The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - July/August 2016
Author: Various
Date: 2016-09-14 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Rights: Kindle Edition, © 2016 Spilogale Inc.

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Kindle Edition, 2016 © Spilogale Inc.

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Table of Contents | 237 words

July/August • 67th Year of Publication

NOVELLAS

The Vanishing Kind | | Lavie Tidhar

NOVELETS

The Desert of Vanished Dreams | | Phyllis Eisenstein
Vishnu Summer | | David Prill
The Thing on the Shelf | | David Gerrold

SHORT STORIES

Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful | | Gregor Hartmann
Spells Are Easy if You Have The Right Psychic Energy | | Dominica Phetteplace
An Open Letter to the Person Who Took My Smoothie from the Break Room Fridge | | Oliver Buckram
Last One Out | | K.B. Rylander
Killer | | Bruce McAllister
Jesus Has Forgiven Me. Why Can't You? | | Betsy Phillips

POEMS

Martian Garden | | John Philip Johnson

DEPARTMENTS

Books to Look For | | Charles de Lint
Books | | James Sallis
Films: Bunker Mentality | | Kathi Maio
Science: Our Super Cool Solar System | | Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
Plumage from Pegasus | | Paul Di Filippo
Coming Attractions | |
Curiosities | | Robert Eldridge

CARTOONS: Arthur Masear , Arthur Masear , Nick Downes .
COVER by Mondolithic Studios for "Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful"

GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor
C.C. FINLAY, Editor
BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher
KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher
ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor
STEPHEN L. MAZUR, Assistant Editor
LISA ROGERS, Assistant Editor
ANNA WILL, Editorial Assistant
CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor
HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor
REBECCA FRENCH, Subscriptions & Marketing Manager

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 131, No. 1 & 2, Whole No. 726, July/August 2016. 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 © 2016 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved.

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GENERAL AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 3447, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030
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The Vanishing Kind

By Lavie Tidhar | 18093 words

A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar's noir novel about Nazis and British fascists, was published in the US in March to wide critical and popular acclaim. He tells us that the idea for "The Vanishing Kind" came to him shortly after he finished writing that novel. Both stories make their way like spies through the sordid, shadowed streets of a London that might have been.

Tidhar, who lives in London, has previously won the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella. 2016 has been a busy year for him already. In addition to A Man Lies Dreaming, his non-fiction book, Art & War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction, a dialogue with Shimon Adaf, was released in April by Repeater, and his science fiction novel Central Station was just published in May by Tachyon.

1

DURING THE REBUILDING of London in the 1950s, they had erected a large Ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames. When it was opened, it cost two Reichsmarks for a ride, but it was seldom busy. London after the war wasn't a place you went to on holiday.

Gunther Sloam came to London in the autumn, which was when I first became acquainted with him. He was neither too tall nor too short, but an unassuming man in a good suit and a worn fedora. He could have been a shopkeeper or a traveling salesman, though he was neither. Before the war he had been a screenwriter in Berlin.

He came following a woman, which is how this kind of story usually starts. She had written to him two weeks earlier, c/o the Tobis Film Syndikat in Berlin, and a friend who was still working there eventually passed him her note. It read:

My dear Gunther,

I am in London and I think I am in trouble. I fear my life is in danger. Please, if you continue to remember me fondly, come at once. I am residing at 47 Dean Street, Soho. If I am not there, ask for the dwarf.
Yours, ever,
Ulla.

The note had been smudged with a red lipstick kiss.

It was a week from the time the letter was sent, to Gunther receiving it. It was another week before he finally departed Berlin, on board a Luftwaffe transport plane carrying with it the famed soprano, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and her entourage. She was to perform in London's newly rebuilt Opera House. Gunther spent the short flight making notes in his pocket book, for a screenplay he was vaguely thinking to write. He was not unduly concerned about Ulla. His view of women in general, and of actresses in particular, was that they were prone to exaggeration. No doubt Ulla's trouble would prove such as they'd always been—usually, he thought with a sigh, something to do with money. In that he was both right and wrong.

He was flattered, and glad, that she wanted to see him again. They had carried on a passionate love affair for several months, in Berlin in '43, before Gunther was sent to the Eastern Front, and Ulla went on to star in several well-received patriotic films, the pinnacle of which was Die große Liebe, for a time the highest-grossing film in all of Germany. Gunther had watched it in the hospital camp, while recovering from the wound which, even now, made him walk with a slight, almost unnoticeable limp. He only really felt it on very cold days, and the pangs in his leg brought with them memories of the hell that was the Eastern Front. He had never known such cold.

"Don't you see?" he said to me, much later. He was pacing my office, his hair unkempt for once, his eyes ringed black by lack of sleep. He'd lost much of his cool amused air by then. "Because we did it, we beat the Russians, and Ulla went on to star in Stalingrad, that Stemmle picture, but it was the last big film she did. I don't know what happened after that. We lost touch, though there'd always been rumors, you see."

