question into his coffee to see if it'd be answered.

Pink said, "This feller, Midas, Daddy said he could claim his debt from Midas any time. One morning, he come in roaring drunk and mad at I don't know what. He planned to fetch what was his. Daddy never did come back.

"I been once when I was a girl, while Momma was still with us. Momma came from Red Star. Midas was nice, that's what I remember. My job at the Piggly Wiggly, they won't care. Let's just go. No one's left to bother about me. No one will find us there."

Coffee sloshed uneasy in Jimi's stomach. His skin crawled from bad food and no sleep. He wondered what she was really after. Hard to believe it was him with a trunk full of slimy trouble. He rubbed his neck. "Why're you so sure this is a good idea?"

"You got a baby dragon in your trunk that needs hiding. Folks'll come after you for it. Me, I want to know what happened to my pa. Red Star's the place for us. It's just a speck up in the Ozarks, not even on a map. I promise, if you don't want to stay, we can leave."

Jimi paused while eating his waffle. How could she be so certain this was a good idea? Was she really saying the truth? The knot in his chest transferred to a scowl on his face.

Pink's lips thinned in a smile. "Don't be scared. It's not like I'm the Queen of Fairyland."

That sounded odd, but stranger things had happened to Jimi lately, and besides, this was Arkansas.

Pink and Jimi Bone showed up on Midas Welbe's doorstep, one hopeful, the other ill at ease. Midas fed them chickory coffee and eggs in a kitchen smelling of rancid bacon grease. Pink whispered to Jimi that Midas hadn't aged a bit, and wasn't that strange? The same ashy-colored hair hung over his watery blue eyes. There ought to be something to show for ten years gone by, but nary a line blemished his smooth face.

Jimi found their host reminiscent of an augur-man he knew back in West Texas when he was a boy no bigger than a gopher and just as dumb. Like Midas, the augur-man looked free of age. The man from Texas also possessed a collection of witchy sticks and colored bottles filled with shapes a body didn't want to examine too close.

Midas gazed at Pink over runny eggs, then said, "You were such a curious li'l girl, damn sight smarter'n your pa."

It made Jimi uneasy, the way he stared and stared while Pink rambled on about needing a place to rest up for a while and how her daddy always talked about missing Red Star. As if anyone would ever miss this crossroads half a mile from nowhere and next door to nothing. Sure as shit Midas had to suspect something.

The pair nodded politely for another cup of coffee. As Midas stood, he scorched Jimi with a look hotter'n a cutting torch. He said, "I heard on the TV about a big mess in the Gulf. Some smuggling racket bootlegging Chinese water lizards from the Wei River Valley. I see that dragon mark on your neck. A Chinese boy like you wouldn't know anything about that, now would you?"

Jimi sent Pink a questioning look, Should we tell? Her glare said, No. He figured that for reasonable.

"No sir," Jimi mumbled. "I'm as Texan as the next man. My granddad came from Taiwan, but that was a long time ago. The dragon tattoo's just for luck. I wouldn't know one to see one."

"Few would," said Midas. "People think magic is all big eyes and pretty wings. Immortals are never what you expect."

While their coffee cooled, Midas provided directions to a bolt-hole. He said to Pink, "Your ma, Evie, bided among those red oaks, hearkening to their daily choir." Pink's face remained serene while her color jar blushed. Satisfaction licked Midas's lips. Jimi didn't like that. But they needed help, so he paved their escape with thank yous.

A quarter mile up the road slept an abandoned Airstream. Its elegant bullet shape (rusting from years of lonesomeness) nosed out among thick oak trunks like some godalmighty rocket ship. Jimi Bone backed the Impala beside it and that was that.

Except for the dragon in the trunk.

"We should bury it," Jimi said. Days had passed while they waited to see if anyone followed. He pulled some peanut butter and Welch's grape jelly down from the cupboard to make them sandwiches. Now, this evening, whatever one it might be (Jimi had lost track of time and hours and all aspects of civilization) he sat with the albino girl from Conway, wondering what to do. Her pale skin glowed in the twilight. She surely was a lovely thing.

Outside racketed a chorus of June bugs. Every few minutes some creepy-crawlie would splat itself against the window trying to meet the sixty-watt bulb swinging over the table. Jimi flinched each time. Pink never did pay them any mind.

Ribbons, glitter, and bones in a plastic box—materials for Pink's play-pretties—waited on the mustard-colored Formica table that bisected the Airstream. Amulets, Midas had called 'em, necessaries for the unwary soul, and weren't all God's children unwary?

Pink said, "What makes you think it's dead?" Her fingers busied themselves twining fuchsia ribbon around a mole skull.

"It ain't moving." Jimi rubbed the back of his neck where the dragon lay in his golden skin. It itched like a fire ant bite.

"It ain't stinkin' neither. And something dead that long would stink." She held her creation up for Jimi to admire. The color wasn't to Jimi's taste. The rest looked fine enough.

He asked what she thought they should do, not clear on how Pink had become the brains of the outfit, but satisfied that it was so.

Pink switched out the ribbon for ochre yarn, then fastened the amulet around his neck. "You bound yourself to it when you ran off with it. Now you're responsible."

Delicately Jimi touched his new adornment. It weighed on his chest. "Chinese dragons are illegal. Who'd risk bringing 'em in?"

"The drought," said Pink. "Times like these people take chances. I've seen all kinds of crazy stuff. We can hide it. There's thousands of caves up here. Tyson factory uses them to store chicken carcasses. We can find a wild cave and stow it. It'll be secret and it'll be ours."

It took several days of hiking the woods, turning over stones, and crawling down ridges before Jimi stumbled, plumb fell down and nearly broke his neck, into a suitable hole. The limestone cavern was just tall enough to stand up in. Somewhere in the back end, in the pitch-black where he had no intention of going, water burbled.

At night, under a pregnant moon, they moved the creature. The dragon had grown, which Jimi swore couldn't happen. It looked less like a big eel and more like a giant snake. Scales showed now on its pale violet skin. The neck didn't appear to be strong enough to hold the weight of the head, which didn't resemble anything Jimi recognized. Something that might be horns budded from its slick forehead. Silver eyes showed an uncomfortable depth. The gluey skin looked wet, and the whiskers, like some kind of overgrown catfish's, curled in pale spirals.

The bulges in its transparent gullet were bits of a person, Jose or Alejandro—half-digested now. It gave Jimi the shakes. He'd known that man once, even if he couldn't recall his exact name. Pink steadied Jimi. He swallowed, ashamed to have less courage than a girl.

Protecting their arms with plastic bags just in case, they slopped the dragon into the biggest container Jimi could buy at the Walmart Supercenter over to Fayetteville, a fifty-five gallon electric-blue recycling bin.

Peeper frogs and cicadas serenaded them as they dragged the blue bin through the woods. They reached the site out of breath and sweating. A haze of bugs nipped their skin. The cave's black hole yawned at their feet. The creature made a wheezing noise as it dropped ten feet down into the dark. From the cave floor the Immortal glowed like an earthbound star.

They held a whispered confab under the spangled sky. Pink said, "I don't think it's dead. There ought to be some way to check."

Sweat dripped from Jimi's black hair as he shook his head. "Even if it is, we need to leave it be. That was a man in the dragon's gut. He didn't get there by accident. Done is done. Now I say we get out of here."

Pink crossed her arms. "What about your dragon tattoo?"

With conscious effort Jimi kept from rubbing the patch on his neck. "I'm one hundred percent U.S. of A. The only Chinese I know is chop suey, so don't go saying I owe anything here. We could make KC tonight in a couple of hours, or Little Rock, if you like."

"You run if you want," said Pink. "I'm staying to find out about my kin. I don't need help."

Jimi swallowed the sigh that rose from his belly. From the minute he stood by Pink's booth at the Toad Suck craft alley, he knew she was for him. They fit together like an acorn and its cap. "All right then. We gotta live. Guess I'll figure out something."

Pink rested a hand on his neck. The irritation eased. She said, "You won't be sorry."

OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS Jimi cleared space by the Airstream and set to growing life's necessaries, cultivated from seeds in the plastic baggies he always had with him. He figured setting up couldn't be any more difficult than doing it in a greenhouse back home. Besides, everyone knew Arkansas produced the best weed (save Mississippi) in the South. Selling product up Fayetteville way would give them some folding money.

Pink contrived her play-pretties. Effort grooved lines between her eyebrows as she bound and wound and tied pieces of nature to bits of made things, all the while singing meaning into her creations. Other times she visited Midas.

Jimi didn't care for that. Midas Welbe creepified him for certain. But she insisted the augur-man knew something. Jimi believed knowing wasn't the same as saying. Midas Welbe no doubt knew a score of things. Most of which Jimi suspected he'd rather not be told, even if Pink felt differently.

Evenings, the downing sun would warm the unmelting snow of Pink's hair as she learned the secrets of leaf and bough. It was a homecoming, she said, to know her mama tended this same grove. Jimi figured the trees were her trade. Same as it must've been her momma's. That was all right by him, though he couldn't see the benefit of it.

While they waited for Jimi's crop to grow the earth turned boggy. Low fields swelled to marshes. Waterfalls sprang jubilant from crags. Wood ducks and greenheads moved to new addresses in previously stubbled meadows.

One muggy night, Jimi leaned against the rusting Airstream picking at mosquito bites. He said, "Ground's gone awry. My planting's rotted plumb in the dirt. I looked for a decent yield to set us up. This place is a pisshole."

Snuggling into his shoulder, Pink said, "Been no rain hereabouts since last year. Wrong direction, water coming up from the ground. I could go see Midas. He might know something."

"Don't," said Jimi. The less Pink saw of Midas, the better he felt. Besides, he should look into this. It was his job, after all. "Tomorrow I'll see to the neighbors. Check if they got the same problems. Might be nothing." Jimi wasn't keen on the idea. Being a stranger, and not your average white boy, he had to push down a wispy fear.

"All right then." Pink said. "Be home by suppertime."

The morning sun painted the day with a honey-light. Warmth stirred up an earthy smell congruent with the heavy mist that ladled itself around Jimi's legs. Already he'd taken coffee with Tim Williams, who groused that water swamped his cornfield, and not the low one neither. Outside there was a smell of wet, like wood rot. The earth felt spongy underfoot. It unsettled Jimi, who'd thought the swampiness limited to their piece of land.

Continuing along, Jimi shouted in fear as a wall of gray water, tall as a man, rose up from the damn ground, where no wave should be, to knock down Jayme Stone as she walked her little dog. The little dog never did get up. A great puddle of sour ooze ankle high was left behind. After helping her rescue the terrier's broken body from the muck, Miz Stone said Midas took care of things hereabouts. He was the man to fix this terrifying deluge.

Jayme said Jimi'd find Midas at his fishing hole. Earlier he'd passed that way carrying a pail and a six-pack of Bud. She recommended Jimi go past Pistone's dairy, past the wrecked train tracks, up an overgrown trail.

Now Jimi pushed his way through a staggering number of cottonwoods. Sweat glued his black Cannibal Corpse T-shirt to his back. He brushed a cobweb from his face and paused for consideration.

There was nary a path through the woods, at least none he could spot. Twice now something had hissed at him, and he had no idea what the critter was, or what he'd done to piss it off. Jimi swatted at the no-see-ums haloing his head. He wished for a sign, an ordinary street sign. He missed Port Arthur. He missed the noise, the stink, and the pure regularness of it all.

A city has streets and people and rules. Keep the speed limit. Don't steal. Obey the cops. Of course, Jimi had broken those laws and then some. So maybe it was fitting that he'd landed ass-up in a place like Red Star, where he had only Pink to advise him. And now Midas.

A hot metal tang stung his nose. A deep thrum rattled him. Likely it was just a bird. Likely. The hairs on Jimi's arms stood up. Something boomed close behind him. He backed into a trickle of water, then turned and ran, following it down, away from the deep bass sound. When the water was up to his knees he stopped, finding himself at the mouth of a lake he didn't know existed.

Midas stood in the shallows on the far side with a bucket next to him. Curls of steam rose from it. He leaned over the water, studying the glassy surface, his hair stringing down so as Jimi wondered how he could see. He held a net, which looked awkward to manage in the heavy work gloves he wore.

Jimi sloshed over along the lake edge. He scanned the ground for snakes before settling on a mossy log. He asked, "Catch any fish?"

"Too hot for fish," said Midas. "You out on a promenade?" Around Jimi's neck hung the bone piece secured with ochre yarn. Pink made him put it on that morning. The little doohickey caught Midas's eyes. The augur-man seemed to vibrate with tension. To break it, Jimi tossed a rock that lay at his feet into the lake.

"You oughta be careful, son. You shouldn't put things places unless you know all about 'em. I'm familiar with this pond man and boy, longer than most people figure. Even I don't know what might lie in there anymore."

Jimi gulped, sure Midas could hear his fear, his heart was beating that hard. "Our place is swamped. Other folks got the same problem. They said to see you about fixing things."

"You could go back to Texas," Midas said. "No need to stay."

"Pink won't leave and I won't go without her. You telling me this bog is natural?"

"Got no need to tell you anything." A new splash riveted Midas's attention. He netted a black lizard daubed with red spots. When he grabbed the hissing thing in his gloved hand, smoke flashed from its skin. Midas dumped the lizard in the bucket. The water inside boiled. "Salamanders," Midas explained. "They get a tad warm when a body upsets 'em."

"I knew you for an augur-man. Only met one before, but you got the look." That was one question answered for sure. Jimi smiled.

Working carefully so as not to disturb the pail, Midas stripped the gloves from his hands. "That amulet Pink's work? Can I see?"

It seemed a reasonable request. Jimi couldn't figure his reluctance to remove the bony piece. Slowly he looped it from his neck, then handed it over.

Fast as lightning, Midas dropped it in the bucket, almost as if it burned. Jimi stood up in surprise. Anger mixed with fear. He motioned toward the bucket. "What'd you do that for?"

Midas pinned Jimi with his pale eyes. "Settle down. We couldn't talk comfortable with that thing on you. Why'd you come here, son? I never did believe that tinsel-story Pink told."

There was something persuasive about his light blue eyes. Jimi chewed his lip. He'd never been good at lying. A cicada started sawing loud enough to wake the dead. Bugs whirred and chirruped. What was his voice against this noise? Jimi took a breath before unspooling the tale he'd kept wrapped 'round his heart.

He remembered that Texas night. Jimi was working nightshift on an offshore oil rig as a fifth hand, only work a nobody like him could get, when all hell broke loose on a CSC barge sneaking into port. He'd never seen anything like it. Folks were yelling, diving into the water. Roughnecks quit work to have a look-see. Jimi joined them at the metal rail, glad to fit in. It was terrifying, but exciting, too. Until the barge sank amid explosions and screams. That gave him the chills.

Seconds later, the rig groaned as metal bent in ways it shouldn't. The derrick man called up that something was stuck in the mud pit. The rig boss ordered a couple of Mex divers into the water. After they jumped, blood pumped up with mud. Jimi felt sick inside. None of those divers came back.

Things like giant eels circled the derrick. One of the drillers pulled out a .38 Smith & Wesson to shoot the monsters. A creature big as a semi jumped up, flew through the goddamn air, to cut him in half with its claw, then plunged back into the water. That was a big one.

There were little ones too, writhing and snapping in the waves. One got on the rig and attacked a driller. They tangled it with chain. It looked strangled sure, but it was too late for the feller it'd bit into fleshy pieces. The dead creature gave Jimi the heebie-jeebies. The rig boss ordered him to take the thing to shore in the lifeboat. Someone would be waiting.

Jimi didn't want to go. But he had no choice. He motored off with the little monster beside him. Heat scorched his back as the oil rig exploded. Ash smudged the stars as flames shot over the water. Shrieks and gunshots and the smell of burnt meat hung on the air.

A sedan waited by the dock, accompanied by a string of police cars. Men in dark suits watched the burning rig, and no doubt Jimi, as he shipped toward them. Their mirror sunglasses reflected the hell-born fire.

But then some instinct bid Jimi to duck low and veer off. He tied up a mile away, bagged the dead thing—by then he was pretty sure it was a contraband dragon—and then lit out of Texas carrying it in his trunk.

He explained that coming to Red Star, well, that was Pink's idea.

Midas stirred the bucket. "So I guessed right. A Chinese boy with a Chinese dragon." For a moment Midas was far off in his thinking. When he continued, he smiled friendly-like at Jimi. "An Immortal like that, no length of chain nor bullet can end it. Maybe it got injured in all the fuss. But dead? Not like to happen. Where'd you bed this thing down?"

Jimi's tattoo prickled. "A cave. I doubt I could find it."

"We'll find it together." Midas pressed the last cold Bud into Jimi's limp hand. "I'll fix what you brought on us. You'll help."

The dragon mark burned. Jimi gulped the beer down. The cold drink eased the pain. He had a certainty that helping the augur-man was the thing to do.

WITHIN MIDAS'S WORK SHED played out a scene from some preacher's nightmare, or maybe a Hollywood movie, the kind that makes girls hide their eyes. Jimi swayed in place, wishing the walls would hold still. The augur-man jumped around throwing burning stuff into a chalk circle while shouting strange words. In the circle's security, he took the salamanders, threading them ass-to-mouth on heated metal sticks. The lizards tried to crawl off the red-hot dowels, their tiny feet and tails lashing the air in desperation. In their pain they burned in fierce reds and blues and yellows, hotter than any natural fire. Midas used his magic to collect the colorful essence, all the while singing. When their fires weakened, he gutted the pitiful creatures and collected the glowing coals of their innards too. Such cruelty made Jimi sick.

His head throbbed. He was pretty sure that came from the green drink Midas poured him, a remedy for what ails you , Midas had said. The augur-man made certain Jimi drank all the mixture down, even though Jimi complained it tasted of sulfur and oil and cat piss. It scoured his throat, which was still sore.

A small window cut in the far wall was minus a glass pane. Jimi edged that way. Maybe he could catch his breath. It seemed unlikely Midas would notice, not as het up as he was. After what felt like years Jimi arrived at the opening and put his face to the missing rectangle. He jumped at the touch of Pink's hand on his cheek. "What're you doing here?" he hissed at her.

"What're you doing?" Pink whispered back. "I waited till nightfall and you never came home so I went looking. What craziness is going on in there?"

Her color jar rested sidewise in the dirt, its contents a swirl of orange and yellow. Jimi twitched with effort to tell how Midas planned to kill the Chinese beast from Port Arthur. "It's an unnatural being," Jimi said. "Only something equally unnatural can stop it." For a moment he felt very wise.

"Where's my play-prettie?"

Jimi found he couldn't say. Pink's eyes were round as an owl's. "You've been doped. Can you get out the door?"

That wasn't possible as he could barely stand. Before Pink left, Jimi said, "The monster has to be destroyed."

"Creature's got a right to live. Killing's no business of ours."

He tried to warn her away, but Pink had grabbed her jar and was gone and he could not think further.

Midas had spent the rest of the night in some kind of trance, a hoodoo the like of which Jimi had never seen. Now he pulled Jimi through the woods with his fingers pressed against the back of Jimi's neck, reading the tattoo like it was a message. Jimi hoped that after their talking, Pink would have the sense to stay away. Or better still, take the car and get out.

While they traveled, Midas mumbled. Psyching himself up, Jimi figured, like for a football game. The augur-man's face grew red as he yelled about Harold, Pink's daddy. How the fool came demanding his wife, believing he was owed because of a gold ring on her finger. Anyone could die sudden-like from a brain hemorrhage. Later Midas paid for a stone up to Dripping Springs Cemetery.

Jimi threw himself down. When Midas went to lift him, Jimi wrapped his arms around a tree trunk and held fast. He said, "You murdered Pink's daddy. You magicked him dead. You're a stone-cold killer."

"That's not exactly the way of it," Midas said. "Harold came fixing to murder me. It was pure self-defense." He paced the oak tree to examine the situation.

"You do for Pink's mama, too?"

Midas slammed his boot heel on Jimi's entwined hands. Jimi screamed, then grit his teeth against his skin ripping, flesh mashing into the dirt. His bones ground together, the little ones just snapping. He cried out and swore, knowing it would be even worse when Midas stopped. Crushed, his misshapen fingers could not hold.

Midas hauled him up. "You think I'd harm my own precious wife?"

Everything Jimi heard came through a fog, and Midas would not stop talking. "She had no business leaving me. Leaving Red Star." Jimi couldn't rightly remember who Evie was, or why he'd cared once. His arms throbbed with the pain of his mauled hands. His shaking made it hard to walk, while Midas kept on at him. "No wood sprite is free to just up and leave like she did, not for love nor any reason. She's blooded to them oaks. I locked her, body and soul, into her grove. She hid the girl. But I knew she'd come. You're the one that don't belong. You and the dragon."

Jimi's hands hurt so much he couldn't think. He cursed himself for being a damn fool, for taking Pink's amulet off, for ever coming to Red Star. If Midas didn't kill him, the dragon would for sure.

A tangle of shrubs lay crushed beside a new-made river. Among the few hawthorns and cottonwoods left upright curled a patchwork creature. It wasn't yet as big as the ones Jimi thought of as adults. It still lacked claws to slash. But it was fearsome enough at three, maybe four times his size. A wiry neck with a goat's head sprang from the curled snake's body. Antlers, bad-ass as any seven-point buck's, sprouted from its bony carapace. Saucer eyes watched them with interest. A leaden cold emanated from the beast. Jimi could taste a metal tang, like blood, in the air.

Midas whispered, "Thought you put it in a cave."

"We did," said Jimi. "Dropped it down a limestone hole." He added unnecessarily, "It grew."

Midas thrust Jimi in front. The augur-man's power twisted into Jimi, doubling Jimi over as his hair began to singe. Steam hissed from his skin. Terror churned his gut. When Jimi opened his mouth, he coughed out smoke.

Prodding him forward, Midas said, "That's right, son. You're my locum to cast a mighty flame and destroy that thing. You'll die, but you had your chance to leave."

Pink slipped from an oak. Red leaves circled her head like a rusted crown. In her hands she carried a net woven of willow twigs. Embedded within the green mesh were clumps of brown feathers, bones picked clean, and specks of glitter. She said, "I've come for my Jimi."

"Step aside, girl," said Midas. "Keep your hocus-pocus for fairs and wonder-shows." Sparks exploded from his fingertips. She threw the net over Midas, trapping him and the glowing jots. The sparks fizzled to ash as they battered against the web.

Midas created a fireball in his hands. It burned like the sun. The ball grew, levitating between his palms. "You can't stop me, no more'n your ma could. Smart girl like you knows that. Let me do my work."

"I'm not my ma," said Pink.

Pain ate at Jimi from a terrible burning inside. His lips cracked as he coughed up smoke and bubbles of red spit. He looked to Pink and tried to gasp, "I'm sorry."

She laid his broken hands on the dragon's skin. A gluey substance engulfed them, attaching him to its shining scales. The dragon regarded Jimi with eyes that gleamed with unshed rain.

Molten gold glowed inside Pink's jam jar. She twisted the lid open. She said, "Trust me," then poured the fluid over Jimi. The liquid flowed like a living thing. It crawled into his ears and up his nose. He cried out as it seeped into intimate crevices and holes.

Taking advantage, Midas bowled the fireball at Jimi, who screamed as it set him aflame. His skin melted, seared, burned to blackened char. He blazed blue, then yellow, then white-hot. Fire wound pathways through his hands into the cold body of the dragon, heating it, transforming it into a creature of ether and mist.

Jimi stopped screaming and opened his eyes. He lay in the center of a circle of hot ash, buck naked, and hairless as the day he was born. He wasn't dead. The dragon—Panlong, he realized its name was—uncurled itself some distance away. Drizzle rose from the dragon's glowing iridescent skin. It hovered a few feet above the ground.

Diminished, Midas slumped within the twiggy net. Pink whispered a word and the shoots rooted. Pain etched Midas's face as he pushed against fast-growing oaks, cottonwoods, and maples.

Wood snared his flesh. Willow bark curled over his legs. Midas thrust out his arms as leaves sprang from his fingertips and his hands turned into woody excrescences.

Jimi gasped, "That's what he did to your mama, Evie. I heard him talk of it."

Pink said, "She told me through wind and leaf how he caught her. The red oaks knew. Midas broke her for revenge without a thought for me."

The augur-man rasped, "You plan to kill me, girl?"

"That'd be a sin as great as your own. But you've turned wily as a water moccasin. There's no trusting you." Pink made a gesture and bark grew over his chin, his lips, his eyes. In minutes no human sign remained of Midas Welbe. Where he stood, an ancient black willow leaned over a mountain stream.

"Can you free your ma?" asked Jimi as he got to his feet. He trembled as he touched the leaves on Pink's head with his scarred hand. Tiny bones and little toys dangled down. It was beyond his understanding.

Pink slumped against Midas's willow trunk. "There's nothing here Mama wants, not even me. Green life changes a person." She wiped tears from her face with the back of her hand.

With a groan, Jimi sat beside her. She laid her head against him to cry. Jimi held her close, wondering at the freshly healed scars on his bronzed hands. It felt like his wits and other parts were scattered far and wide. He kept his arms around Pink—choosing to ignore the aches, the spatters of rain, the gathering purple clouds, the wind buffeting the trees. Mostly he chose to ignore the Chinese dragon, Panlong, dancing close to their fragile selves. He knew the dragon wouldn't hurt them now. Maybe it never would have.

Panlong spun, tighter and tighter, pulling stones and leaves and dirt into its whirlwind orbit. Above, thunderheads split with a resounding crack. The unbridled dragon knocked nearby trees all cattywampus. Except for the black willow. It stood uncompromised, leaning over the foaming river. In a sudden quiet the dragon was gone.

Cold rain sheeted down, drenching Jimi and Pink.

Jimi said, "Once, I had a rig job. I worked my shift. Off-shift I got drunk, got laid. I never looked for anything like this," he waved at the mashed landscape, "whatever this is. I could sure use a shot of bourbon."

Above him, in the pearly layers of cloud cover, Jimi sensed Panlong stretching, growing, shifting in the wind. They were tethered sure now with an umbilicus made of water and fire.

Pink said, "Sometimes things just happen, one long string of bumps on the road. Doesn't mean the road's not worth traveling. We all gotta get to who we are somehow." She examined the contours of Jimi's face. "You staying or going? I'd like it if you stayed. Couldn't blame you if you left."

With considerable effort, Jimi struggled to his feet, then gave Pink a hand up. "Let's get home. My name's not Jimi Bone. I'm Eddie, Eddie Chun. The dragon's name is Panlong."

There were things they should talk about. About her pa, about the dragon, about what to do next. But today had enough trouble of its own, and besides, it was raining.

The Boy Who Drank from Lovely Women

By Steven Utley
| 4602 words

Last year saw the publication of the first collection of Steven Utley's Silurian time-travel tales, The 400-Million-Year Itch. Hot on its heels (at least by using a geologic time scale), a new volume entitled Invisible Kingdoms has just come out in Australia. Mr. Utley says his long-overdue fame and riches will be arriving soon. We hope he's not referring to geologic time.

Concerning this new tale, don't let the title fool you: it's not about vampires.

MONSIEUR IS LOOKING VERY well today. Of course. Monsieur looks very well every day. Actually, no one has addressed me as Monsieur for a long, long time, but every morning for many years a faithful valet—a succession of faithful valets—sent me forth with the benediction, "Monsieur is looking very well today." And one becomes so used to things.

Monsieur goes to work. Monsieur, one-time adventurer, former this, ex-that, erstwhile something else, now works the evening shift at what is euphemistically called a Retirement Home. It is in fact a warehouse for old people who are waiting to die. While they wait, they must be attended—fed, cleaned, dressed, undressed, put to bed. Monsieur does all of these things and more. He talks with his charges rather than to them, and they like him for it. Some of the women are obviously delighted by his youthful good looks as well and may be said to flirt shamelessly with him. He doesn't mind at all. Monsieur is an accomplished flirt—it's the least of what he is—and, even now, though he has scrupulously avoided both romantic entanglements and purely sexual encounters since before most of these people were born, he still enjoys being able to turn heads. It's all the vanity he permits himself. He is strongly drawn to these oldsters and, if truth be told, needs them as much as they need him, certainly more than they know.

They are discards, of no personal (as opposed to monetary and possibly statistical) value to anyone except me. They tell me that they can tell me a thing or two, and I listen, truly attentive, because some of them can indeed tell me a thing or two. My own experience may be extensive, but it isn't encyclopedic.

My current favorite is an old gentleman whom I call Casanova. The nickname pleases him immensely, as he claims to have cut quite a swathe through American womanhood in his time. I've no reason to doubt him. He dips his head toward me, speaks confidentially from behind his gnarled hand. His experiences with women seem to have informed his expectations of the afterlife. Heaven, he believes, will be more of the same pursuit to bliss. "But Hell," he says, "Hell is where all the men women wish they'd never met have to spend eternity with all the women men wish they'd never laid eyes on."

"I see," I tell him. "Then they all wish they'd never been born."

He makes a sound that's as much cough as laugh, and then he says, "Still."

"Yes. Still."

"Beautiful women were my tonic, my wine. They kept me young years beyond my time."

"But," I say, wagging a finger at him in mock-admonition, "one must take care not to become a drunkard." I don't say what I'm thinking, which is, A beautiful woman may have kept me young centuries beyond my time.

Casanova coughs up another mirthful sound. "I could write a book."

And I, too.

I was born into a prosperous mercantile family in Paris in 1780.

I cannot account for my apparent immortality, which takes the form of the protection I enjoy from harm and my immunity to aging. I recall making no promises to God, no pact with the Devil. Perhaps the Devil approached me as I tossed in the pain-wracked delirium of yellow fever over two hundred years ago. Perhaps he offered me these terms: "You shall live on until you find life unbearable. When once you wish for death, then I shall claim my part of the bargain." I was deathly ill, I would have accepted poorer terms than those. Perhaps, however, it was Sophie's curse and the doing of the loas. Or perhaps the answer lies still ahead, to be revealed to me only after I have lived out my third or fourth century. Perhaps I am the Antichrist. Perhaps I am the harbinger of something as yet unimagined by all prophets, something even unimaginable by them. I do not know. I only can accept my condition, and what choice have I but to accept it?

In any case, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, as the sole son at the tailing end of a long string of daughters, and being blessed with beauty of person, I commanded much favor with my parents. I'm afraid they spoiled me badly, then lived to regret it. My sisters did their unknowing part, too, in making the monster I was to become. Growing up surrounded by young women left me with no fear of the creatures and, indeed, supremely confident of my ability to outmaneuver even the unsympathetic ones.

It was, however, a servant girl in our household who, by initiating me into the delights of the boudoir, unleashed the monster. Thereafter I was rapacious and unstoppable. I possessed the formidable advantages of money and a masculine comeliness that smote feminine hearts, in as permissive an age as ever was. I didn't long confine my attentions to servants, or to professionals, either, with the result that before my twenty-first birthday I had earned the reputation of a young man of flagrant indiscretions. Moreover, I had taken definite steps on the way to becoming a drunkard and a gambler.

It was my own wretched conduct with women that saved me from a short and totally dissolute life in Paris: the loose morals of the time may have been an incentive to my instincts, but there were limits. By figuring prominently in an affair involving the daughter of one of my father's investors, I provoked an eruption of paternal outrage. My father had already resigned himself to my being hugely indifferent to all aspects of the family business (save the cash it produced). Now, though, I wasn't merely a drain on his pocketbook; I had become a menace to it. He couldn't go so far as to disown his only son and heir, but he declared that I needed setting straight on matters of personal responsibility, and that the military life would do for it. Although the army was in transition at the turn of the eighteenth century, it was still possible to obtain an officer's commission by either buying it outright or else calling in political favors. My father was rich and a noisy supporter of the Republic— voilà! I became a sous -lieutenant!

I was no more unqualified than any other wastrel to serve as a junior officer in the Republican army. Indeed, I excelled in one regard: I looked good in any clothes but was positively dazzling in regimental finery. Never mind that it was the finery of a lowly lieutenant of infantry in one of the less desirable regiments (my father always shopped for bargains). Once I had donned those white canvas pants and that red-trimmed blue jacket, I was a vision.

I was put in charge of a company of men and largely left to learn by trial and error how to command them. It could have been a catastrophe. My men were illiterate bumpkins, malingerers, and deserters flensed from better regiments, prisoners, captured English seamen, Germans, and other foreigners. Heaven knows what would have happened had I actually given them an order, but I quickly understood that it was the business of sergeants, not lieutenants, to keep this surly rabble in line. That left me free to get on with my own business, which consisted mainly of drinking, gambling, and whoring. If my father had really expected iron military discipline to save me from my innate wickedness, he must have been disappointed, for there was no dearth of young officers as callow and useless as myself, and I naturally gravitated to them.

I hadn't been in the army long enough to incur many new debts or catch the pox before my captain, Ledoux by name, summoned all junior officers to his headquarters and announced, "We are ordered to Le Havre."

The man standing next to me said, "Sir, are the British invading?"

The captain trained his eye on my brother lieutenant, and I would have sworn that I smelled singed hair. "We are going to the West Indies to fight niggers!" Ledoux's attitude confirmed to my satisfaction what I had heard from my messmates, that our captain regarded his posting to an inferior regiment as a personal affront engineered by enemies in high places. Perhaps he wasn't simply paranoid—he generated a blizzard of petitions for transfer that melted away to nothing—and now here was the final outrage: he was to travel halfway around the world to help put down a slave revolt.

To tell the truth, I was none too happy about it myself. It wasn't that I had the faintest notion of what awaited us in the West Indies. I would have to leave Paris and all its delights!

But leave I did, to find myself, in December of 1801, or Frimaire of the Year X, if I remember my French Republican calendar correctly, en route to the West Indies as a member of the largest expeditionary force that France had ever sent overseas—thirty thousand men, including thirteen generals and twenty-seven brigadier generals, embarked on eighty-six ships of the line and transports, with another twenty thousand men to follow. I was by no means the only green lieutenant present, but the majority of men and officers were veterans. Our Commander-in-Chief, Captain General LeClerc, and his divisional generals, Rochambeau, Boudet, and Hardy, had led their grenadiers to glory at Hohenlinden, Marengo, and Abukir. The campaign plan had been drawn up by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The mission: recapture Saint-Domingue, which is now called Haiti.

Fifty thousand men may sound like an astounding number to bring to bear on a single island, but Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the world. It occupied the western end of Hispaniola—Spain controlled the eastern end, called San Domingo—and the value of its exports, coffee and sugar, exceeded that of all the British West Indies, even that of the thirteen British American colonies that had broken away to become the United States.

Our armada sailed from Le Havre, Brest, and Toulon. Perhaps we should have interpreted an incident that occurred almost at the outset as a portent of what was to come. Admiral Joyeuse commanded the fleet, but the First Consul, typically, had plotted its course, and Bonaparte simply did not understand the sea. He chose as our assembly point the Bay of Biscay, whose tricky current promptly smashed two corvettes together, badly damaging one, sinking the other with all hands.

I was too sick to worry about omens. I spent several days on the high seas violently disgorging everything I had ever eaten in my life, clear back to my first solid food. I suppose I should have been grateful that my father hadn't decided to send me to sea, but I cursed him anyway, and the military in general, and rebellious darkies the world over.