He'd told me quite a lot by then but I was happy to let him talk. I knew some of the story by then and, of course, I'd known Miss Ulla Blau. We had been taking an interest in her activities for some time.

The plane landed at Northolt. There was no one there to welcome him, and the soprano and her entourage were whisked away by my superior, Group Leader Pohl. I saw Gunther emerge into the terminal with that somewhat bewildered look that afflicts the visitor. He saw me and came over. "Where can a man get a taxi around here?" he said, in German.

"I'm afraid I don't…," I said, in English.

His eyes, surprisingly, lit up. "You are British?" he said.

"Yes. You speak English?"

"But of course." His accent was atrocious. "I learn to speak English in the cinema," he explained. "Do you know the works of Alfred Hitchcock?"

"His films are prohibited nowadays," I said, kindly. He frowned. I was not in uniform and he did not know what I was until later.

"Yes, yes," he said. "His death was most regrettable. He was a great maker of movies. I'm sorry," he said, "I have not introduced myself. Gunther Sloam." He extended his hand and I shook it.

"Name's Everly," I said. "I was in fact on my way back into town now. Can I give you a ride?" My jeep was outside.

"That would be most kind," he said. "I am here to see an old friend, you see. A woman. Yes, I have not seen her since the war." He laughed, a little sadly, I thought. "I am older, perhaps she is older too, no? But not in my memory, never."

"You're a romantic," I said.

"I suppose," he said, dubiously. "Yes, I suppose I am."

"There is not much call for romantics in London," I said. "We English have become pragmatists, since the war ended."

He said nothing to that; perhaps he never even heard me. He sat beside me in the jeep as we went past the ruined buildings left over from the bombings, but I don't think he saw them, either.

"Where do you need to go?" I said.

"Soho."

"Are you sure? That is not a very good area."

"I think I can manage, Mr. Everly," he said. He lit a cigarette and passed one to me.

" Danke, " I said. Then again in German, "And who is this mystery lady you're visiting, if you don't mind my prying?"

He laughed, delighted. "Your German is flawless!" he said.

"I studied in Berlin before the war."

"But that is wonderful," he said.

Then he spent fifteen minutes telling me all about Fräulein Ulla Blau; her film career; their passionate affair ("But we were both so young !"); his new screenplay ("A Western, in the Karl May tradition. You know how fond the Führer is of these things"); Berlin ("Have you been back? It's a beautiful city now, beautiful. Say what you want about Speer but the man is a gifted architect"); and so on and so on.

At one point I finally managed to interject. "And you know what your friend is doing these days?" I asked him.

He frowned. Such a thought had not entered his head. "I assumed she was acting again," he said. "But I hadn't really thought.… Well, it is no matter. I shall find out soon enough."

We were driving along the Charing Cross Road by then. The few approved bookshops stood open, their wan light spilling onto the dark pavement outside. I remembered the book purges and burnings after the invasion—after all, I led one such group myself. I did not like doing it, yet it was a necessity of the time. Gunther did not seem to pay much attention. His eyes slid over the grimy frontage of the shops. "Where are your famed picture palaces?" he said. "I have long desired to ensconce myself in the luxuries of the Regal or the Ritz." His eyes shone with a childish enthusiasm.

"I'm afraid most were destroyed in the Blitz," I said apologetically.

He nodded. We were in Soho then, a squalid block of half-ruined buildings where the lowlifes of London made their abode. It was a hard place to police and patrol, filled with European émigrés of dubious loyalties. But it was useful, as such places inevitably are.

Along Shaftesbury Avenue, the few theaters were doing meager trade. The big show that year was Servant of Two Masters, an Italian comedy adapted to the English stage. It was showing at the Apollo. Dean Street itself was a dark thoroughfare that never quite slept. Business was conducted in the shadows, and red lights burned invitingly behind the second-floor windows. I saw doubt enter Gunther's eyes and I almost felt sorry for him. I had my own interest in his well-being or otherwise. My men were already stationed unobtrusively in the street.

"This is the place," I said, stopping the jeep. He stepped out and extended his hand.

"Thank you, Everly," he said. "You are a gentleman."

I could see he liked that word. The Germans are a peculiar people. Having won the war, they were almost apologetic about it. I said, "If your visit does not go well, there is a transport leaving for Berlin tomorrow night. I can ensure you have a seat on it."

His eyes changed; as though he were seeing me for the first time.

"You never said what you do," he said.

"No," I agreed. "Good-bye, Mr. Sloam."

I left him there. I did not expect him to be so much trouble as he turned out to be.

2

GUNTHER STOOD outside 47 Dean Street for some time. Perhaps, already, he began to have second thoughts. On receipt of her letter, he had expected little more than a fond reunion with Ulla. Perhaps he saw himself as a sort of Teutonic white knight, riding to the rescue of a helpless maiden. He never really knew Ulla, or what she was capable of, though he didn't realize that until it was too late.