If ever I made a bargain with the Devil, it was probably at this point of my life. You would think, of course, that I should remember doing so, but perhaps selective amnesia is part of such deals.

The time came, anyway, when I seemed to have nothing loose left inside me. I was on deck, clutching the rail and staring out across the ocean, and it occurred to me then that I was beginning to feel better, that, suddenly, I was bearing up better than many others. I entertained the notion that I should pass the rest of the voyage in relative comfort. One can become only so seasick before either flinging oneself over the rail or growing accustomed to the ship's constant rolling and pitching. Either way, one ceases to suffer.

But, of course, I had no idea of the suffering that lay ahead for most of us.

Never for a moment did we entertain any doubt that we should regain what was rightfully France's. We were the warrior race of Europe. The word contempt doesn't begin to convey our attitude toward the blacks; we believed that we need only shoot into the air, and they would run away. None of us in the army had ever been to the West Indies before or bothered to read much about them, but from the naval officers we were amused to learn that there were "more than a hundred races" in Saint-Domingue—Congos, Fulah, Ibo, Mandingos, Senegalese, and bastard subclasses called mulattoes, mestizos, quadroons, sacatras. The slaves had revolted in 1791, and what began as a mere uprising had grown into a triangular sort of war in which blacks fought whites and affranchis and, occasionally, whites and affranchis fought each other. The affranchis were freed mulattoes, descendants of slaves and Europeans. Many of them had slaves and property of their own, and certain prominent mulattoes sailed with the fleet. They weren't exactly trusted as allies, but the feeling was that their innate viciousness could be directed at the blacks, whom they hated far more than they hated whites.

Also sailing with the armada were two young men who had been attending the College de la Marche. The First Consul had thought that they would be useful to LeClerc, for they were the black son and mulatto stepson of the man regarded as the chief troublemaker, Pierre-Dominique Toussaint, who had come to be called Toussaint L'Ouverture, derided by the First Consul as "this gilded African." Toussaint, said to be a man of considerable charisma, intelligence, and military skill, had rid Saint-Domingue of French authority and declared himself governor. None of us, however, was impressed by his recent successes against the British, who had tried to seize the colony for themselves following the expulsion of the French. We ascribed the gilded African's successes to failings on the part of the British, whom we naturally denigrated because they were our homeland's traditional enemy. We were inclined to be amused by Toussaint's pretensions. After all, at the beginning of the rebellion, hadn't the slaves seized muskets and, not knowing how to operate them, employed them as clubs?

The fleet straggled all the way to the West Indies, with our transports constantly falling behind and warships constantly having to be detached to wait for them to catch up. Consequently, the armada arrived piecemeal and at as ill-chosen a final rallying point as the First Consul could have picked. The Bay of Samana, off the eastern tip of Hispaniola, is full of rocks, and the leeward wind is strong—always a bad combination.

Another omen, perhaps, but still I shared in the general confidence of the outcome.

I was fortunate enough to be assigned at the outset to garrison duty in the north of Saint-Domingue and so missed out on not only the fighting but also the atrocities committed by both sides. Garrison duty was not unpleasant. I quickly settled into my usual behavior—shrugging off reports that trickled in of rebel successes. After all, victory seemed within our grasp: Toussaint L'Overture was captured and deported to France, where he soon enough died in a dank prison cell, and without their "gilded African" to lead them, what could the rebels hope to accomplish? There was plenty of good food to eat, rum to drink, local women to seduce. I began to miss Paris less.

"The most beautiful women in the world," I tell Casanova, "live in the West Indies."

He gives me a dubious look.

"There," I say, "is the true melting pot of the world. Arawaks and Caribs were living there when Columbus showed up and mistook them for Indians. Slaves were imported from Africa to work the plantations, and after slavery was abolished, contract laborers from India—real Indians—immigrated. Chinese, too, and Lebanese and Syrians. And what you have there now is people of every possible coloration, from blue-eyed, fair-haired Scandinavians to the pitch-blackest folks on Earth."

Casanova growls under his breath. He is of a generation disinclined to approve of miscegenation. If he had the time left, he might learn better. There's always hope. I learned better—I, product of a world that was disinclined to regard non-whites as human at all.

PERHAPS SOPHIE really did put a curse on me. If so, it worked, albeit imperfectly.

She was the octaroon daughter of an affranchi, and my head was turned by her great beauty as she was allured by mine. God, she was lovely. Robust women were the ideal then; she was slim, other men thought she looked starved, said she needed a good feeding. Men today would swoon for her, if men swooned, or run at one another and butt heads, which is more like what they actually do. (Not really being one of them gives me the right to speak of modern men in the third person.) The first time I saw Sophie, I, too, thought her too boyish to be attractive, for, no less than other men, I accepted the standard of beauty prevalent at the time. The second time I saw her, however, I noted her suppleness, her cat-green eyes, her luminous skin, and almost forgot to breathe while looking at her.

I can exactly recall the texture of her, her scents, her tastes, her sounds, the warmth of her breath as she traced her lips over me, the feel of her body pressed against mine, the strength of her love-grip, and, always, the look in her eye and the poison in her voice when she cursed me. Well, I did betray her, and with a woman of the town at that, openly, flagrantly, in a way profoundly wounding to her self-esteem. I was still the callow sous -lieutenant, at once arrogant and ignorant.

"I thought you a man," Sophie raged at me, "but I see now that you are only a boy, faithless and full of himself."

I felt anger begin to build in me as I listened, but pride has many facets. I resolved not to let on that her words stung. I smiled contemptuously, to show that I couldn't possibly be hurt by the words of a mere woman—not even a white woman at that. I must have been so convincing that one of my comrades said, "Oh, give her a good beating and send her on her way!"

But that I could not do, would not have done in any case. I had only enough resolve to harden my heart against her, none at all to raise my hand.

"A boy you shall always be," she said. "I will ask the loas to give you time to regret your perfidy." The loas, I vaguely understood, were the local deities, whose assistance was biddable through dancing and animal sacrifice and all the attendant mumbo-jumbo. "You will drink from lovely women and yet always be thirsty. And long after I am dust, you will think of me always with yearning and regret." And I have. "I will be like knives in your heart, forever." But there she may have given me too much credit. I may not have had a heart then, though I know now that I have been trying to grow one almost ever since.

Soon after Sophie had left for parts unknown, yellow fever swept though the army, almost carrying me off and indeed carrying off LeClerc and thousands more. I next found myself, still shaky from the fever, among the relatively few defenders under Rochambeau at the climactic Battle of Vertières; the rebels, it turned out, did not really need Toussaint L'Ouverture's leadership as long as they still had their hatred of the French. Without at all intending to distinguish myself, I managed to wind up in the thick of the fight but escaped—miraculously?—without a scratch, though most of the men around me were killed. When Rochambeau admitted defeat and agreed to terms, I was more than slightly relieved. I decided I had had enough of army life and began making plans accordingly. We were given ten days to embark and depart from Saint-Domingue, leaving our wounded behind, under key, as the expression went, until they were able to follow.

France had paid a heavy price in treasure and soldiers' lives and gained nothing in Saint-Domingue. Just so, Saint-Domingue had paid a heavier price for its independence. If there is anything to the loas, and if, as some darkly hint, their help was enlisted in expelling the French, they exacted a terrible toll—after a dozen years of civil war, there were in 1803 only ten thousand of thirty thousand whites left alive, and probably one-hundred-fifty thousand of half a million blacks had died. And the loas continue to this day to exact their toll. I visited Haiti during the 1960s. The richest colony in the New World had long since become its poorest independent nation. Papa Doc Duvalier was a genius in the handling of the populace—one of those human monsters, it is true, who make Hell necessary, but a genius nonetheless. For me it was a glimpse of the future of the rest of the world, one I shall probably live to see. The environment was infinitely degraded. An educated, wealthy few lorded it over the illiterate, impoverished, superstitious many.

Sometimes the most important thing is simply to remember it all. It's as if my memory were a bookcase, and I must periodically straighten its contents, find the proper places for items carelessly tossed in at some earlier date.

Thus, I make lists.

I start with a list of the names of women I've loved, truly loved. I think about Sophie, of course. I think about Lise, whom I courted in Paris, and Suzette in New Orleans, and Maria in Mexico City, and the one and the one and the one, and have to ask myself, finally, were those courtships or merely seductions? After a time, surely it was more the one thing than the other, for once I knew what had happened to me, how could I have seriously offered to share my life with someone whose own existence was so brief, so fragile? Then I find myself writing the names of some to whom I falsely professed love, and then the names of some whose attention I only rented—if they had names—and a deep shame overtakes me.

Yet it has been only since around the end of the First World War that I could resist lovely women. It took me more than a hundred years to become bored with them, and at first that seemed even worse than what Sophie had promised, knives twisting eternally in my heart.

We survivors of the wretched expedition were scattered, some of us to return to France, others to go on to the French West Indies, where the British were making trouble. I succeeded at avoiding both destinations and found myself in New Orleans, a sous -lieutenant no longer, a deserter, in fact, but one with a few advantages. My looks were my passport.

And here I finally became truly cognizant of my immunity to harm: it stood me in some good stead in that cesspool of cutthroats and compulsive duelists. Even then I felt I enjoyed an unfair advantage, and thus I was never the challenger in affairs of honor. By such infinitesimal increments did my transition begin, but I had seen enough of killing. My other habits had not changed, however, and so I was the challenged often enough. There was no way for me to duck out—how could I have explained, and to an irate husband at that, "You cannot get so much as a pinprick's satisfaction from dueling with me—I am under the personal protection of some god or demon!" I invariably chose pistols, therefore, in most cases, an exchange of shots (two each, all deliberate misses on my part, inexcusable misses and inexplicable misfires on the challenger's) satisfied honor and was less messy and arduous than swordplay. An opponent armed with a sword generally felt himself obligated to try to skewer or at least pink me, and my invisible guardian would make sure that my blade was there to parry, or that the other fellow's foot slipped in the grass.

The disadvantages of always looking twenty-two years old became apparent after a time. I grew tired of being always on the move. I married well, settled down, fathered children. After twenty years, when my wife was visibly middle-aged and my children were being mistaken for my siblings, I knew I had overstayed, and I contrived to disappear, with enough money to set myself up in comfort someplace else. After a time, I stopped taking wives. After a bit more, I stopped even taking lovers. Boredom had settled in, and I wondered if this might not be the first sign of my despairing of life—that I would soon find myself longing for death, and up would pop the Devil to claim his due—or of growing a heart, the better to feel Sophie's knives. There are few things more tormenting than not knowing by whom you are being tormented.

I returned incognito to France in 1867, having seen some of the United States' civil war and too much of Maximilian in Mexico. I had become adept by this time at taking on and laying aside civilian identities and at providing their wherewithal. I got caught up in the tragicomic Franco-Prussian War and stayed in my homeland long enough to see something of its horrific sequel in 1914. That was the last major war I witnessed up close, and thank God for that, for it gave me some unhappily correct notions as to the shape future wars were to take. I removed myself from Europe one step ahead of World War II, and I have long since ceased to pay particular attention to the flags, sovereigns, and sovereign patches of dirt for which mortal human beings risk everything they have, everything they are.

Perhaps there is no moral in all this. There were many better persons than I in Saint-Domingue in the early 1800s, but many worse, too. I have mentioned atrocities; I took no part in them. I was only a self-centered, self-satisfied sous -lieutenant, cruel to women, perhaps, but not vicious toward them, pulling soft duty in the rear area; when it ceased to be a rear area and became the site of the last pitched battle of the campaign, I fought hard because I believed, rightly or wrongly, that my life depended on it. Sophie, the loas, the Devil, perhaps none of them had anything to do with my immortality. Perhaps Fate chose me. If so, it must have done so blindly. I don't know the answer. I don't know. I just don't.

"You're always here with us old fossils," Casanova observes. "Don't you ever hang around with young people your own age? Surely there's a young woman in your life."

Of course, I cannot tell him what a curse eternal youth is to one who can no longer stand young people, male or female. I let the question slide by and tell him it's time to prepare for bed. He is still able to do that for himself, so I slip out and swiftly reconnoiter the other rooms assigned to me. Everybody else is asleep, and even Casanova is slipping away when I return to look in on him. He is just conscious enough to extend a hand to me. I take it and hear him murmur, "You're good to us. You're always here for us."

"And I always shall be," I tell him. And I mean what I say. I can't be sure, of course, but it could be the only hope I have of redemption.

The Long View

By Van Aaron Hughes
| 3022 words

Van Aaron Hughes is a recent winner in the Writers of the Future Contest. His fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future Vol. 27, Abyss & Apex, the political protest anthology Glorifying Terrorism, and other publications. He does book reviews and author interviews for www.FantasticReviews.com and he judges the "Battle of the Books" at their blog. In real life, he is a lawyer practicing in Denver and has argued before the United States Supreme Court. His F&SF debut should be of interest to anyone who has ever been concerned about balancing work and family.

WHAT MAKES A PERSON decide to desert everyone she knows and leave the whole world behind?

My name is Emzara Ghali-Gordon, and the first time I did it was easy.

The first thirty civilian colonists arrived on the Vanguard together, with a cheer and more than a few tears. The captain had already spun up the main cylinder, leaving all our zero-g training useless. We raced each other down the central corridor, bounding in the low gravity, laughing as Coriolis toppled us like so many drunks at closing time.

Chuck was in that first group too. We didn't know each other yet, but in hindsight, his presence made the Vanguard my first real home from the moment we floated aboard and for the next 125 years.

At university in Alexandria, they called us the jabaan , the "cowards." We worked like donkeys to get the best grades, to win scholarships to graduate school overseas. To get away.

I was the best of the jabaan . I wanted nothing but to leave Egypt. Not because it was miserable, although it surely was, especially for the surviving Coptic Christians like my family, but because it was old . My country had passed its best days many centuries before, and I wanted a home in the future.

I remember little from university but a rush of coursework and late-night studying. I loved history, literature; I doubled up in biology and chemistry, because they wanted that in America and China. I pestered every professor until I mastered each item in the syllabus, but hardly spoke to the other students.

Nor did I ease up once I made it to America, for the bio-boom was just starting. The other students thought we were learning skills to make money, but I always take the long view of events, and I knew what we were really doing: rejuvenating the tottering global economy.

To most Americans, a weak economy means having to borrow from your uncle to get by. In Alexandria, it means death. To me, the bio-boom wasn't about money; we were saving the world.

The first weeks after everyone boarded the Vanguard were a whirlwind of activity, especially for me as chief geneticist and sonoporator. I kept telling myself that soon everything would slow down, by a factor of twenty.

Three hundred colonists, untold thousands of adjustments to get the stream of cavitation microbubbles just right—too weak and you don't create deep enough pores in the cell membranes for the DNA to pass through; too strong and you cause excess cell damage. Since nobody's cell walls are the same, the balance is different for each cell type in each person.

Some people can't undergo gene modification by sonoporation at all, usually those with relatively thick cell walls. But the colonists were tested in advance and all had cells within the tolerance range. All except one. My procedure made this whole trip possible; damned if I would be left behind.

The charm of saving the world wore out much faster than I had expected. All our amazing progress in biotechnology and what had we accomplished? Medical researchers still favored retroviruses, so my team didn't get to work much with diseases. The American government had strictly outlawed intelligence enhancements, and I didn't have the nerve to go underground or to China, where I would face further religious oppression. So we used the human macro-sonoporation I pioneered—deploying modified genes with ultrasonic sound—to give people puffy lips, subcutaneous skin art, and mood hair. I had left Egypt because it was in decline, but I soon came to believe that so was America, so was China, all of Earth.

I wanted my work to take us into the future, but people were interested in toys and games, not real advances. So I volunteered for Vanguard .

I ONLY EVER SAW Chuck cry twice. The first time was the day I realized we were in love.

He had told me he loved me before that, and I said it back so as not to hurt his feelings, but it surprised me he would say it so soon after we started dating—as a biologist, I did not believe in love at first sight, not until Boutros and James arrived.

Chuck and I had been spending nearly every minute together since I finished the sonoporation. It had worked for everyone, even me with my chubby cells, and we were all slowed. Now, we had over a century to pass, but it would only feel like a bit more than six years. That still sounded like a lot to me, but less daunting after I met Chuck.

For no reason but time to kill, I decided to surprise Chuck by going blond (with dye—I didn't play with DNA for trivial things). He said he loved it, but a while later I caught him tearing up. Okay, he really hates it , I supposed. But he didn't hate the hair, he explained. What he hated was the realization that we would change, that he couldn't hold onto this time together forever. Now I understand how he felt, but then I really didn't. To me, change was something to embrace. I always wanted to move forward.

Still, I went back to black hair. And even though we didn't have Boutros and James for nearly two more years, somehow it feels as if we conceived them that night.

In theory, you could travel to the stars using suspended animation, putting people to sleep for years at a time. In practice, that doesn't work. Tarried animation works. Using a combination of drugs and genetic modification, human beings can be recalibrated to as little as one-twentieth speed.

My macro-sonoporation technique was necessary for the extensive gen-mods required. You couldn't just turn a dial on people's DNA and slow them down. There were a hundred alterations to make, in light of the physical and chemical processes outside our control. We could compensate for some things externally—for instance, elevating the ship's temperature to reduce body heat loss and spinning the main cylinder to simulate one-twentieth gravity, so things would appear to fall at the correct acceleration.

But many other factors required genetic tinkering. For example, a slowed person will blink one-twentieth as often, but evaporation from the eyes does not slow, so we countered with denser tears. No adjustments, however, could keep the body functioning at much less than one-twentieth speed. So we calibrated the crew and all the colonists to one-twentieth.

That meant no woman could get pregnant on the six-year (subjective) voyage without going through my lab—the zygote had to be slowed before implantation. And if most of the mothers took my offer to ensure their children's high intelligence, well, that would benefit the whole colony in the long run.

Since we synchronized everyone, you mostly couldn't tell the difference after slowing. Of course, we could not avoid slight variations. Some people moved and talked just a little faster than the rest of us. They tended to stick together. Spending time with them always reminded me of visiting New York.

Marriage. Twins. In hindsight, the first four years of the trip were the happiest I've experienced. But at the time, I felt bored.

Then came new data from Earth. With eighty years' advances, they could gather more precise information about Ararat, our destination. A lot of minor adjustments and one major problem: toxic levels of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, apparently generated somehow by the same abundant plant life that made this world an attractive destination.

We would need to adjust, if we didn't want to switch to a secondary destination at least four more subjective years away. I had serious doubts our little band would survive the extra four years. Everyone was growing so thin I felt like I had returned to Alexandria. I was sure I wouldn't be able to take much more of the reconstituted food, or of the smell building up in the lab, from the recyclers downstairs and the chemicals the air scrubbers couldn't quite wipe away. And gossip had it the captain and crew were getting loopy. I even overheard one group of colonists assuring each other that the ship was so easy to pilot, if necessary we could mutiny and fly it ourselves.

Genetic modification seemed to me the obvious answer to the carbon monoxide problem. I suddenly had a lot to do.

The next two years passed in a blur. And then, of course, everything became a blur. The difference is, I can still remember certain events and conversations from the two years before we reached Ararat. That's what I've lost, the ability ever to take my finger off the fast-forward button, to experience the world in real time.

We need to talk, Emzara.

Quickly. I have to get back to the lab.

That's what we need to talk about. You're working so hard. You're not getting the exercise you need in this gravity. And we hardly ever see you anymore.

I'm sorry, Chuck, but you know how critical my work is. Do you think I enjoy working eighteen hours every day? I have to do this, for everyone.

But what's the panic? If you're still working when we arrive, we'll just wait in orbit a while.

Three hundred people should each put their life's ambition on hold because I couldn't get my job done?

Em, I know it's important, but we need you here, too. The boys need a mother.

Is that right? Tell me, when your ancestors landed on the beach at Normandy, was anyone saying, "But why aren't they with their children?" I suppose even on an interstellar spaceship, for women the future is still a long way away.

Look, I know I'm not being fair.

Chuck, they're not yet three. They're still babies. They'll be older once we get to Ararat. They'll appreciate the time with me more then.

They aren't babies anymore, Em. You just haven't been here to realize it. Did you see the mural outside our slot? Boutros did that.

You mean you did it, and he helped.

Me? I can't paint.

Well, neither can I, and I didn't try any augmentation of artistic ability. Where does he get it?

Gene modification, the old-fashioned way.

How does he make the paint?

Hey, I had to have some skills too, to get on this boat.

Really, Boutros painted that?

Yes.

All right. All right. I will figure something out, some way to spend more time with all of you.

Thanks, Em. I don't mean for you to feel bad, but we miss you. I miss you…. Boys, you're supposed to knock first.

Mama crying.

Why?

Because Mommy needs a hug.

Mmm, thank you both. Do you know Mama loves you very much?

Hee-hee-hee, Mama silly.

Why?

I HAVEN'T DECIDED whether I'll really transmit this recording when I finish, but just in case, here—here are the murals Boutros did. He kept adding to them for over two years. See? They extend beyond the horizon. Of course, the horizon slants up and it's only twenty meters away.

Nobody minded some extra color in the corridor. In fact, Boutros started a trend. Half the ship is painted now, even some of the exterior.

See how it gets even better as you move away from our family's slot? Boutros graduated from simple shapes and animals to complete landscapes. At only four years old. And do you know, it just occurred to me for the first time, he painted this without ever seeing a real landscape. What an artist! No doubt he made a wonderful farmer also, but I wouldn't really know.

I think Chuck knew I wouldn't be able to keep my promise. That night, we made love for the last time before we reached orbit at Ararat. Two years of hardly seeing my family. That was the second time I chose to desert everyone I knew, and the only one I regret.

We managed to design the mods we needed by the time the ship arrived. Once the Vanguard reached Ararat and confirmed a habitable surface, we started in with two sets of modification by sonoporation, one to adjust to the Ararat atmosphere, one to reverse the slowdown.

I take great pride that my assistants and I managed both sets of mods on everyone, working at a furious pace, with only two failures. One little girl I had never met went into system shock from cell damage and died. And one colonist proved totally resistant to further modification—the colonist with cell walls outside the preferred tolerance range. Should have seen that coming.

I performed the reversal on Chuck and the boys first. By the time we realized it hadn't worked for me, the second time I ever saw Chuck cry, they were already at double my speed.

I could still talk to Chuck, who spoke as deliberately as possible, but not to Boutros or James. I could barely even track the boys with my eyes, they moved so quickly. And hugging them through all their motion was like trying to hold on to water from a faucet.

Chuck insisted that I slow the boys and him back to my speed. I refused. But when he threatened to have one of my assistants do the sonoporation to slow them again, I relented and said I would do it.

No good doctor would ever force treatment on an unwilling patient. But I wasn't a doctor to them, I was a wife and a mother. So with my last three sonoporation procedures, I acted as a wife and mother should, for the final time. I gave them a splice to forever block any genetic slowdown, making it impossible for them to rejoin me at my speed. I would not permit my family to be trapped, to give up their future for me.

A day later, they were at ten times my speed. I could understand nothing anyone said. Standing right next to each other, Chuck and I communicated by email.

By the next day, everyone but me was fully accelerated. Chuck continued to try to communicate, but how agonizingly long every conversation must have taken for him.

Just trying to kiss him was an exercise in frustration. Doubtless he was holding the kiss as long as he possibly could, but to me it felt like a tiny peck.

I remember I kept lying down to cry, feeling wells of tears pool in my eyes, but someone would always wipe the tears away before they could fall down my cheeks. Did Chuck do that so the boys would not see? Or did it just look uncomfortable to them to have all that water on my face for so long?

WHEN CHUCK, Boutros, and James took the last one-way shuttle to the surface, I stayed behind. Everyone begged me to come, even though it would be a challenge to keep me alive in that atmosphere, for it would be many years of scratching out a foothold on the planet before they would be able to return to orbit. But I had no wish to live down there, a statue frozen among the living.

They stripped down the Vanguard as they left, but the remaining equipment was still plenty to keep one woman alive. And I could receive and send messages and pictures. At first, it felt like I was traveling, as if I had gone on a voyage and left Chuck and the boys behind, instead of the reverse.

I tried to communicate with them every day, but it was hopeless. If I didn't want to miss a day for them (26 hours on Ararat), I couldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time. In a few weeks, I became irrational with sleep deprivation. That made me tear up a lot, and a good cry would cost a whole day anyway.

So I gave up and went to a normal sleep cycle, waking each time with the awful realization that I had missed an entire week. If I stopped to read my family's messages from that week, another day was lost before I could respond.

I watched my sons mature in a few months, like bean sprouts in a time-lapse film.

Since Chuck died, since Boutros and James became strangers, I have spent more time watching news and entertainment feeds from the planet. I have seen a whole civilization grow from the tiny seed I helped plant.

I have become a legend, a sad story my descendants retell for entertainment. Three times they have made flatfilms of my life. Each time the story becomes more melodramatic, and the actress playing me more absurdly beautiful.

The leaders of the world's young government often consult me. They trust me to consider a proposal's long-term consequences. But then, their long term is so near, for me.

Every time I step away from the screen, when I return it's the future. I suppose in a way life is like that for everyone, forever rushing into the future. But it is different for me. For me, there is only the future. Other people get to inhabit the present, at least for a time, even if they seldom appreciate it.

I sit above the world like an impotent god, watching my grandchildren build a new life, a life with no place for me. In the past year, I've seen both my sons die, then the last surviving original colonists.

They are finally redeveloping spaceflight. If I wait, before long my descendants will arrive here, to marvel at my slow-motion movements and wipe away my tears.

I have been studying the specs, and the Vanguard really is quite simple to pilot. Soon I will take the ship back into deep space. The systems will surely start to break down before long, and I will be at a loss to make repairs, but at least my grandchildren will first be able to see the torch in the night sky as I leave.

Back in Alexandria, they were right. I am jabaan. This is a coward's form of suicide, leaving behind all my descendants and the whole world I helped create, but it carries one comfort.

No one will stop my tears from falling.

The Trouble with Heaven

By Chet Arthur
| 7047 words

Since his last appearance in F&SF, Chet Arthur has let on a few details about his shadowy past. He says that as a young soldier stationed in a Bavarian cow town, he recalls nothing whatsoever except that the burg had one cathedral and fourteen breweries. During college, he was sitting next to Allen Konigsberg in Metaphysics when the latter was expelled for cheating on the final exam. Later in life, Mr. Arthur got lost in the Pentagon and had to survive for a week on hot dogs and Smoothies from an enlisted men's mess. His eventual rescue by Navy SEALs was not the stuff of which films are made.

In regards to this story, your editor would like to say only that he has nothing but respect and admiration for the Gateway City (the one east of the Mississippi, that is) and its current mayor. Opinions to the contrary in this story do not reflect those of management.

CHARLES ADAMS-MORGAN approached without joy the prospect of dying and going to heaven. That was how he thought about retirement—dying. And everybody down at the Diplomatic Club said Ambrosia was a lot like heaven.

Charles disagreed. He knew the Minister was sending him there for his last tour of duty only because he didn't want to waste anybody with a future on a post where nothing ever happened. Putting old boys out to pasture on the Earth's poshest residential satellite was so well established that Ambrosia was called a "pre-mortem assignment."

"You'll enjoy it," the Minister assured him, smiling benignly. "Big desk, no duties. A great chance to decompress after your long, distinguished career."

"You mean a great chance to learn how to be useless. I've never even known why we have an embassy there."

"Legally, because it's another world. As a practical matter, because the bunch of snobs who live there have more money than God. They'll love you, Charles, if only because you have a hyphen in your name."

"What'll I do with my time?"

"Evenings, go to parties. The Ambrosians spend a lot of time having dinners and balls and receptions. Daytimes? I dunno. The only issue that seems to get them stirred up is the Servant Question, and I don't see why that should concern you. So relax, play a little tennis, take up tai chi, think about your memoirs."

"When I was a kid," said Charles, "I used to sit in church wondering if heaven could possibly be as boring as it sounded."

"Soon you'll know." The Minister smiled. He gave the old boy his patented sincere handshake, and put him out of his mind forever.

In the aisle of the shuttlecraft, Mike Segretti said good morning to a tall, forbiddingly well-groomed old man entering a unit marked DeLuxe. In reply he got a chilly look, and the door closed with unnecessary force.

Mike shrugged. Life as a journalist had left him almost unsnubbable. He found his own compartment—the type of beige closet the Transport Administration termed Basic—and settled down to sightsee. When the shuttle left the atmosphere and the blind on his porthole retracted, he pressed his nose to the triple transplast and gaped at the oceans, the clouds, the moon over here, dawn breaking over there. The Earth was beautiful, just like travel brochures said—not a hint of all the bad stuff that went on down below, the tedious succession of disasters that journalists called CODO (for Crap of Daily Occurrence).

Feeling inspired, Mike pulled out his notebook, turned it on, and made the first note for the article he'd been assigned to write. "Below lies the human tragedy," he intoned, "but up here you see only the divine comedy."

That was exactly the sort of oracular stuff the Editorial Computer liked. He had his article's lead, and now if he could come up with a snappy finish, what lay between would practically write itself. Smiling contentedly, he put away the notebook, closed his eyes to both tragedy and comedy, and began to snore.

The two travelers arrived simultaneously, yet not together.

In the VIP Lounge of Ambrosia's shuttleport, Charles Adams-Morgan was met by a delegation of gleaming personages, all of whom turned out to be droids. He endured with the stoicism of long practice a (literally) canned speech of welcome, then entered a limo that rose purringly from the porcelain floor and bore him like a pheasant on a platter down six levels to the palatial embassy. Awaiting him there were champagne, fancy chocolates, hothouse flowers, and two of those annoying cards that talked.

The first, in a desperately upper-class accent, invited him to dine with the Board of Governors that evening. "Formal attire," it fluted, "decorations will be worn."

"Monkey suit," Charles translated, "with clinkers."

The second card in gruff Germanic tones invited him to a costume ball a week hence, with the theme Old Vienna. Oh God, he thought, not one of those, and gestured at a serving bot standing in a niche of the atrium. It rolled up, gathered his luggage, and led the way into a gold-plated elevator and down a gleaming hallway.

The master bedroom's rococo décor looked as if it had been vacated a few hours earlier by Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine. Here a valet bot took over, explaining as it unpacked his luggage, "I am programmed not merely to obey Your Excellency's commands, but as far as possible to anticipate your every desire."

"Then you should have anticipated that I prefer to be served in silence," Charles replied in tones that had given frostbite to many a hostile diplomat. After that the unpacking proceeded—mutely.

Meanwhile, Mike was undergoing Ambrosia's way of greeting non-VIPs. The searching and scanning of his meager form ended only when the Medical Officer stripped off his latex glove and handed Mike a paper towel.

"Get dressed," he said and walked away, whistling tunelessly. A nurse passed the doorless examining cubicle and glanced in. "Make mine sunny-side up," she said.

In Passport Control, Mike perched his insulted backside on a very hard chair while his documents were processed. Though now fully clothed, he still felt ghostly fingers prodding him inside and out.

"Police record," the guard muttered, collating four piles of hardcopy. "Security clearance, retinagraph, DNA, bloodwork, brain scan, sperm sample, rectal smear.… First trip to Ambrosia?"

"Yeah."

"Have fun," he said, and waved Mike down a long blank hallway that led to OPAL, the Ordinary Persons Arrival Lounge. He was wondering what new humiliation might await him there, when an elegant young woman held up a sign with his name on it. He pointed at himself and smiled and she smiled back.

"So you're Mr. Segretti," she said, shaking hands. "What do your friends call you?"

"Mike," said Mike. "And you are—"

"You can call me Alice."

"You live on Ambrosia for long, Alice?"

"I've been here quite a while," she corrected him. "Technically speaking, I don't live at all."

Oh Christ, he thought, another one. It was getting harder and harder to tell them from people. At a desk labeled SUPPLIES, he checked out an omni tuned to local channels, retrieved his suitcase, and followed Alice onto a slider ramp that took them down five levels. They emerged into the light of a vagina-pink sky.

"It's always morning on Senior Level," she explained. "Makes the old folks feel more hopeful. Or so I'm told."

"Why are they putting me on Senior Level? I'm only twenty-nine."

"This is where we house most of our visitors. For obvious reasons, units are always coming vacant."

"So there's death, even on Ambrosia."

"Our scientists are working on the problem."

For a few minutes they stood gazing at the scene. Belle époque buildings overlooked parkland with shivering aspens, weeping willows, blooming dogwood, a murmuring brook, and a pool where a rainbow trout leaped and scattered glittering spray. Far off, a line of snow-capped mountains etched the dawn sky, and the snow had faint roseate tints, just like real snow on real mountains on a real morning.

"Wow," he said.

People began to appear. Young couples strolled through the park arm in arm, climbed an ornamental bridge, stood gazing at the water. Toddlers in immaculate jumpers or rompers or whatever they called those things (Mike had so far avoided the joy of fatherhood) ran laughing from one blossoming copse to another.

He nodded at the people. "Are they, uh—"

"Good, aren't they? Senior Level residents like to look at young people, provided they aren't real young people, who are, you know, too noisy."

She led him into a building that resembled a very large piece of pastry and deposited him in a small apartment on the first floor.

"I'm sure you'll want to clean up and rest a bit," she said efficiently. "Tonight you'll observe a state dinner. Observe, not partake. We'll have a bite early, or rather you will. Tomorrow A.M. we'll do a grand tour, get you oriented, and I'll set up some interviews. See you at nineteen-thirty in the lounge."

Mike's new quarters comprised two large rooms with faux antiques, a white carpet, white walls, a white ceiling, and an opulent bath. Music was provided by an audio program called Three Hundred Years of Show Tunes. Mike looked for some way to turn it off, couldn't find any, and told his notebook, "Remind me to ask Alice how to can the goddamn music."

He dropped his wrinkled clothing into a trapdoor marked Clean and Press, took a hot shower and stretched out on the bed. Immediately it began to massage him. "Stop that," he said. The bed stopped. That gave him an idea, so he added, "Stop the music," and the music stopped too. Mike thought, The room listens. The room hears. The room is at my service. That's better than having to call a bellboy, who'd want a tip.

In its quiescent state the bed was superb, molding itself to every bone and joint of his body. Fifty-two minutes later he woke, allowed a shaver vac to smooth his face and whisk away the mown bristles, retrieved his now spotless clothes, and dressed. As he exited the room, it assured him, "Henceforth, I will open the door only to your body signature."

Whatever that might mean.

Aided by soft-voiced signs hovering in midair, he found the lounge, sat down, and told his chair to stop massaging him even before it started. When the bartender rolled up, he ordered a Gin Apocalypse and had just downed it when Alice arrived. The time was precisely nineteen-thirty, proving again that droids, alone of all creatures in the known universe, were always punctual.

"Ready for the thrill of seeing the Board of Governors eat dinner?" She smiled.

"Are they human? So far the only carbon-based organism I've seen was in the bathroom mirror."

"If they weren't, would they be dining?"

He said he guessed not, and at her suggestion ordered another Apocalypse and a hamburger. While he ate and drank, she plugged into a wall socket and became visibly more energetic and talkative as the current flowed.

CHARLES CONTEMPLATED the Palace of Government without pleasure. Who but a trillionaire would mix Palladio with neo-Frank Gehry, then cover all interior surfaces with anodized gold? Between the gold and the blaze of light from nineteen chandeliers, he was glad his replacement eyes had tinted lenses.