The address she had given him had been a theater before the war. Now it was a sort of boarding house, with a hand-written sign on the door saying No Vacancies! in a barely legible scrawl. The windows were dark. The front of the house, once grand, now looked dowdy and unkempt. Gunther looked about him and saw two shifty characters in the shadows across the road. They were smoking cigarettes and watching him. He gathered his courage and knocked loudly on the door.

There was no reply. The whole house felt silent and empty. He knocked again, louder, until at last a window overhead opened and an old woman stuck her head out and began cursing him in a mixture of English and gutter German. Almost, he wanted to take out his pen and note down some of the more inventive swearing.

"I'm looking for Ulla Blau!" he called up, when the old woman finally stopped, momentarily, for air.

The old woman spat. The spit fell down heavily and landed at Gunther's feet.

"The whore's not here," the old woman said and slammed the window shut.

Now angry, Gunther began to hammer on the door again. The two observers watched him from across the street. They, too, had an interest in Fräuleine Blau's whereabouts.

At last the window opened again and the same old woman stuck her head out. "What?" she demanded crossly.

"I need to see her!"

"I told you, she's not here!"

"Well, where is she?"

"I don't know, and I don't want to know!" the old woman said and slammed the window.

Gunther stood in the street. He was tired now, and hungry, and he wanted a drink. He had hoped for a fond embrace, a night spent in a comfortable bed with a bottle of good Rhine wine (which he had brought) and a willing companion to murmur sweet nothings into his ear. Instead he got this, and besides, the street smelled, from uncollected garbage gathered every few paces on the broken pavement.

"Open the damn door or I'll break it down!" he said.

Then he waited. Presently, there was a shuffling noise and then the door opened a crack and the old woman stuck her head out. "What are you, Gestapo?" she said.

"If I were the Gestapo," Gunther said, reasonably, "you'd already be answering my questions."

The old woman cackled. She seemed to have no fear of this strange German on her doorstep. "Do you have a drink?" she said.

Gunther brought out the bottle of wine and the old woman's eyes widened appreciatively.

"Come in, come in!" she said. "The night is cold and full of eyes."

Gunther followed her into the building.

*   *   *

The old woman's apartment was surprisingly comfortable. A fire was burning in the fireplace and Gunther sat down wearily on a red velvet sofa which sagged underneath him. The walls were covered with old photographs and playbills. The old woman herself reminded him somewhat of an old, faded revue actress. She bustled about, fetching glasses. They were good crystal, and when she saw his enquiring look she cackled again and said, "From Marks's, the filthy Jews. Now that was a fire sale!"

Gunther accepted the glass, his loathing for the old woman growing. He let her open the bottle, which she did deftly, then poured two glasses. The old woman drank hers rapidly and greedily, then refilled the glass. Her eyes acquired a brittle warmth.

"You have come from Germany?" she said.

"Berlin."

"Berlin! I have often wished to visit Berlin." She spoke a bad but serviceable German.

"It is a great city."

"Not like this place," the old woman said. "London is a shithole."

Gunther silently agreed. He took a sip of his wine, mourning the loss of its planned usage. The taste brought back memories of warmer, happier times.

"I am looking for—" he began, and the old woman said, "Yes, yes. Ulla Blau. I told you, she is not here."

At this time he was not yet unduly concerned.

"This is the address she's given me."

"She was here," the old woman said. "She hires a room from me, at thirty Reichsmarks a month. I do not ask questions, Mr. Sloam."

"Has she gone away, then?" Gunther said.

"She is always coming and going, that one," the old woman said.

"Is she still acting? In the theater, perhaps?"

The old woman snorted a laugh, then wiped it away when she saw Gunther's face. "Perhaps," she said. "Yes, perhaps. What do I know?" She took a long shuddering sip of wine. "I am just an old woman," she said.

Doubts, at this point, were finally beginning to enter Gunther's mind. "Well, what does she do, for money?"

"I am sure I don't know," the old woman said huffily. Her glass was empty again and she refilled it with unsteady hands. "You should have seen this place before the war," she said suddenly. "The theaters all alight and the public flowing on the pavements all excited and gay. The men handsome in their suits and the women pretty in their dresses. I saw Charlie Chaplin play the Hippodrome once." Her eyes misted over. "I don't blame you Germans," she said. "I blame the Jews, but there are no more Jews to blame. Who can we blame now, Mr. Sloam?"

"Can I see her room?" Gunther said.

The old woman sighed. She was coming to the realization that Gunther Sloam could be very single-minded.

"I'm sure I can't let you do that," she said; but he saw the speculative glint in her eye.

"I could perhaps rent it, for a while," he offered. "I am a stranger in this town and the hour is getting late."

His hand, which he had dipped in his pocket, returned with a handful of notes. The woman's eyes tracked the movement of the money.

"When you put it like that…," she said.