"His Excellency, Charles Adams-Morgan, Ambassador of Terra," intoned a lackey in eighteenth-century attire.

"Ah, Mr. Ambassador," murmured the squat, veinous, and many-wattled Chairman of the Board of Governors, extending his right little finger and smiling, or trying to.

"Chairman Lewinski," replied Charles, whose memory for names was legendary. He hooked the proffered digit with his own and they gingerly shook.

"My colleagues," said Lewinski, while a servant wiped his used pinkie with a germicidal patch. Somewhat insulted, Charles ignored the other fingers waving at him like worms emerging after a rain, bowing instead. He preferred bowing anyway—it showed respect while avoiding contact.

Superb drinks and stilted chitchat followed. Everyone was indifferent to the wars, massacres, scandals, and revolutions currently agitating Terra, but passionately committed to one side or the other of the Servant Question. Charles gathered that the issue was whether to be waited on by humans, or not.

Those who favored their own species argued that there was something terribly generic about the service given by bots and droids. To be served, in the best and most traditional sense, you needed servants —people over whom you had power, not mere devices that could be programmed to obey any Tom, Dick, or Harry. Those on the other side of the issue argued that people, dammit, were just too unpredictable. Some of the techs were talking about forming a union! What would come next? Strikes, labor unrest, the storming of the Bastille? Why had they moved to Ambrosia, if not to get away from that sort of thing, anyway?

Another lackey in knee pants and silk stockings announced dinner. Gold-leafed doors swung wide, and with many bowings and scrapings the portly maitre d' directed the guests to their chairs. Charles's server, a youngster with wig askew, was definitely human. While decanting prosecco into crystal flutes, he managed to spill at least half of it, causing a fat lady to exclaim, "Gimme a bot any day!"

Sipping slowly, Charles eyed the long table with its burden of crystal and silver. Regardless of age, all the guests looked buffed and glossy. At the far end of the banquet hall, behind a sheet of transplast, stood a throng of the unglossy. He turned to a slender, flat-chested woman seated on his left—her place card identified her as Poppaea Mosul Delcombray—introduced himself, and asked who the onlookers were.

"Just the little people," she replied in a bassoon-like voice. "Off-duty servants, techs, medics, people like that. I've never understood why they like to watch their betters eat, but they do. We call the area where they're permitted to stand 'Newark.'"

"Very amusing."

"I suppose that journalist fellow is in the crowd someplace."

"Journalist?"

"One of Lewinski's hacks. Lew owns fifty-one percent of Informat, the communications cartel. When the fellow gets back to Terra, I suppose he'll do one of those features about how, under all the glitz, the rich and powerful are just folks like everybody else."

She chuckled throatily, and he realized that she was a hermaphrodite. He rather liked hermos for their slightly askew angle on the human comedy. "An American writer," he told her, "once said, 'The rich aren't like the rest of us.'"

"Well, of course we aren't. We have a lot more money. By the way, how do ambassadors make theirs?"

"A little at a time," he replied and turned to the fat lady, who wanted to know if Terra was as big a mess as ever. He said it was.

Six courses later, when the last spoonful of pêche Melba had been disposed of, he and Poppaea left the hall together. Their cars were waiting, and he was about to enter his when a short, badly tailored young man materialized with leprechaun-like suddenness at his side.

"Hi, Mr. Ambassador," said the elf. "Remember me? Mike Segretti. We met on the shuttle. I'm here to do an article on Ambrosia."

Charles said distantly, "Ah."

"Seems I've got a problem," Mike confided. "I'm staying on Level XIII, but my droid's gone off someplace, and I don't know how to get back to my building."

"Best of luck finding it," said Charles, and entered his car alone. As the door was closing, he heard Poppaea say, "Oh, Mr. Segretti"—she pronounced it seg-ret-TEE—"perhaps I can help you."

Charles smiled cynically. "Well, that's one way for a young man to find out about Ambrosia," he muttered, and allowed his bot driver to waft him home.

If he thought he'd gotten rid of Mike, he was wrong. Next day Charles was in the embassy's public office, checking on the bots who handled routine business, when the reporter entered with his droid.

"Good day, sir," said he, bright-eyed. "Since you're here and I'm here, could you spare me just a few minutes for an interview?"

Charles sighed and murmured, "Delighted." Clearly, the only way to get rid of the fellow was to give him a quote or two for his article. While the droid plugged into the nearest wall socket, he led Mike into his private office and asked politely what he'd learned so far about Ambrosia.

"Alice just gave me the grand tour." Mike shrugged. "Basically, it's nothing but a big hollow ball with twenty residential and two service levels and ramps connecting them. Like a spherical parking garage, except for the French-pastry palaces and phony gardens. Is this your first time here, sir?"

"First and last."

"Same here. Up to now I've spent my career, such as it is, reporting mainly riots and massacres."

Charles summoned a bleak autumnal smile. "I used to settle things like that. It was my job."

"Mine was to make them look important. They're always bloody and tragic close up, with all the screaming and bleeding and so on, but as soon as you get ten clicks away they're just boring."

Charles nodded. Despite his regrettable tailoring, Segretti was no fool. But that didn't mean he wanted to protract the interview. "Since I'm new in Ambrosia, I don't see what I can tell you about it," he said.

"Well, sir, I want the angle of a knowledgeable outsider. I'd like to stick a paragraph in my article answering the question, Why Ambrosia ? And the fact is, I don't know why these people didn't just stay on Earth. In spite of everything, Terra's a lot more interesting than living inside a gilded beach ball."

Charles explained that Ambrosia belonged to a millennia-old tradition of gated communities, penthouse co-ops, island getaways, and moated granges.

"Rulers don't like to associate with the ruled. They don't like the way common people look or smell or talk or act. It's not just fear of thieves and beggars, it's a kind of visceral loathing for what they used to be themselves before they got lucky. That's why the French kings built Versailles and the Chinese emperors built the Forbidden City—so they'd never have to see anybody who wasn't either a servant or a courtier."

"I wonder how I can put that tactfully . I can't just say snobs don't like slobs. The Editorial Computer would never accept it."

"That, my young friend, is your problem."

Charles walked him back to the entry hall where Alice joined them, moving in more sprightly fashion after her plug-in. Noting the superbly supple rhythm of her hips and legs, Charles thought it would be a shame if she burned out her circuits, like so many droids who got addicted to energy flows. For a moment he wondered if she had a sexual app—then sternly repressed that voyeuristic fancy, and said farewell.

The rest of his day was filled with mostly nothing. His one piece of ambassadorial work was arranging the deportation to Terra of a tech who'd been declared persona non grata as an agitator. Charles asked the ferret-like little man who he'd been agitating, and he said everybody.

"I tried to set up a union," he said. "They don't like organizers here."

"I'm sure they don't. What was your job?"

"Maintenance on the police droids. When that bastard Lewinski told me they were booting me out, I made some final adjustments he won't like," he added, with rather a nasty smile. "Delayed action, too. I'll be long gone when the gadgets start acting up."

"I hope you didn't sabotage a droid named Alice."

"Alice? I guess you mean an AL-20. I never worked on no 20s. They're almost human. The cops don't have to be. In fact, it's better if they ain't."

Charles personally stamped his visa and handed him over to the bots for routine out-processing. Then, having nothing else on his agenda, he left the building to stretch his legs and do a bit of sightseeing.

LEVEL XII HAD, besides the embassy and rows of luxury co-ops and the Palace, its own patch of faux nature. Charles had been a hiker in his younger days and felt almost at home striding past ancient trees, choirs of singing birds, and tame deer that approached on delicate hooves, only to sprint away again. But when he left the porcelain walkway to go exploring, the trees, grass, birds, and deer flowed silently away to either side, like a carpet being rolled up. When he returned to the path, the woods followed him.

"It's Alice in Wonderland, " he thought.

The Alice part proved prophetic, for Mike's droid was coming down the path toward him, her hips moving as musically as ever. He smiled and nodded.

"Oh, Mr. Ambassador," she said. "How nice to see you again. Are you enjoying the enchanted forest?"

"Yes and no. It's an amazing conjuring trick. I was wondering how it's done."

"Something with lasers," she said vaguely. "I'm here to schedule some interviews for Mike at the Palace. He wants to talk to Lewinski, and since he's Mike's boss as well as the Chairman, I can just imagine what a groveling session that'll turn into."

Charles smiled. He'd always been susceptible to attractive and clever women, and Alice scored on the attractive and clever parts at least. They strolled in the general direction of the palace, chatting. She said something about the dinner the night before, and he told her Mike had been looking for her afterward.

"That's odd. He told me not to wait for him. He said he was going to worm his way into some VIP's limo and pick his tiny brain."

"Ah," said Charles. "I should have known."

At the palace gates, they paused and stood for a moment facing each other. His replacement eyes gazed deeply into hers, and what he saw there made him smile even more broadly than before.

"Why d'you pass yourself off as a droid?" he asked.

For an instant she was startled, then laughed. "I got so tired of guys hitting on me all the time. Now I just do my job and go home to my cat, which by the way is a real cat."

"So you're actually one of the human workers. I hear talk about getting rid of people like you."

"Fine with me. I just hope they don't do it right away. The pay's good up here, so I want to work another year or two to build up a nest egg. Then I'll go back to the real world and start to live like a human being."

"What's all the plugging-in about?"

"Helps to make the droid shtick more believable. The plug's a dummy, of course. I just act a little more vivacious afterward, and everybody thinks, Oh, the gadget's gotten itself juiced up." She laughed gaily, and so did he.

"Never feel a longing for love?" he teased.

"Sure. But that can wait. You're not going to hit on me, are you?"

"No, I've become a monk in my old age." On impulse he added, "If you don't mind an invitation that's strictly on the up and up, why don't you let me squire you to that damned costume ball next week? I'd far rather talk to you than the locals."

Alice kissed her fingertips and touched them lightly to his chin. "Underneath all that armor plate, you really are sweet," she said. "I'd love to go with you."

"My antiquity doesn't bother you?"

"So you're a million years old, so what? Everybody's got some little thing wrong with them. What night is it, and what's the theme?"

For Charles, the days that followed their chance encounter weren't as empty as before. Whenever she could get away from Mike, Alice came to lunch or cocktails at the embassy, and despite the age difference they found plenty to talk about. He told her about trying to negotiate between people whose greatest joy in life was murdering one another. She told him about living as a droid, and about working with Mike.

"It's like baby-sitting a hyperactive six-year-old. Every once in a while I say I have to plug in, just to get a break. By the way, he's going to the ball too. Some woman with the incredible name of Poppaea Mosul Delcombray is taking him."

Briefly Charles tried to imagine a couple made up of a short elf and a tall hermo, then decided he'd just have to wait and see what they looked like. He asked what Alice had decided to wear to the ball, but she wouldn't tell him.

"I want to astound you," she said.

But he was already rather astounded, because he found himself being happy for the first time in he couldn't remember when. He enjoyed getting up in the morning, and the days passed swiftly. He was even looking forward to the ball.

When the big night came, it turned out to be a surprise for everybody, especially Mike. Wearing a garish Hussar costume that Alice had obtained for him, he climbed into Poppaea's limo only to find her dressed not for Old Vienna, but for a Goth party.

Her coltish body was clad in black vinyl, with a silver chain for a belt and a padlock for a buckle. Another chain hung from a jeweled collar around her neck. As the car began descending one ramp after another, she informed him that they were headed for something much more interesting than the waxworks at the Palace.

"Voilá le scenário pour la nuit," she said, taking his arm cozily among the deep cushions of the back seat. "Until dawn, I'm your slave. I got the idea reading de Sade, and it sounds like such fun. I stop being a rich bitch for a while, give up my will to my master, and just take it easy. Here, hold my leash," she added, looping it around his wrist.

"Where are we going?" he asked, trying to be sophisticated, though he'd never previously used a leash on anything except his dog Lew, who was named for his boss.

"To the depths. To Level III. To the Underworld."

"I thought the underworld was what people moved to Ambrosia to get away from."

"That's what they thought too. Unfortunately, their children came with them."

She explained that many young Ambrosians were idlers, dropouts from expensive schools who found any form of work demeaning. The passive ones spent their time drinking and screwing and playing golf with "smartballs," which always went in the cup. Others were more violent. The Council kept the troublemakers on Level III, just above the level where the police droids were stored. The denizens called it the Underworld, and amused themselves by forming gangs, committing vandalism, and having drug-fueled orgies.

"Some die." She shrugged. "But that's rather the point, isn't it? Dying is the ultimate way to distress their parents."

"Great story!" Mike enthused, wondering how he'd ever get it past the Editorial Computer.

Level III, like all the others, had a faux moon and stars. But the streets, despite being lined by fancy lamps resembling birdcages, were dark as tunnels. Poppaea explained that knocking out the lights was a popular sport—the denizens smashed them at night and repair bots fixed them in the morning, so they could be knocked out again.

When the limo stopped, they exited into moon-cast shadows. A narrow, dimly glowing path opened ahead of them through a black forest of cypress trees, and Poppaea quoted, " Here once, through an alley titanic of cypress, I roamed with my soul ."

"That's Edgar Allan Poe," said Mike. "Did you ever read his story called 'The Imp of the Perverse'? I was just thinking about it. A man destroys himself for no reason at all, except a random impulse."

Through the taut leash he felt her shrug. " C'est tout l'histoire de l'homme. Oops, here come the denizens ."

A throng of adult trick-or-treaters began emerging from the trees. Young or youngish people with painted faces, dressed (if they were dressed at all) as cannibals, witches, spiders, demons, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, and who-knew-whats. All were armed with what looked like toys, but actually weren't—their spears and swords and knives were made of black duroplast, a synthetic almost as hard as steel, and had wicked-looking points and edges.

Giggling and squeaking, the mob surrounded them. Mike smelled the familiar dry musk of cannabis mixed with exhalations of costly wines and brandies and liqueurs. Underneath were earthier reeks—unwashed armpits, feces used as body paint. Pushed and jabbed and jostled by this noisome crew, Mike wished he were back on Senior Level, where his apartment would take care of him.

"Da fucka you?" growled a tall, hoarse somebody in the crowd, imitating the rough language of the lower classes.

"Oh, Donny, cher, it's Poppaea, the girl with the great big clit. This is Mike, who's a writer and will make you famous."

"Hi," said Donny, stepping forward. A cloak of faux fur thrown over his shoulders emitted a subtle odor of decay. Eyeing the leash, he said, "So, Poppy, you're his slave for the night?"

" Oui, Monsieur ."

"Well, this is mine. Say hello, Sporus."

"Hiya," said Sporus, who was very pale and thin and wore a leash, a loincloth, and a spiked slave collar. "My real name's Pavl Lewinski. I've got a sort of genetic contact with writers, Mike. My father runs Informat."

"Good Christ," said Mike. "I work for Informat."

"Then you're a lot more of a slave than I am, Honey."

"Enough," growled Donny, yanking Pavl's leash so hard he squeaked. "We're hunting tonight. The question is, who's the quarry?"

"I have a suggestion," said Poppaea, breathing faster. "Why don't you hunt Mike and me? If you catch us, you can gang-rape us. That's always terribly exciting."

"Now, wait a minute," said Mike, but nobody else wanted to wait, so the hunt got underway tout de suite.

In a moment he and Poppaea were plunging through the dense forest of faux cypress, pursued by the mob howling, "Hai-hai-hai-hai!" She dragged him by the leash, not the other way around. Her method of escape was to run straight at a large tree or boulder or stone wall until it dissolved, flowed around them, and took form again behind. She seemed to think this would confuse their pursuers, but Mike had his doubts.

"I think they know this trick," he gasped.

"Ah, but I have another. Coming up is a real wall, so scramble, my little man."

She yanked hard and together they went up and over a heap of stones and beams, then crouched behind it. To judge by the smell, they were now in the ruins of a burned-down house.

"I thought you wanted to be caught," he whispered.

"It's no fun unless I really try to escape first. After all, Mike, what is illusion? What is reality? Is l'être really le néant, or not? Does a mask conceal the real self, or reveal it? How often, like any true child of France, I have pondered these questions—"

At this moment the first of the drug-addled hunters ran head-on into the wall, thump, crack, and collapsed with groans. Others followed, thunk, bonk, bam. Followers began to fall over leaders, who at least were softer than the wall.

"Idiots," said Poppaea. " Allons, Mike! Now is our chance."

Again they were running headlong at trees that turned to shadows as they touched them. Through the fleeting forest he caught glimpses of Poppaea's limo, parked beside the ramp that led to safety. Lounging in front, fur-caped back against the hood, stood Donny. He was holding a nasty-looking scimitar in one hand, Sporus's leash in the other.

"He thinks he has outsmarted us, l'imbécile, " she hissed. She tucked two fingers into her mouth and emitted a piercing whistle.

Instantly the car's lights switched on and it leaped forward, flattening Donny and sending Sporus spinning away. Its hydro/electro engine humming tunefully, the limo rushed through the forest, trees leaping nimbly out of its way. It halted directly in front of them, the bot chauffeur blinking its LEDs, and the back doors flew open. Poppaea and Mike scrambled in, the doors closed with a satisfyingly weighty sound, and she exclaimed, " À la maison, vite, vite! "

It was high time. The denizens had recovered from their encounter with the ruined house and were coming on again, howling with rage. As the limo swept up the broad white ramp, they poured out of the woods and followed it onto Level IV, where real people lived. Mike saw them beginning to disperse among the bijou palaces, smashing windows and setting fires. Then the limo climbed another ramp, leaving the spreading chaos behind.

"God, it has been such an entertaining evening," breathed Poppaea. "And now, mon cher petit Michel, I am ready for another kind of adventure, if you are. Remember, I am your slave until dawn. The time is short—don't waste it."