*   *   *

Ulla Blau's room was an almost perfect square. It had once been a dressing room of some sort, or perhaps, Gunther thought a little uncharitably, a supply closet. The old woman, whose name, he had learned, was Mrs. White, stood in the doorway watching him with her bright button eyes. She swayed, from time to time, and hummed a tune under her breath. It sounded a little like the Horst Wessel song.

There was nothing of the personal in Ulla Blau's room. There was a bed, perfectly made up; a wardrobe and a vanity mirror; a small gas ring and a kettle; and that was about it. Gunther's imaginings of their reunion plunged further into doubt, for this was not the romantic abode he had perhaps envisioned. There were no clues as to Ulla's employment or whereabouts. Beyond the wall, the noise of hurried sexual congress could be clearly heard. He glanced at Mrs. White, who shrugged. Gunther began to have an idea of what the majority of the rooms were used for.

Mrs. White moved aside to let him out. The corridor was long and dark and the communal bathroom was at one end of it. Gunther was, at this point, beginning to feel concern.

"And you do not know where she is?" he demanded of Mrs. White.

The old woman shrugged. She didn't know, or didn't care, or didn't care to know. Gunther dug out Ulla's note. If I am not there, she had written, ask for the dwarf.

I shall interject, at this point, to say that this dwarf was a person of considerable interest to us. We were anxious to interview him with regards to some matters which had arisen. This dwarf went by the name of Jurgen, and was of a Swiss nationality. He had come to London six months previous and was, moreover, the scion of a wealthy Zurich banking family with connections high up within the party.

"Where can I find," Gunther said, and then felt silly, "the dwarf?"

He said it quite light-heartedly. But Mrs. White's reaction was the opposite. Her face turned a crimson shade and her eyes rolled in her head like those of a grand dame in a Christmas pantomime.

"Him? You ask me about him ?"

Gunther was not aware of the reputation the dwarf had in certain circles. Mrs. White's reaction took him quite by surprise.

"Where can I find him?" he said mildly.

"Do not ask me that!"

Good wine, missed plans, and bad company do not mix well. Gunther at last lost his patience.

"Listen to me, you silly old bat!" he said. He had done terrible things to survive on the Eastern Front. Now that man was before Mrs. White, and she cowered. Gunther jabbed an angry finger at the old woman's face. "Tell me where this damned dwarf is or by God I'll.…"

She must have told him; he must have left. My men lost him, by accident or design, shortly after; and so the first I knew of it was the next morning, when Sergeant Cole called me and woke me from a blissful sleep, to tell me they'd arrested Gunther Sloam for murder.

3

BY THE TIME I made it to HQ, they'd worked Gunther over a little; mostly I think just to keep their hand in. I told them to straighten him up and bring him to my office, along with two cups of tea. When they brought him in, he had a black eye, a swollen lip, and a bad temper.

"What is the meaning of this?" he said. "I am a citizen of the Reich. You can't treat me like this!"

"Please, Mr. Sloam, sit down. Cigarette?" I proffered the box. He hesitated, then took one, and I lit him up. He took in all the smoke at once, and after that he was a little calmer.

"Say, what is the meaning of this?" I think only then my face registered with him, and he started. "You're that chap, Everly. I don't understand."

He looked around him at the office. The framed photograph of the Führer stared back at him from the wall.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I should have introduced myself more fully. I am Kriminalinspektor Tom Everly, of Gestapo Department D."

He looked at me in silence. His lips moved. He looked around the room again. When he at last spoke he was more subdued.

"Gestapo, eh?"

"I'm afraid so."

"But you're English!" he cried, turning on me accusingly.

"Yes?"

That stumped him. "When you said you studied in Berlin before the war—"

"It is not I who have to justify myself to you," I said.

"How do you mean?"

"Mr. Sloam, you have been arrested for murder."

"Murder!" His eyes were wild. "Listen, here!"

"No, you listen," I said. "We can do this the hard way. You've already had a little taste of that. Or we can do this the civilized way."

I waited and presently there was a knock on the door. Then Cole came in with the tea. He left it on my desk and departed. We'd had the routine down pat by then.

"Milk? Sugar?" I said.

Unexpectedly he smiled. "How very English," he said. "Two sugars, please, and milk too, why not." He sat down on the chair, hard. I passed him the tea and lit a fresh cigarette and watched him.

"You'd better tell me what happened last night," I said.

He sighed. "I don't know where to start," he said, dejectedly.

*   *   *

Gunther left the house on Dean Street around eight o'clock in the evening. When he stood outside, the thought that came to his mind was that the house was, indisputably, one of ill repute. What Ulla was doing in such a place he did not know. He could not believe that she prostituted herself, nor understand how she came to live in such a squalid place. As I'd said to him before, he was a romantic—though that did not necessarily make him a fool.

Mrs. White had given him an address nearby. Gunther walked, not hurrying, but at a steady pace. He was well aware of the two shadows which detached themselves from the wall across the road and followed. He did not increase his speed or slow down, but his path was such that in a short amount of time he was able to shake them off. Taking a turning, he hid down a dark alleyway as the two men walked past. He could hear them arguing in low voices as he slunk in the other direction.

The night was thick with darkness. The buildings here were still half-ruined, destroyed in the Blitz, and served as hidey-holes for all kinds of illicit activities. Gunther watched himself, but wished he had a gun, a wish he was soon to fulfill. He smelled frying onions nearby and his stomach rumbled. He heard drunken laughter, soft footfalls, and a scream that was cut short. He saw four men sitting by a lit lantern playing cards. He smelled cigar smoke. He heard someone muttering and moaning in a low, never-ceasing voice.

At last he made it to the Lyric. It is a Victorian pub, and had remained undamaged during the war. Gunther, the romantic, found it charming. Opposite the pub stood the Windmill Theatre. It was the one source of bright light, and advertised nude tableaux vivants, as well as the exclusive appearance of Tran und Helle, the popular comedians, visiting London for seven nights only.

Gunther entered the pub. It was dark and dim inside, and the smell of beer, and cigarette and cigar smoke hit him with their combined warmth. A small fire burned merrily in the fireplace. The atmosphere worked like a panacea on Gunther. He removed his coat and perched on the bar gratefully.

"Help you, sir?"

The bartender was bald and rotund and missing one eye, his left one. He turned a rag inside a beer stein, over and over and without much hope of making it clean.

"I'll have an Erdinger, please," Gunther said. "And a plate of Schweinshaxe mit Sauerkraut. "

The bartender, without changing an expression, poured the beer and served it to Gunther.

"We don't have pork knuckle," he said. "Or sauerkraut."

Gunther closed his eyes and took a sip of the beer. He already felt light-headed from the wine he had consumed earlier with the old woman.

"Well, what do you serve?" he said.

"Pie."

"What sort of pie?"

"Pork pie."

"Then I shall have a pork pie, bitte. "

The bartender nodded and kept wiping the stein. "That'll be twenty Reichsmarks," he said.

"Twenty!"

The bartender looked bored. Gunther cursed under his breath but paid. The bartender made the money disappear. Gunther lit a cigarette and looked about the pub. There were only a few men sitting around, and no women. No one looked in his direction. He began to get the sense that he wasn't welcome.

He took another sip of his beer.

"I am looking for Der Zwerg, " he said; announcing it into the air of the pub.

No one moved. If anything, Gunther thought, they had become more still.

"Pie," the bartender said. Gunther looked down at the counter. A round, solid brick of pastry sat on a cracked plate. Gunther picked up the knife and fork. He cut through the pastry into the pink fleshy interior. He cut a slice and put it in his mouth. It was cold and rather flavorless. He chewed and swallowed.

"Delicious," he said.

Someone sniggered. When Gunther turned his head a tall thin figure rose from a bench against the wall and perched itself on a stool beside him. The man had the cadaverous look of a disappointed undertaker. The smile he offered Gunther was as honest as a Vichy check.

"You are new in town?" he said.

"What's it to you?" Gunther said.

"Nothing, nothing." The man rubbed his hands together as though cold. He reminded Gunther a little of that Jew actor, Peter Lorre; he had starred in Fritz Lang's M nearly three decades earlier. "It is good to hear an honest German voice again."

"You are not from Germany."

"No. Luxembourg," the man confessed. That explained the accent. "It is a strange country, England, is it not? They are so dour, so resentful of you Germans. Do you know, I think, deep down, they believe they should have won the war." He laughed, the same sort of insincere sound a hyena makes. "Beer, bartender!" he called jovially. "And one for my friend here. Put it on my tab."

"You have been here long?" Gunther asked.

"Two years now," the man said. "I do a little business. Import-export, mostly. You know how it is."

Gunther did not. The beer arrived and he sipped from it. He forced himself to finish the pie. He had eaten worse on the Front.

*   *   *

"This man," I said. "His name was Klaus?"

Gunther was pacing my office. He looked up, surprised. "Klaus Pirelli, or so he told me," he said. "Yes. How did you—?"

"He has given us a full statement," I said. "He says he drank beer with you and discussed the ongoing war in America, Leni Riefenstahl's latest film, the new African Lebensraum, and the import-export business. He says you got progressively drunker and increasingly aggressive. At some point you asked, loudly, where a man could get hold of a gun in this town. You became so voluble that he had to escort you outside. He says the last he saw of you, you were staggering down Great Windmill Street in the direction of Shaftesbury Avenue, waving your arms and swearing you would, 'Get that bitch.'"

Gunther stopped pacing. His mouth hung open. I almost felt sorry for him at that moment. In his comic horror he reminded me of the comedian, Alfred Hawthorne, whom I had recently seen playing Bottom in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"But that is Wahnsinn !" He gaped at me like a landed fish. "It is madness! I did no such thing!"

"Can you prove it?"

"The other drinkers! The bartender! They were all witnesses—"

He looked at me then, realization slowly dawning.

"You are German," I said, sadly. "They are not."