Unaware of the riot, Charles and Alice were viewing, but had not yet begun doing, the Viennese waltz.

The Palace was a colorful scene, all its chandeliers dimmed and flickering to imitate gaslight. The male guests were dressed in the fancy uniforms of disbanded armies; the women in ample gowns that swayed like complex flowers as they moved; some sported entirely superfluous bustles. Charles disdained costumes and wore his usual evening attire, clinkers and all.

He smiled at Alice, who was looking superb in pink. After a conventional life, he thoroughly enjoyed both her company and the shock effect of squiring what everybody else thought was a droid. He took her by the hand and waist, caught the languid deux-temps rhythm, and they joined the dancers circling the floor. The couples spun round and round on their own axes, and also orbited the room—just like Terra, come to think of it.

"My goodness," said a woman dancing nearby, "I didn't know those things could be programmed to waltz ."

Charles winked and Alice grinned. When the music stopped, he led her out onto a balcony.

"Oh my God," she breathed. "Moonlight, roses, a nightingale singing. It's a program called Smiles of a Summer's Night , and it's all on one single memory cube, even the smells of the flowers."

"Don't tell me about it," he said, feeling happier than he had in a decade or two. "I'd rather enjoy the illusion."

"Sorry to be a downer. I just know too much about this damn fake world, that's all. Charles…can I ask you a really pushy sort of question?"

"Ask away."

"Well then, do you think I could become your mistress? Just for a while?"

"That's rather an astounding proposal, my dear. What brought it on?"

"Oh, I don't know. We're both loners, aren't we? I just thought, maybe when you retire we could go back to Terra and be alone together."

"That sounds entrancing," he said, and put an arm around her shoulders. She leaned against his starched shirtfront and sighed.

"I hope that's a yes. It'll be nice to have a man in my bed again, even if—"

"Even if he is a million years old."

"You've got to stop reminding me of that right now. Only women are permitted to repeat the dumb things their partners have said, over and over and over.… Charles, do I have to do all the work around here? They're playing Strauss, and the faux moon is full and the faux nightingale is singing, so what are you waiting for, anyway?"

They had just fused into a deep embrace when Chairman Lewinski came bustling up. He was looking frantic—his ball-bearing eyes darting angry gleams, his swollen veins inflamed, all his wattles aquiver.

"Ambassador," he said abruptly, "please tell your droid to turn off. I have an urgent matter to discuss, and I don't want her recording it."

"Certainly," said Charles. "Turn off, my dear."

Alice immediately froze in place.

Lewinski growled, "It seems we're having a riot. It started on Level III. Down there it's always trouble, trouble, trouble, and what does Ambrosia exist for, if we're to have trouble all the time?"

"How can I be of assistance?"

"We don't have a real jail here, so I want you to communicate with the Government of Terra on an urgent basis. Tell them that we desire to lease prison space, provided a prison can be found that is suitably upscale."

"If there's one thing Terra possesses," said Charles, "it's a wide variety of prisons. I'll return to the embassy at once and contact the appropriate authorities. It'll be costly, you know."

"What's wealth for, if not to imprison one's obnoxious offspring? I thank you, Ambassador. Please ask also for a squad of human police to guard the rioters on the shuttle—preferably very mean police, who dislike rich brats. Our coppers, unfortunately, have been programmed for deference."

He bustled away, tearing out what was left of his hair.

"Turn on again," said Charles, but Alice replied, "After that interruption, I may have to fake it."

He was having coffee in his private office next morning, when his butler showed Mike in. He clearly needed a drink, so Charles asked what he wanted. "Gin Apocalypse," said Mike promptly.

The butler bowed, rolled away to the embassy's wet bar, and returned with a stiff one. After Mike had imbibed a healing quantity, Charles said, "You look like a man who's made a rough night of it."

"Oh, just the usual. Helped start a riot, got chased by a lynch mob, had sex with a hermo. A female hermo," he added quickly.

"That's an oxymoron," Charles objected.

"Not really. Poppaea's just a tad overequipped. This morning she announced that we're changing places—now I'm her slave and she's my dominatrix. 'Oh good,' said I, 'I've always wanted to try that. But first I gotta take a leak.' Into the bathroom, out the window, ran like hell. Guess I'm safe here," he added, looking around like a hunted wild creature. "I mean, legally the embassy's Terran soil, right?"

At this point Alice entered, wearing one of Charles's bathrobes. Mike goggled at her. "My God," he gasped, "I didn't know you had a sexual app."

"Actually, I'm as human as you are, if not more so. Charles, order some coffee for me, will you?"

"Certainly, my dear."

Mike's face took on a moonstruck expression. "God, how I wish I'd known you were human," he muttered.

"Oh, Mike, I'm so glad you didn't."

They were seated at breakfast when shouts, screams, and the clatter of weapons began in the street outside. Charles sent the butler to find out what was going on, and it returned with startling news. "It appears, sir, that the police droids, instead of arresting the rioters, have begun attacking the Palace."

"What a story!" cried Mike. "Trouble in heaven! Rich snob bums running wild! Police mutiny! Attack of the rebel droids!"

He gulped his coffee and rushed off. Alice left to get dressed, muttering, "Nothing but a ball gown to wear, and this isn't shaping up to be a ball-gown type of day."

Charles ordered his bots to close the Embassy gates, finished his breakfast, and set out to see the excitement for himself. He was headed toward the Palace through the faux forest when it began to fade and vanish. One by one the trees flicked off, the emerald grass rolled up like a carpet, the singing birds blinked out like Christmas-tree lights, and the cloudless sky vanished, leaving behind only a grim coffered ceiling of dull metal with dusty pipes and wires—the underside of Level XIII.

Now Charles could see the battle, and it was like déjà vu all over again. How many times in his life had he witnessed riot and disorder? The droids hammered at the closed doors with their weapons, anodized gold burned off revealing the steel beneath, smoke drifted like tendrils of acrid mist, and muffled curses and screams came from inside. When someone touched him on the arm, he jumped—but it was Alice, wearing workmen's coveralls she'd found in some closet at the Embassy.

"I know the Council are a bunch of boring twits," she said urgently, "but we have to do something ."

"Is there a master control panel for the droids? Can we shut them all down?"

"Yes, it's on Level I, the lowest service level. We'd better go back and get your car—"

But they'd just turned toward the Embassy when a limo shuddered to a stop beside them. Poppaea was driving herself, and she leaned out and cried, "I was looking for someone, but this—this is incroyable . What is occurring, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur?"

"I'm afraid the Servant Problem is solving itself," said Charles dryly. "We need to lobotomize the droids. Do you know the way down to Level I?"

"Only too well. Hop in."

They crowded into the front seat beside her. The powerful car rose from the bare metal ground, swooshed past the battle at the Palace—where the droids ignored it, fixated like any machines on one assigned task—and down the nearest ramp.

As they passed through level after level, Alice gaped at the contrasts. On V through XI, everything was serene, faux lovers wandering hand in hand among faux gardens, human and nonhuman workmen adding dabs of paint to bijoux residences. But Level IV revealed burned-out buildings and shattered windows, while Level III was bereft of life. Level II was also empty, all the police droids off attacking their masters, while on Level I baffled bots stared at control panels where alarm lights flickered in epileptic disorder. Circuits were overloading left and right, and the smell of burned plastic and metal poisoned the air.

"Typical of urban riots," Charles remarked like a connoisseur. "Blood flows in one neighborhood, people walk dogs in another. Screams of pain here, screams of laughter there. Where's the panel we need?"

"Straight ahead, I think," said Alice. As the limo careened past tall, glimmering banks of machinery, she pointed out a ceiling-high module with LEDs blinking madly. Charles said to Poppaea, "Run into it hard, si'l vous plait . What's this? Oh right, I forgot about the restraints."

But the limo hadn't. With the perfect if limited recall typical of machinery, it reached out upholstered arms to enclose the three of them, while shields alerted by radar blocked the windscreen and the front bumper hardened into collision mode. The crash that followed made the limo groan, but all the warning lights went dead in an instant. Suddenly, anticlimactically, the great Ambrosian riot was over.

"A curious business," said Charles. He was viewing a news program on the bankruptcy of Ambrosia, caused by the refusal of the rich to pay enormous sums to live in a place where the CODO was, if anything, thicker than on Earth.

The program was surprisingly blunt and candid. A massive heart attack inside the burning Palace had deprived Informat of the elder Lewinski's ruthless hand, and under his son the cartel had collapsed in a barrage of scandal. As a result, all sorts of news was getting through that the Editorial Computer used to filter out—including rave reviews for Mike's brutal exposé Secrets of the Rich and Infamous .

"The Ambrosians were right after all," Charles said, turning off the big entertainment center he'd bought with his retirement bonus. "Ultimately, it was the Servant Problem that did them in."

"No, darling," said Alice, "what did them in was being human. Our species just isn't built for a carefree existence."

She fed their pet, a large neutered alleycat named Poppaea, and they left their condo for an evening stroll down the curving flower-and-tree-lined streets of Garden State Gardens, a walled community on the outskirts of Newark. When friends asked why they'd chosen this particular spot to settle, Alice always answered that their aim was to get as far from Heaven as they possibly could.

"Newark," she liked to say, "just dropped into the slot."

Dislocated Heart/ A Starpilot's Post-operation Note

By Robert Frazier
| 75 words

Ecstatic yes but how can I fill this vacuum
where my blood used to pump
where they've left me a bit
of shivering shifting magenta tech
like a dark lucky stone from Mars
with a stripe of quartz-like fibers
lining it like a jolt of passion or
the mold of a fist from an unborn child
waiting in my chest to unfold

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

By Charles de Lint
| 3125 words

Every Day , by David Levithan, Knopf, 2012, $17.99.

I'M ALMOST at a loss as to where to begin explaining just how great a book this is. What's easy to say is that it's a perfect example of how some of the most innovative novels are being published in the Young Adult market—and there's nary a vampire nor a dystopian future in sight here.

Beyond that, pinpointing what kind of a book it is gets tricky. It's a love story, but not a romance. It's speculative fiction, but rather than concentrating on the nuts and bolts of strange occurrences, it focuses on how people are affected by those unexpected circumstances.

Maybe a little background will help.

Our protagonist calls himself A, and every morning he wakes up in somebody else's body, displacing the regular inhabitant. He might wake up as a boy or a girl, gay or straight, blind or grossly overweight, a star athlete, suicidal, or a bully. He's sixteen when the book opens and he's lived like this his whole life. It wasn't until he was four or five that he realized that it's not the same for everybody else.

By now he's got his routine down pat. He accesses what he can of his host body's memory as soon as he wakes and tries to fit in the best he can, leaving behind as little baggage as possible. In other words, he's developed a pretty mature moral code. He knows he's only borrowing the bodies for a day. Whatever he does while he's borrowing their bodies will affect his hosts for the rest of their lives.

Except then he wakes in the body of a boy named Justin who mistreats his girlfriend Rhiannon. He feels bad for her and he might have been able to let it go the way he has every other one of his borrowed lives (if you can call one stolen day a life), except he falls in love with her. So instead of treating her the way Justin would, he treats her the way he believes she should be treated and steals her away from school to spend a perfect afternoon on the beach.

Nothing more can come of it, of course. When the day ends he'll leave Justin's body and awake in another one that Rhiannon doesn't know. And Rhiannon will be back on the wrong side of Justin's mean barbs and indifference.

The rest of Every Day is about how A tries to buck the odds and create a relationship with Rhiannon. It doesn't go easily, and with A concentrating so much on making things work with Rhiannon, he gets sloppy with the lives of his body hosts. Soon he's got one of them trying to track him down, and the impossibility of what he's doing grows even more complicated.

I hadn't read David Levithan before this book—or I should say, I hadn't read him writing on his own. I've enjoyed previous collaborations but they in no way prepared me for how good this particular book is.

First off, the idea is fantastic. And while Levithan never explains why this is happening to A (let me add here that I didn't want him to; explanations almost inevitably spoil things), his "worldbuilding"—if you will—is impeccable. A changes host bodies throughout the book more often than we might change a shirt, but each of the hosts has a unique, fully realized life that impinges on A's quest, for good or for ill.

Levithan flirts a bit with painting a larger picture, hinting that there are others like A, but happily focuses on the small story which gives the novel, and its ending, the power that it has.

I like the messages of acceptance and tolerance in Every Day , how if you get to know the stranger (intimately in A's case), they're no longer so scary. Levithan delivers this without preaching. There's no "and here's the message, kids." It simply flows naturally out of the narrative and the choices the characters make.

The Spider-Man mythos has that famous line, "With great power comes great responsibility." But the truth is, with any power comes responsibility, and that holds as much for how we treat the people around us as it does for, say, a politician holding office.

You couldn't get a better example of why that's true than you can with this book.

Highly recommended.

The Emperor's Soul , by Brandon Sanderson, Tachyon, 2012, $14.95.

Before I even started The Emperor's Soul , it already had a couple of strikes against it insofar as I was concerned.

First, it's a secondary-world fantasy, and having read so much of that kind of story over the years I find my patience sorely tried with most of them. Too many feel interchangeable. They're invariably vast sweeping epics that read more like war novels with magic substituted for weapons of mass destruction and magical beings (elves, dwarves, whatever) deployed as specialized fighting forces. In other words, no sense of wonder.

I know—I'm generalizing. But generalizations come from somewhere, and in the case of the state of high fantasy as it has existed for the past few decades, the exceptions have not proved the rule. I don't say these books shouldn't be read and enjoyed by the many happy readers who appreciate them. I'm just saying I don't appreciate them.

Second, Brandon Sanderson has been finishing off Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, which is not a plus in my eyes, since Jordan's epic is exactly the sort of thing that put me off of a lot of high fantasy. Again, I'm happy it's giving so many people as much pleasure as it does. I'm just not one of them.

But I try everything that comes in for review, stopping only when I lose interest, and that didn't happen with The Emperor's Soul . In fact, satisfying as the conclusion of this short novel is, I would gladly have read more.

Shai is a young Forger who is caught replacing the Empire's prize treasure, the Moon Scepter, with an almost flawless copy. She is slated for execution until an assassin leaves Emperor Ashravan without consciousness. If he doesn't emerge from the hundred days of mourning for his wife who was killed in the same attack, the rule of his faction will be over and the Empire plunged into chaos.

So his advisors come up with the plan of staying Shai's execution if she will fulfill an impossible task: Forge a new soul for the Emperor.

In Sanderson's world, Forging is a magical act of creation that works under strict guidelines and skills. Everything—animate and inanimate—has a spirit and a memory of what it is. What a Forger does is convince a thing that it is something else. To do this the Forger has to know everything that can be known about the final Forgery. The level of difficulty goes up exponentially depending on the complexity of the subject.

Naturally, a soul-Forgery is hardest of all to attempt. An unconscious human—where one can only get information about his life from books and the memories of those around him? Success is unlikely even after years of work. Shai has less than a hundred days.

The task isn't made any easier by her being confined to a tiny, dirty dungeon chamber, watched over by those who hate her (soul-Forgers are considered an abomination by her captors), and her prison room being sealed with a magical ward made of her own blood.

Sanderson proves to be an exceptionally talented writer in the pages of this book. Complex as some of the background is, he never gets bogged down filling in details for the reader. Instead we learn everything we need seamlessly as the story unfolds. His prose is lyrical without ever getting in its own way (you know what I mean; his writing never sits up saying "Look at me"). His characters are fascinating and fully realized.

So here is an exception to what seems to have become the rule: The Emperor's Soul is one of those rare high fantasies that feels fresh and is filled with a sense of wonder.

I definitely plan to track down more of Sanderson's original work.

A Fine and Private Place , by Peter S. Beagle, Peter Gillis & Eduardo Francisco, IDW Publishing, 2012, $3.99.

Peter Beagle's quiet novel A Fine and Private Place is pretty much the last book I would have thought might get a comic book adaptation. There's not a great deal of action in the prose version. Instead you'll find lots of contemplative conversation and a wonderful small cast of characters, each of them fully realized from the moment they step onto the page.

In fact, if you'd told me the book was going to be adapted, I would have assumed it would be for the stage since—with the right director and actors—it would make a terrific play.

With all of that said, the comic is a very pleasant surprise. Peter Gillis has done a terrific job of retaining the quiet mood of the novel. Eduardo Francisco's art is a little static, by which I mean the flow between panels isn't smooth—the point of interest in one panel drawing the viewer into the next. But it's a style that really suits this book, and he does a fine job of depicting a middle-of-the-twentieth-century New York and the folks living there.

If you're not familiar with the original novel, it tells the story of a pharmacist who has withdrawn from the world to live in a cemetery where his only companions are a helpful raven and the ghosts of the recently dead.

You really should read the prose version—it's one of my all-time favorite novels—but Gillis and Francisco are doing a great job and I'll stick with their adaptation until it ends. And I'm hopeful it'll get people reading Beagle's novels. He's one of the best writers we have still working in our field, and you won't regret the time you spend with his stories and characters.

Fair Coin , by E. C. Myers, Pyr, 2012, $16.95.

Quantum Coin , by E. C. Myers, Pyr, 2012, $16.95.

I love the way Fair Coin takes a fairy tale motif and first, makes it its own, then transforms it into a solid sf outing.

Ephraim Scott finds a quarter with Washington's head facing the wrong way that commemorates the state of Puerto Rico. That's odd enough, but then he discovers that the coin makes wishes come true when it's flipped.

Or at least it sort of does.

The problem is while a wish fixes one problem, others arise in its place.

I was really enjoying this as a "watch what you wish for story" because Myers does a great job with his characters. Ephraim, his crush Jena, and his best friend Nathan all feel like real kids. Ephraim doesn't try to save the world; he does what a kid would do, and that's try to solve the problems around him—from his mother's alcoholism, to getting Jena to notice him.