"Listen, Everly, you've got to believe me!"

"Just tell me what happened," I said.

*   *   *

Gunther found the Luxembourgian trying. The man was obviously selling something, but Gunther wasn't sure what.

"I am looking for the dwarf," he said again.

"Him!" the Luxembourgian exclaimed.

"I was told I could find him here."

"He is not an easy man to find, Herr Jurgen."

"Is that his name?" Gunther said.

"You do not know his name, yet you seek to find him?" The Luxembourgian looked amused at that. "What is the nature of your business with the count?"

"A count, is he?" Gunther said. His head really was spinning. "Well, I want to know where Ulla Blau is." He grabbed the Luxembourgian by the lapels and shook him. "Do you know where Ulla is?" he demanded. His speech felt slurred, his tongue unresponsive. "I need to see her. She's in a lot of trouble."

The Luxembourgian gently removed Gunther's hands. "You need air, friend," he said. "I think you've had too much to drink."

"Don't be…ridiculous," Gunther said. His vision swam. He was dimly aware of his new friend putting an arm around his shoulders and steering him outside. Cold air hit his face like a slap, but it did not clear his confused thoughts. He began to stagger away from the pub. As he did so, he saw a pair of shapely white legs strolling past. He raised his head and tried to focus. A good-looking woman wrapped in a thick fur coat walking away from him. As she passed under a gaslight, for just a moment, she turned her head and smiled.

"Ulla?" Gunther cried. "Ulla!"

There was something mocking in the woman's smile. She turned and walked away. Gunther lurched after her for a few more steps but she was long gone, and perhaps, he thought later, she had never been there at all. He tottered on his feet. Darkness opened all around him like the entry to a sewer. He fell, hard, and lay on the ground. He closed his eyes, and dark sleep claimed him.

*   *   *

"And that is all you remember?" I said.

"All I remember, until some uncouth men roused me on the street, administered a series of kicks for good measure, put me in irons, and dragged me to your cellars to have another go." He touched his black eye and winced. "Don't you see?" Gunther said. "I was drugged. The Luxembourgian must be in on it. He must have slipped something into my drink when I wasn't watching."

The mention of drugs caught my attention and I looked at him in a new way.

"Besides," he said with a laugh, "who the hell am I supposed to have murdered?"

"Come with me."

He shrugged. This, he endeavored to get across, was nothing to him. In that he was wrong.

He followed me along the corridor and down the stairs. The Gestapo had made its headquarters in Somerset House. We found the stout walls and easy access to the river compelling. I took him down to the makeshift morgue.

"What is this?" he said, and shivered as we entered. I ignored him.

"Sir," Kriminalassistent West said, standing to attention.

"What is this?" Gunther demanded. We both ignored him. I gave West the nod. He pulled one of the refrigeration units open and slid out the gurney.

A corpse, covered in a sheet, lay on the cold metal tray.

Gunther's lips moved, but without sound. Perhaps he was beginning to realize the trouble he was in.

I gave West the nod again. He removed the sheet. Underneath it lay a naked female form. Her face had been blasted apart by a bullet from a Luger semiautomatic.

I watched Gunther closely. The horror on his face looked genuine enough.

"Can you identify her?" I said. He stared at the body mutely. His eyes took in the ruined faced, the still, cold body, her bejeweled fingers. He began to shake.

"No, no," he said. "It cannot be."

He stepped closer to the gurney. He took one dead hand in his.

"This ring," he said. It was a rather tawdry thing, a chunky emerald set in copper. "I gave it to her. I remember buying it, from Kling's on Münzstrasse. It was a token of my love, just before they shipped me to the Front."

"Gave it to whom?" I said, gently.

He looked at me, his eyes full of quiet despair.

"I gave it to Ulla Blau," he said.

4

THE STORY could have ended here, but for the fact that Ulla Blau's death, though in some part not entirely without benefit, nevertheless put me in an awkward position.

I took Gunther back to my office. I asked Sergeant Cole to bring us two coffees this time, and some Viennese pastries. You may wonder why I treated Gunther Sloam with such kid gloves. After all, the expedient act would have been to send him back down to the cellars for a second, more thorough work-over—to last only as long as necessary to extract a full and frank confession—then a speedy execution and burial by water. There were, as I mentioned, several reasons why Somerset House was chosen for our headquarters. The corpses, occasionally, if not weighted enough, floated back up to the surface or caught in the Greenwich wharves on their way out to sea, but that merely served to reinforce in people's minds the long and lethal reach of the Gestapo. Sometimes we had to make sure the corpses were lightly weighted when a particular message needed to be sent.

Gunther wondered the same thing. I could see it in his eyes. He observed Sergeant Cole bring in the coffee and pastries with the eyes of a condemned man watching his executioner. I sat behind my desk and stirred a cube of sugar into my coffee.

"Cream?"

"Thank you."

He said that in a wondering voice. I smiled patiently and took a bite from my Apfelstrudel. "They are not as good as on the Continent, of course," I said, when I had chewed and swallowed. "But we do try our best, as you see."

"I am sure it is delicious," he said. He didn't look like he tasted anything.

"I asked you, when we first met," I said. "What your friend was doing in London. You did not enlighten me."

"Everly, for God's sake…!" he began, then went stumm .

I waited him out.

"I don't know," he admitted at last. "I received this note, and I—" he buried his face in his hands. "I did not take it seriously. She said her life was in danger and I, I—"

"You were expecting nothing more than a pleasurable reunion," I said. He raised his face to me and his eyes flashed with anger.

"Now look here, Everly!" he said. "I did not kill her!"

"Do you know what Pervitin is?" I said.

"Of course," he said, without hesitation, but with a moue of distaste. "It is an artificial stimulant. A type of drug, what they call methamphetamines. They gave it to us during Barbarossa. It keeps you awake and gives you energy, and it lowers inhibition, which is useful in battle."

"It is also highly addictive."

"Yes," he said. "In our case, the army didn't worry about it too much. Most of the people who took it were destined for death. I was just luckier than most."

"Your friend, Ulla Blau, came to London some years ago," I said. "London at that time was a city in ruin. A large occupying force was initially needed and soldiers, as soldiers are wont to do, require entertainments."

"What are you saying?"

"Ulla's theater connections proved handy in supplying girls for the soldiers. At that time, in London, a warm body was cheaper than a loaf of bread, and easier to get. From the soldiers she could easily acquire extra supplies of Pervitin. These she sold back into the general populace. It wasn't, strictly speaking, legal, but legality didn't have much of a meaning in the immediate aftermath of the war."

"I don't believe you," he said.

I shrugged. "You can believe what you'd like to believe," I said. "But you can't dismiss the evidence of your own eyes. Somebody plugged a nine-millimeter bullet into her pretty little face, after all."

"That doesn't make her guilty!"

"It doesn't make her bloody innocent, either," I said.

He stared at me with hatred and his fingers curled into fists. He was going to go for me in a moment.

Then realization dawned; I could see his expression change. "You don't think I killed her," he said, wonderingly.

"Look, Sloam," I said. I was tired and the pastry was cloyingly sweet. "It doesn't matter to me if you killed her or not. She was nothing but trouble and the world's a better place for her not being in it. However."

He watched me closely. I could see he was still aching to swing at me. He wasn't the first and he wasn't going to be the last.

"Either way, it's a mess. You're a citizen of the Deutsches Reich, not just a colonial. So was Fräulein Blau, and as a former actress, her death would play for news. The last thing my superiors want is a fuss back in Berlin about a sordid murder in the colonies. Citizens of the Reich must feel they can travel safely to any part of the empire. This isn't 1946, Sloam. England's a peaceful place, and a faithful servant of the Führer."

"So where does that leave me?" he said. He wasn't slow when he didn't want to be.

"What would you do in my place?" I said.

He considered. "You'd announce her death as an unfortunate accident, and bury me somewhere out of sight with a bullet between my eyes."

I nodded. He wasn't an innocent, just the wrong man in the wrong place, and for all his war experience, he still thought like a character in one of his movies. "What did you think," I said, "that you'd come over here and rescue her?"

"I don't know what I thought," he said. "And I still don't believe she was guilty!"

"Which of us isn't guilty, Mr. Sloam," I said. "Which of us isn't guilty?"

He watched me. "I am not afraid to die," he said.

I pressed a button, and Sergeant Cole came in. Gunther tensed.

"Cole," I said "Please show Mr. Sloam outside."

Gunther watched me with suspicion.

"There's a flight leaving for Berlin tonight," I said. "I'd advise you to be on it. Remember, I had made that offer before, and I'm unlikely to make it a third time. Sergeant Cole will take you to a hotel where you can clean up and get some rest. Auf Wiedersehen, Mr. Sloam. I hope, sincerely, we do not meet again."

The hint of a smile touched his lips then. "Good-bye, Kriminalinspector Everly," he said.

But I could see he did not mean it.

*   *   *

Cole dropped him off at the Albert in Covent Garden. It was basic, but clean. Gunther collected his key and went up to his room. He showered and changed. He did not sleep.

Of course the obstinate German did not take my advice. I had accused him of being a romantic and I wasn't wrong. Gunther, for all his battle experience in the Wehrmacht, still insisted, deep down, to think of himself as a character in one of his own cowboy pictures. All he could think about was Ulla Blau's ruined, once-beautiful face staring back at him from the mortuary slab. I think he believed himself untouchable. Most Germans did, after the war. There were still pockets of resistance in America, but few since we'd dropped the A-bomb on Washington, D.C. The world belonged to Germany: for Gunther, that idea was as fixed as his notion of honor.

From the hotel, Gunther went out. For a time he walked through Covent Garden, which he found a dismal sort of place. Underneath the butchers' stalls the blood ran rancid, and the greengrocers' offerings of hard, lumpy potatoes and bent carrots depressed Gunther. The market had all the festivity of a Dachau.