But as the book progresses, a darker undercurrent makes itself known, and the characters realize that Ephraim doesn't have a magic coin so much as a device that transports Ephraim from one world into a parallel other world depending on the decisions he makes. He also realizes that for him to appear in this world, another version of him is kicked back to the world he just vacated.

Then there's the fact that in some of these worlds, Nathan's not his best friend. He's a scary guy with a gun.

I won't tell you how it all works out—why would I want to spoil it for you?—and I won't tell you too much about the second book either, since that'll do the same. What I will say is that the first book is fabulous from start to finish.

The sequel, Quantum Coin , isn't quite as good. The first book had a great ending—tidy, with some good character building for Ephraim. It also had the benefit of introducing all these great ideas and characters. The second book's reason for being felt somewhat forced, and I kept feeling the author's need to up the ante. I still enjoyed it—and if there's a third, I'll probably read it—but Fair Coin , where it all starts, is the real gold, and I recommend it to you highly.

Taken , by Benedict Jacka, Ace, 2012, $7.99.

The touchstone here is Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files series. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Jacka is a pen name of Butcher's. I'm not saying the Alex Verus novels (of which this is the third) are copies of Butcher's popular series. Rather they share a similar sensibility, pacing, and tone, and the magical systems in both are just as meticulously worked out.

In Taken , Verus gets involved in a mystery involving the disappearances of apprentices. Unlike Dresden, he's not a wizard, but he does have a divination ability that Jacka uses to great effect throughout the story. Verus also has access to a bag of magical tricks—little temporary fog bombs, a cape that makes you almost invisible, a gateway spell, etc.—but it's his divination ability that makes him feel so fresh.

Unfortunately, all his leads in the case bring him to an enormous country manor where his ability and tricks won't work and some mysterious parties don't just want him off the case. They want him and his friends dead.

If my opening paragraph seems harsh, I don't mean it to. I'd happily read new books by both Butcher and Jacka every year. There's room for the two of them. I like Verus's world and the cast of characters that surround him. The obvious history from previous books is seamlessly integrated into the current one so the reader never feels lost.

So if you're jonesing for a Dresden fix, but you've already read them all, do yourself a favor and give this series a try.

Fables: Werewolves of the Heartlands , by Bill Willingham, Vertigo, 2012, $22.99.

Long before the TV show Once Upon a Time showed up, Bill Willingham was telling us stories in his comic series Fables of displaced fairy tale characters living hidden alongside the regular human world (the Mundy world, as his characters call it). I've never quite warmed to the TV show, partly, I think, because it annoys me that the spin around the show is that it's so cool and original; longtime Fables readers know it's anything but.

Fables is still going strong. It's had spin-offs like Jack of Fables , Fairest , and various mini-series and one-shots, of which Werewolves in the Heartlands is only the latest.

Willingham always brings a bit of grit to his takes on the old tales (which is fitting, since the originals were never meant for children in the first place), and this book is no exception. It features Bigby Wolf (the big bad wolf) on a quest to find a new location for Fabletown, which was destroyed in the regular Fables series a while back.

He comes upon a place called Story City, which seems promising except that it already has a secret of its own that you can probably guess from the title of the book. What follows is a fascinating take on the effects of totalitarianism that also includes some background information on what Bigby was up to during the second world war.

The art by Craig Hamilton and Jim Fern is simple but effective, and the story's gripping. It's a standalone piece that requires no previous knowledge of the series or even Bigby, though naturally there are deeper resonances for the readers who are familiar with Willingham's previous work.

I was particularly amused by Willingham's afterword describing how the book came to be. It turns out there really is a Story City, but what I found funny was Willingham going into a diner there and ordering a meal and a drink…and a story. The waitress just gave him a blank look, so he had to find one for himself.

And it's a good one.

Faery Tale: One Woman's Search for Enchantment in a Modern World , by Signe Pike, Perigee Trade, 2011, $15.

I read non-fiction books for two reasons. The first is to get information. The second is for the writer's voice. When it comes to the latter, if the voice is interesting, it doesn't really matter what the book is about, I'll keep reading. (Which is a great way to find out about things you didn't think you cared about, but hey, once you're better informed, they turn out to be pretty fascinating after all.)

Now, I've never seen a faerie (outside of gatherings like FaerieCon or FaerieWorlds), but I like the idea of them, I suppose that's pretty obvious from my fiction, and I really enjoy reading about how the idea of searching for faeries and magic impacts peoples' lives, so I was sold on trying this book by its subtitle, "One Woman's Search for Enchantment in a Modern World."

The thing is, while people might set out to look for actual physical proof of faeries or magic, in the best of such quests the seeker eventually discovers that the spiritual connection they're looking for is actually inside themselves, and that the world is full of enchantments and glamour, albeit not necessarily of the fairy tale kind. And I know it's pretty much a cliché, but it's the journey that's important, and therefore of the most interest.

One of the first such books I read was Colin Wilson's The Occult , published back in 1971. Wilson was a skeptic and he wasn't looking for faeries, but in his search for the validity of magic in that book, and in the others that followed, he came across all sorts of fascinating things, including the phenomena of ley lines and the movement of Earth energies.

Which leads us along a rambly road through the decades to some of the current thoughts about faerie, which basically consider them to be some kind of sentient energies that we clothe in the garments of fairy tale characters so that our minds are able to "see" them.

And from there to this book.

Signe Pike was an editor at Random House who decided to take a sabbatical during which she would search for the existence of faeries and write a book about that search. It's part travelogue, part spiritual quest, part memoir. She has a good eye for detail and the story never lags—whether she's interviewing the Frouds (Brian & Wendy) in England, hiking in the highlands of Scotland, or coming to terms with her feelings about her father's passing.

Her voice is engaging and informal, so much so that I—and I'm sure many of her readers—would just like to sit down in the corner of a coffee house or pub for an evening of conversation with her. The book hits all the right notes—lyrical but still down to earth, a little woo-woo but with a healthy dash of skepticism, full of interesting characters and great descriptions of her travels.

Since it's unlikely that most of us will have that conversation in person with Pike, this charming book is the next best thing.

Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.

BOOKS

By James Sallis
| 1999 words

American Science Fiction Novels of the Fifties , ed. Gary K. Wolfe, Library of America, 2012, boxed set, $70.

Volume One, 1953-56: The Space Merchants , More Than Human , The Long Tomorrow , The Shrinking Man

Volume 2, 1956-1958: Double Star , The Stars My Destination , A Case of Conscience , Who? , The Big Time

THOSE among us who have looked up and around of late may suspect that there's a willful co-opting of genre underway. Celebrated mainstream writers without apology squeezing out science fiction, fantasy, and crime novels. Tussles online and off. Social-networking writers declaring that "literary" is simply another genre rife with its own blind spots and conventions. Or my favorite by far: Colson Whitehead admitting he'd rather "shoot himself in the face" than suffer through another literary vs. genre discussion.

So let's just clear our throat and move along. Nothing to see here.

Except. In the fifty-plus years science fiction has been an integral part of my life, I've watched waves lap in and recede, and I've walked among shoals of fish gasping on the strand. It has always seemed to me—a notion brought up repeatedly in my criticism—that a periodic return to science fiction's origins has been essential to restoking its fires. The same is true, I think, of the crime novel. That something muscular, primitive, even a bit shabby lies at their heart and accounts in part for their impact and power.

And now, it appears, the rest of the tribe's got onto us.

Previous Library of America volumes include historical anthologies of science fiction and fantastic tales, books from Shirley Jackson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. P. Lovecraft, three collections devoted to Philip K. Dick and two to Kurt Vonnegut. This latest entry celebrates the golden age of the science-fiction novel, a time in which signature idioms were being established and the field's ambition—its reach—rose like flood waters. These novels for which many of us paid thirty-five cents or a dollar in drugstores and bus stations and used bookshops have traded in their overalls and worn jeans and got dressed up to go into town.

It's a beautifully designed, beautifully produced set. Attractive box, comfortably sized volumes with some heft to them, great repro covers, good paper. And with Gary Wolfe editing, one can be sure of taste, knowledge, and discernment.

Beware though, aged children, of nostalgia rolling in like a wind across the plains. Many reading this column will have little need of plot summaries or reminders because these stories have become a part of who we are. I can remember where I was when I read each of these books the first time, the specific light, the sounds of traffic or insects or birdcalls around me, the clip-clop of rain on a roof.

Many too, I suspect, may find themselves of two minds regarding this enterprise, pleased with our little plot of land's having gained such recognition (See, we knew all along!) yet feeling at the same time a tug of loss for what has been so resolutely and privately ours .

As condiment for the novels themselves there's a great deal of ancillary material at the Library of America website (www.loa.org). This includes personal introductions for each novel by current writers such as Tim Powers, Neil Gaiman, and William Gibson, an introduction and two other brief pieces ("Historical Context" and "Why the 1950s?") by editor Wolfe, and a reprint of Robert Silverberg's essay "Science Fiction in the Fifties: The Real Golden Age."

Citing this very magazine's debut in 1949 as "the first harbinger of the new era" along with Galaxy's advent the following year, Silverberg reminds us that:

"Until the Fifties there was essentially no market for science fiction books at all. The paperback revolution had not yet happened; the big hardcover houses seemed not to know that science fiction existed…. All that changed in the Fifties. The mighty house of Doubleday began to publish hardcover science-fiction novels steadily, soon joined by Ballantine Books, an innovative company that brought its books out in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions. The sudden existence of willing publishers was all the encouragement the new writers needed: and suddenly we had dozens of splendid novels in print in book form."

All today's science-fiction writers are deeply indebted to the dominant Fifties writers, Bob insists, to Bester and Sturgeon and Sheckley and Pohl and the rest, "for the fundamental body of ideas and technique with which they work today," a thesis well served by the nine novels selected here.

What may surprise is how well these novels hold up. Witnessing corporate artful dodger Mitch Courtenay prepare for battle—"As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report"—it occurs to us that Pohl's and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants isn't showing its sixty years much at all. English 101's verisimilitude and Aristotle's recognitions right there on the page. And its teeth are still good.

The wondrous voice and language of Theodore Sturgeon gleam untarnished in More Than Human :

"The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead."

Leigh Brackett's bildungsroman still grabs you from the first sentence, The Long Tomorrow , a template by which we measure hundreds of tales of social repression and relapsed civilizations. Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man , diminished to less than a pinpoint, gains vision of the world's true vastness and possibilities:

"He stood in speechless awe looking at the new world with its vivid splashes of vegetation, its scintillant hills, its towering trees, its sky of shifting hues…Scott Carey ran into his new world, searching."

The Chilean poet Vincente Huidobros wrote: Invent new worlds & be careful what you say.

Exactly.

And that's just the first volume. We move then from social satire, shrinking men, shriveled civilizations and inchoate superbeings, to dramatized theology, political intrigues, the nature of identity, and individuals suspended in wars so all-embracing as to be the only existence they can ever know.

Talking about books that changed one's life is right up there with "making a difference" and "giving something back" on my list of blathermouth cliches. But two of these novels proved of tremendous importance to me. More Than Human , along with much of Sturgeon's work, first stirred within me the urge to write, and first brought me to consider that such might be possible. When years later, an earnest poet, I turned back to the science fiction I'd loved as a child, it was this novel and Bester's The Stars My Destination that I read and read again. Breathing them in, getting them in my blood.

"Bester strips the dross from classic mechanisms of fiction," William Gibson writes on the LoA website. "It made most of the rest of its assumed genre look hick."

And of More Than Human , Kit Reed remarks:

"It's still risky, exciting and fresh.… He showed me how to open [my stories] up.… He uses timing, cadence, selection, everything at hand to shape his story so organically that there's no separating the story from the telling."

This is about imagination and story. We mature, we create ourselves as human, by mimicking those around us, form gradually becoming content. We attain civilization by identifying with other individuals of our group. And we compose our own individuality, our selves, by patching together the stories we find around us: structures upon which we will superimpose our lives.

The stories we choose, or allow to be chosen for us, are important.

And that does often seem a central theme in these novels. Father Ruiz of James Blish's A Case of Conscience struggles to reconcile the stories by which he's led his life with the new reality he sees around him. Bester's Gully Foyle rewrites the given narrative of his life. The problematic robot of Algis Budrys's Who? is patently a revision, perhaps a whole new edition, of Lucas Martino. Robert Heinlein's Double Star with its spitballing actor is about becoming what we pretend to be, as a person and as a society. In The Big Time , Fritz Leiber's characters try to see one another and selves in the fog of stories that seem all event, with no glue, no true narrative, to hold those events together.

Leigh Brackett's juvenile protagonist in The Long Tomorrow speaks for all of us forever reaching, hoping to lay hands on the story that will keep us afloat: "Oh God, you make the ones like Brother James who never question, and you make the ones like Esau who never believe, and why do you have to make the in-between ones like me?"

Not to say that, for all this collection's fine representation of the period and the excellence of the novels, there are no flaws or faultlines. The legs work great, but as with all of us so grandly aging, there's the occasional limp and stagger. And sometimes, for a sentence or two, we kinda, you know, forget what we were going to say?

So, yeah, The Space Merchants's loose-jointed structure may creak in the wind a bit and leave readers at times wanting. Stereotypical Fifties male attitudes therein may rankle others. Here and elsewhere, the humor is often broad and can fall flat. A pervasive Cold War presence tends to anchor the Budrys to the past, as do strains of Freudian psychology in Bester and Sturgeon, while, by contrast, the very un grounded nature of the war and of existence itself in Leiber's novel, along with the demands it makes on the reader, may frustrate. Admittedly, too, the language does upon occasion cluck and sputter. But for the most part—though they do occur—this literature is not about great prose and beautiful sentences. This is about story: stories that strive to find their way into recesses of mind that harbor our great myths, right up there alongside Jung's archetypes, and to remain.

Tim Powers says of Who? that "Algis Budrys was one of the handful of literary geniuses who have found that science fiction is the field most open to the exploration of their deepest personal convictions." These novels were written to sell, yes, and to be read; but there is to each a sense beyond the commercial, a sense of necessity, of an individual leaning close to tell us what matters .

I tell my students that science fiction, arealist fiction of every sort, puts a frame around mankind's existence, the same thing that all literature does, but then pulls back, well outside the frame, to have another look. In an unassuming, natural, story-based manner, science fiction can ask the big questions. What are we? Where do we come from, where will we go? What is identity and can we buy some? Must I live the life dealt me, or can I trade up? How do I learn? Is what I see real?

In one of my first published stories, disguised as an aged, world-weary poet, I wrote, "I suppose when I was a young man I cared nothing for history of any sort." All literature builds on what came before, of course, but not in a progressive manner. The arts never reach some pinnacle of activity and achievement; instead, they forever circle back, loop and reboot, repeat themselves, put on new hats, reinvent themselves. Every journey is as much from as it is to . I was fortunate enough to read these novels fresh off the tree, and eventually to meet several of the writers. Many of those writers are gone. The books remain. Perhaps it's important that today's readers and writers, cruising faultless interstates, glance in their rear view mirrors at the county roads we have so recently left?

Collections such as this from The Library of America bring us to consider anew what we've perhaps passed by too quickly, or what we've too long taken for granted. Connie Willis's comments on Double Star speaks to all these novels: "Heinlein's novels of the 1940s and '50s shaped every single science fiction writer of my generation and everyone currently writing science fiction."

Damon Knight said that as writers we're magpies, stealing shiny things from other nests. Lots of shine here. Gold we are still mining.

PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS

By Paul Di Filippo
| 1150 words

Kozmic Kickstarter

PROJECT 103,047
CROSS-BRANE CHORUS

PROJECT STATEMENT: Assemble, rehearse, and take on the road a chorus of identical individuals from several timelines.

PROJECT FUNDING: 3.9 5 megacoins.

PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: Hi, Kickstarters! My name is Hayden Planarian, and I'm a well-established singer, having performed at such venues as Trump Marsport, Hard Rock Café Puppis, and Bellagio Casino Ursa Major. My dream right now is to recruit approximately fifty of my doppelgängers from across various parallel branes to form a unique chorus of myselves, then conduct a galactic tour. I would not draw any salary from the Kickstarter funds, but instead subsist on whatever ticket sales accrue, divided equally among myself and my "sisters." My major expenses are 1) securing access to cross-brane portals (approximate power demands per minute of active usage is point zero five percent of standard annual solar output); and 2) hiring translators, bodyguards, and diplomats, as well as providing bribes, on those branes that deviate significantly and perhaps dangerously from my own.

REWARDS

PLEDGE 1 KILOCOIN OR MORE: live playback parrot with my latest suite of songs installed.

PLEDGE 1 10 KILOCOINS OR MORE: inclusion of donor in a role in my promotional Multiverse TV augmented reality software.

PLEDGE 1 MEGACOIN OR MORE: house concert for you and ten of your friends (methane-breathers excluded).

PLEDGE 1 10 MEGACOINS OR MORE: one-night stand with myself and any desired number of my counterparts.

PERCENT FUNDED: variable across multiple branes.

PROJECT 450,329
UPLIFT SLIMEMOLDS OF
UPSILON ANDROMEDAE VII
TO SENTIENCE

PROJECT STATEMENT: The Society for the Extension of Turing-ready Species wishes to confer sophont-hood on the highest lifeform of Upsilon Andromedae VII.

PROJECT FUNDING: 1.5 10 gigacoins.

PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: As the wavefront of SETS works its way across the galaxy, our dedicated missionaries have encountered many species that were just trembling on the verge of sentience, and needed little more than a stern lecture from one of our Monoliths or the introduction of a non-cannibalistic mating ritual to make the leap to true self-awareness. But with the slimemolds of Upsilon Andromedae VII, we are faced with a truly superhuman task. We cannot use genetic engineering to impose our own ineluctably biased standards of sentience on a species that can barely yet climb a simple ramp, but must instead rely on accelerated Darwinian evolution in situ . Although the chronofield generators are fairly inexpensive, this project will take eons, and we must budget for continuous Uatu-level monitoring during that period.

REWARDS

PLEDGE 1 MEGACOIN OR MORE: receive small terrarium full of rudimentary slimemold inhabitants.

PLEDGE 1 10 MEGACOINS OR MORE: determine which kind of economic system any particular slimemold nation will utilize.

PLEDGE 1 GIGACOIN OR MORE: be allowed to destroy one slimemold city of your choice, when city-building stage is reached.

PLEDGE 1 10 GIGACOINS OR MORE: become the supreme deity of one fully self-aware slimemold society, with all associated privileges.

PERCENT FUNDED: .9%

PROJECT 1,333,807
RECREATE ENTIRE 25-PART GEORGE LUCAS STAR WARS MYTHOS ON A 1:1 SCALE WITH REALITY

PROJECT STATEMENT: To emulate to a high degree of precison what will become, in effect, a live-role-playing simulation of the entire canon of ancient Star Wars "movies."

PROJECT FUNDING: 8.620 petacoins

PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: Galactic civilization having finally reached a developmental stage that matches or surpasses that depicted in the High Chaotic Period entertainment franchise known as the Star Wars Mythos , it is now finally possible to "swede up," as the period slang would have it, a remake of the entire saga, a production that completely eschews special effects of any kind, thus providing a more authentic experience for the dedicated acolytes of this cult. (Small cosmetic enhancements and prosthetics will be allowed to bring contemporary characters into complete conformity with the originals.) We need to purchase many, many items in advance, such as several planets and Death Stars for destruction; to hire millions of extras; and to work out the last few bugs from the design of the double-bladed Lightsaber so that its users do not instantly kill themselves upon activation of the unwieldy weapon. After an internecine interplanetary civil war between rival factions of our team, we have cut down our original cost estimates by deciding to forego hiring any scriptwriters to improve the dialogue.

REWARDS

PLEDGE 1 TERACOIN OR MORE: date with either Han Solo, Chewbacca, or slave Leia.

PLEDGE 1 10 TERACOINS OR MORE: ten one-hour life-coach sessions with Yoda.

PLEDGE 1 PETACOIN OR MORE: allowed to kill Jar Jar Binks after LARP recreation is ended.

PLEDGE 1 10 PETACOINS OR MORE: Darth Vader will father your heir.

PERCENT FUNDED: "Do or do not…there is no try."

PROJECT 89,234,553
BUILD DYSON SPHERE AROUND 51 PEGASI

PROJECT STATEMENT: We intend to disassemble all planets in this system with the exception of exoEarth 51 Peg b for the construction of a totally sealed adamantium, energy-sequestering and causal-blockage globe around the primary.

PROJECT FUNDING: 5.825 zettacoins.

PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: The best stochastics for 51 Peg b indicate an imminent Singularity incident within the next three years, plus or minus 10%. The League to Preserve Baseline Humanity wants to shield the planet from contact with the rest of the galaxy—and vice versa—well before that time, while still allowing its residents maximum developmental freedom, under the terms of the United Planets charter (the famous "life, liberty, and the pursuit of computational density" clause). The well-being and stability of all systems inside a ten-thousand-light-year sphere with 51 Pegasi at its center is our primary concern.

REWARDS

PLEDGE 1 EXACOIN OR MORE: one (1) rivet to be manufactured with donor's DNA incorporated into its alloy.

PLEDGE 1 10 EXACOINS OR MORE: likeness of donor engraved on inner surface of the Dyson Sphere at astronomical magnitude.

PLEDGE 1 ZETTACOIN OR MORE: deed to one billion square kilometers of exterior shell surface. No liability for harm, mutation, or contagion intended.

PLEDGE 1 10 ZETTACOINS OR MORE: rights to address one question per solar year to the 51 Peg b Singularity Mind. No answer or utility of answer guaranteed.

PERCENT FUNDED: 115%

PROJECT 932,456,834,192,128
TURN E. L. JAMES IX FAN FICTION INTO BEST-SELLING URBAN FANTASY NOVEL

PROJECT STATEMENT: I have written over two thousand pages of fan fiction based on the novel Shades of Ultraviolet by E. L. James IX, and I need to revise it to feature supernatural elements.

PROJECT FUNDING: 10,000 zeptocoins.

PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: Although the franchise begun by the original E. L. James and continued by her dynastic successors owed its origin to the supernaturally replete Twilight series, all E. L. James, Inc., properties since that first repurposing have been rigorously stripped of any paranormal elements. I was inspired recently (by sales figures for paranormal romances) to conceive of restoring these occult plot and character tropes to my own clonal iteration of the sampling of the mashup of the slash homage. The small sum I am asking for will cover merely my caffeine consumption, interweb service fees, and purchase of inspirational fantasy trilogies during the revision process, much of which will be facilitated by market-based, reader-polled, artificially creative content- provider software packages.

REWARDS

PLEDGE 10 YOCTOCOINS OR MORE: one line drawing of my novel's heroine produced by my cousin, as featured on deviantART.

PLEDGE 100 YOCTOCOINS OR MORE: naming rights to one human character.

PLEDGE 10 ZEPTOCOINS OR MORE: naming rights to one sexy supernatural character.

PLEDGE 100 ZEPTOCOINS OR MORE: hologram of the author in a genuine thoatskin corset.

PERCENT FUNDED: -99%

FILMS: ALL MAN-EATERS GREAT AND SMALL

By Kathi Maio
| 1964 words

WHEN NOT viewing films for this column, my tastes still gravitate toward horror movies—but not the zombie, monster, or slasher films you might associate with the term. My preferences run more toward environmental and social documentaries. My online queue is full of them. They vary from the quirky and personal (example: Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold's 2002 Blue Vinyl , which considers the environmental and medical implications of ubiquitous PVC house siding) to the politely professorial (example: Al Gore's 2006 Oscar-winning climate change lecture, An Inconvenient Truth ) to those that are preachy yet oriented toward problem-solving (example: Peter Byck's 2010 feature, Carbon Nation ).

I'm not that choosy. The topic can be the death and disappearance of pollinators ( Vanishing of the Bees ), the health consequences of industrialized food ( King Corn, Food, Inc. , etc.) or Earth's mounting fresh water crisis ( Flow ). Whatever the topic, such nonfiction films have the power to scare the bejesus out of me in ways that Freddy Krueger's antics never did.

Of course, some other folks look at such "documentaries" and question their ability to convey anything close to the truth. For them, Sicko 's Michael Moore is a scarier monster than Halloween 's Michael Myers. While I generally find that movies like the ones I've mentioned above are sincerely attempting to inform and educate, there's no question that this is still storytelling with a sometimes frightening and fantastical aspect. When Josh Fox's 2010 indictment of natural gas "fracking," GasLand , shows ordinary Americans setting their formerly potable kitchen tap water on fire, it looks like a special effect, but sadly isn't. Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid (2009) actually incorporates science fiction into her reportage. In it, Pete Postlethwaite plays a forlorn archivist (circa 2055), who sits alone on his devastated planet and reviews footage of all the ways in which humanity did nothing to preserve Earth at the turn of the 21st century.

If nonfiction films are tempted to cross over into science fiction, it is understandable that fiction films are increasingly prone to return the favor. It's beginning to feel like every other horror or science fiction film down the pike falls into the "found footage" category. So much so that I shudder at the announcement of every new example. Nevertheless, the proliferation of hand-held video technologies like smartphones and the resulting tendency of the general populace to record every aspect of the world around them, would argue that this trend will continue, not only on nightly newscasts, but also in cheaply produced feature filmmaking.

Resistance is futile. Mockumentaries may have jumped the shark, but it's likely the next Jaws will be told using found footage techniques. And in the right hands, it might just work. You can almost see the possibilities of retelling that tale through the varying iPhone and Android device viewpoints of fisherman and beachgoers of coastal America. And if you can't visualize it, Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson ( Diner , Rain Man , Wag the Dog ) clearly could. He even inserts a digital camera record of a very Jaws -like savaging of a swimmer into his new low-budget horror film, The Bay .

The film received a limited theatrical release and went straight to VOD services. But "On Demand" is actually a good fit for Levinson's feature. As a faux news exposé, it works well on a TV screen, where I found it to be a very effective melding of my favorite ecological documentaries with found footage fictional horror. If the movie's formula pedigree is not obvious enough, Jason Blum, Steven Schneider, and Oren Peli, who produced the Paranormal Activity franchise, are also producers of The Bay . This type of film is their meat and potatoes. But it is a real departure in style for Barry Levinson.

Still, it's no wonder that the filmmaker was drawn to this particular story. Known for his affectionate social dramas about his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, Levinson has watched the growing dead zone in Maryland's treasured Chesapeake Bay with genuine alarm. He even considered producing his own documentary on the ecological peril of North America's largest estuary. But he quickly realized two things. One was that Hedrick Smith had already reported an excellent 2009 PBS/Frontline documentary (directed by Rick Young) called "Poisoned Waters," which explored the destruction of waterways like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. The other thing he realized is that excellent PBS documentaries don't reach enough people or incite enough action. So he decided to take a different tack.

Teaming with writer Michael Wallach, he concocted a tale of a disastrous 4th of July weekend in a charming little bayside town called Claridge, Maryland. Although the events occurred in 2009, it was only recently that a "GovLeaks" website acquired and released the suppressed video evidence of the earlier events, exposing a wide-scale government cover-up. One of the few survivors of the catastrophe is a young woman named Donna Thompson (Kether Donahue), who had been a perky college intern at the local TV station sent to cover the 2009 Festival. Now she is a disillusioned young woman eager to get the truth out. Through a Skype interview with an unseen documentarian, Donna acts as narrator of the video clips that document the disaster.

Although two marine scientists had already died in what was erroneously labeled a shark attack, the holiday festivities were going on as planned. Miss Crustacean had been crowned and the crab-eating contests and kiddie crab races were underway. It was All-American normalcy until people started taking sick. At first, citizens developed mysterious rashes and boils. Then symptoms worsened and the number afflicted kept growing. Before long, dedicated Dr. Abrams (Stephen Kunken) at the community hospital is overwhelmed with desperately ill patients.

Initially, it looks like a Contagion -like virus outbreak. But soon the blood and gore (and creatures trying to eat their way through distended bellies and ravaged mouths) indicates something closer to the Alien franchise. However, there is nothing alien about the creatures—isopods—portrayed here. They are recognized strains of sea lice. But they have mutated and grown in the toxic soup of polluted Chesapeake waters poisoned by mercury, PCBs, an earlier nuclear accident, and years of urban and agricultural run-off. (In one clip, an "Eco-Spy" reports on forty-five million pounds of hormone-laced chicken shit washing into the Bay each year from nearby poultry farms.)

As events spiral out of control, young Donna posts reports to her TV station and her blog—until they are suppressed by the FBI. Besides the news footage, the film laces together FaceTime chats, smartphone and digital camera home movies, surveillance cameras, police dashboard videos, local radio podcasts, video conferences with the CDC, oceanographer video diaries, and PC Skyping. In all, Levinson makes use of twenty-one different industrial and consumer technologies to tell his story. And he tells it well.

I wouldn't call The Bay a great piece of filmmaking. But as found-footage eco-terror thrillers go, it both entertains and delivers its intended message. Like the cheesy old horror films of the 1950s that cautioned about nuclear radiation, Levinson and Wallach want us to worry about what's happening to our waterways. I'm sold. But then, after all those documentaries I've watched over the years, this Maryland-raised gal was on board before the movie even started.

Another recent movie explored quite different waterborne dangers and also did so using the framing device of a narrator looking back on a time of personal terror. And that's about all The Bay has in common with the sumptuous, high-budget filmic extravaganza called Life of Pi .

You have to say one thing for director Ang Lee—he really never makes the same film twice. From Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) to Sense and Sensibility (1995) to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) to the best director Oscar-winner Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lee's career has been both varied and notable for his skill and artistry. (We can discuss whether 2003's The Hulk was an anomaly on a whole bunch of levels another day.)

Lee's films are visually powerful, but unlike so many contemporary directors, he spends as much time developing and nurturing his characters as he does in producing thrilling action or stunning (and in the case of Eat Drink , mouth-watering) images. And so it is with his latest offering, a relatively faithful adaptation of Yann Martel's Man Booker prize-winning bestseller, Life of Pi .

Pi (or Piscine Molitor Patel—he was named after his honorary uncle's favorite Parisian swimming pool) was born in the Pondicherry region of India. As a young boy (played first by Gautam Belur, then Ayush Tandon), Pi is entranced by the polytheistic spectacle of his first religion, Hinduism. But before long he is equally drawn to Roman Catholicism and Islam. Exactly why Pi becomes a multi-denominational pantheist while still a youngster isn't well explained by the movie or by Martel's novel. And although the story (written and filmed) seems to have a good number of religious trappings, it is hard to know what any of it is supposed to mean.

Is the story an allegory full of cryptic meanings? Maybe. But above all else it is a castaway adventure of most singular variety. This is what screenwriter David Magee ( Finding Neverland ) and Lee wisely focus on.

Because of political unrest in India, Pi's parents (Adil Hussain and Tabu) decide to emigrate from India to Canada, taking their two sons and much of their animal menagerie with them. But soon after a stopover in the Philippines, their ship suffers a cataclysmic event and goes down in the deepest Pacific. Of the humans on board, only Pi (now a seventeen-year-old played with lovely intensity by Suraj Sharma) survives. He makes it onto a lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena….and a Bengal tiger with the incongruous name of Richard Parker. Carnivorism, cunning, and size/food chain dynamics being what they are, before long only the hungry tiger and the heretofore vegetarian teenaged boy remain.

Naturally, Pi would have preferred not to be trapped at sea on a small boat with a man-eater. Yet on two occasions Pi has the chance to abandon Richard Parker to certain death, and in both cases chooses to save him. Which brings a few more of those allegorical queries. What's up with the tiger? Does it symbolize Pi's own primal id? Or perhaps a savage and unknowable deity? Best to throw such philosophical questions overboard, my friends, and simply abandon yourself to the visual wonders of this magical film.

With or without the optional 3D oomph, I defy anyone not to marvel at the look and feel of this movie. Just the opening zoo credits and early India scenes alone were enough to sell me on Claudio Martinez's photography and David Gropman's production design. And then there were the special effects. Although Lee and his team spent a week filming and studying four living Bengals and a hyena, the actual film's carnivores are almost completely CGI. And exquisitely done, at that.

Richard Parker is so real and is framed with so much fearful symmetry that the movie is often too frightening for the small children who might reasonably be brought to a PG movie. Behind me in a theater, a little girl whimpered at the shipwreck and wailed when the carnage (usually done off-camera, at a distance, or in shadow) occurred. Her father kept saying—way too loudly, the jerk—that it wasn't real, it was made up, it was fake. But the little girl believed what she was seeing and plenty of nearby adults were equally transported by the sea, the sky, the fearsome cat, and all manner of additional manufactured magic—including a predatory island populated by thousands of meerkats.

Like the novelist (Rafe Spall) who visits a mild-mannered, middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan) in Canada to hear his story, and like the Japanese shipping executives who cross-examine young Pi after he eventually washes up on the Mexican coast, we might wonder what is real and what is not in this preposterous fable. But in the end, we must abandon ourselves to the storytelling. With a gorgeous film like Life of Pi , that's not hard to do. Whether it's enough to make us "believe in God" is another matter altogether.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

By Gordon Van Gelder
| 117 words

AMONG THE GOODIES we have in store for you in the coming issues are:

"Wormwood Is Also a Star" by Andy Stewart, which takes us inside the meltdown zone around Chernobyl along with a journalist who is telling the world the story of the Witch Children who live there.

"In the Mountains of Frozen Fire," a supernatural story of derring-do that harkens back to the Golden Age of Storytelling.

Other contributors to our next issues include Angélica Gorodischer, Alex Irvine, KJ Kabza, Bruce McAllister, James Morrow, and Robert Reed. Subscribe at www.fandsf.com and you'll get all these stories and much more!

CURIOSITIES

By Richard A. Lupoff
| 255 words

AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA,

BY STEPHEN LEACOCK (1932)

STEPHEN Leacock (1869-1944) was a living paradox. A humorist and satirist with a jolly style and a stinging wit, he took delight in skewering targets ranging from contemporary college life to the works of Jane Austen. But these entertainments, most of which are still relevant and funny, were only half his output. The other half was serious political polemics. A Briton by birth, he was raised and spent most of his life in Canada. He was both a small-c and capital-C Conservative, a full-out flag-waving British imperialist who advocated immigration to his adopted country provided only that the immigrants be of pure British stock.

One of his most notable books was titled Afternoons in Utopia (1932). The lead entry, "Utopias Old and New," includes an hilarious send-up of every imagined paradisiacal society from Plato's Republic to last month's issue of Flabbergasting Fables . Probably the most influential of all utopias was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 . It spawned endless sequels and rebuttals, of which I particularly recommend Mack Reynolds's Looking Backward from the Year 2000 (1974).

I wish I had room for some hilarious excerpts from Leacock's collection, but the bottom of the page is looming. You'll have to snag a copy of the Leacock book for yourself. Just keep an eye out for Dr. Oom, the sandal-wearing and berobed, bearded future sage speaking oddly pseudo-Biblical English—and his lissome, doe-eyed daughter. Leacock's humor is wonderful. In his own time he was hugely admired by Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, and Robert Benchley. Add to that list the undersigned!
—Richard A. Lupoff

Cartoon (Long)

By Bill Long
| 2 words

—Bill Long

Cartoon (Rini)

By J.P. Rini
| 2 words

—J.P. Rini

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

Classified Ads
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