He watched the passersby, though. Londoners moved about the market furtively, with the hunched shoulders of a conquered people. They wore shabby clothes, the men in ill-fitting suits, the women in hand-me-down dresses that appeared to have come from a German Red Cross charity stall. He saw few smiles. Here and there, soldiers patrolled, but they were few in number and looked indifferent to the populace. As I had told Gunther, this England was resigned to its fate. The majority of the occupying force had moved on to other duties, in the new African territories or America. Now, only a skeleton barracks was left and, of course, the Gestapo.

Gunther walked past the Opera House, where a prominent sign advertised the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's appearance that night. Along Drury Lane he saw a young boy in the shadows, peaked cap covering half his face, skulking. He paused to watch as first two men and then a woman stopped and appeared to make a furtive purchase. When the street was clear, Gunther crossed the road and approached the boy.

"What do you want, mister?"

"What have you got?" Gunther said.

The boy looked up at him with suspicion. "You're a German!" he said accusingly.

Gunther shrugged.

"You want girls?" the boy said. "My sister is very clean."

"I need something to keep me awake," Gunther said. "You got some of that?"

The boy grinned, relieved that this was just another punter. "Sure, sure," he said expansively. "But it'll cost you."

Gunther took out a clip of bills and the boy's eyes went wide and round. "Pervitin?" Gunther said.

The boy nodded. Gunther peeled off a twenty. "Tell me where you get it from," he said, "and there'll be another ten in it for you."

"Another twenty," the boy said immediately.

"That's a lot of money," Gunther said. The boy nodded, his eyes still drawn to the cash. Gunther let him have the first note and waited.

The boy darted glances to either side of the street. "Seven Dials, mister," he whispered. His hand was extended for the rest of the money. "The Bricklayer's Arms. Ask for Doyle, the Irishman. And for God's sake, man, don't mention me. It's more than my job's worth."

Gunther gave him the other twenty and the boy ran off. At the end of the street, he paused and turned back. He stuck two fingers up at Gunther. "Nazi go home!" he shouted. Then he was gone.

Gunther resumed his walk. My men were watching him, of course. We had not been able to locate the dwarf. He usually resided at a house in Mayfair, near the Swiss ambassador's residency. The dwarf was as good as untouchable, but Gunther didn't know that. That suited me fine.

He walked with the same determined gait of a city dweller. Though he did not know his way, he did not appear lost. He did not stop to look at the sights. He made enquiries politely but with a certain force; and the people of London still, when they heard a German voice, were trained to reply helpfully and quickly.

Seven Dials was only a short walk away. It was a maze of narrow, twisting alleyways between Covent Garden and Soho, a cesspit of racial degradation, or so according to my superior, SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl. An efficient administrator, he was the overseer of the camps erected to deal with the Jewish question during the war. A falling out with his patron, Himmler, after the war, however (the nature of which I never quite knew) saw him exiled to Britain to supervise the local Gestapo, after the former bureau chief SS-Brigadeführer Franz Six had an unfortunate and fatal encounter with a bullet. Six was leading an Einsatzgruppe on a hunt for missing Jews in Manchester at the time.

Pohl, my current superior, took over the job with his customary efficiency but little enthusiasm. He was a keen lover of the arts and found England stifling. I also happened to know he'd been a fan of Ulla Blau.

Standing at the Seven Dials, Gunther was faced with roads leading in every direction away from him. It was as though he stood in the center of a spider bite, and the infection spread outward in wavy paths. Rundown drinking establishments faced him from each point of the compass. He saw the Bricklayer's Arms, and two women fighting loudly over a bottle of gin at the shabby entrance. He stepped around them and entered the pub. Already he was growing sick of the sight and the smell of British pubs.

Inside it was dark, dim, and smelled of the sewers. Gunther lit a cigarette to combat the smell. He looked about him and hostile or indifferent faces stared back at him. He went to the bar and leaned across. "I am looking for Doyle, the Irishman," he said.

"What's it to me?" the bartender said.

Gunther put money on the counter. He did not have much but, in London, Reichsmarks seemed to go a long way. At the sight of the money there was a collective in-drawing of breath.

"I'm Doyle," said a tall specimen.

"I'm Doyle," said a fat, red-haired man.

"I'll be your doll, sailor," said a bald woman with very few teeth, and leered.

Gunther waited. His stillness was born of the war. A shadow stirred by the far wall. It rose and the others faded into the background.

The man stepped close. He was a short, wiry man, in a checkered suit and a jaunty flattop hat with a red feather in the band. His knuckles were scabbed like a bareknuckle boxer's. He jabbed a finger at Gunther's chest.

"What do you want?" he said.

"Are you Doyle?"

"Depends who's asking."

"My name's Sloam. I was a friend of Ulla Blau."

Doyle retreated a step at the name. "Ulla is dead," he said. His voice was softer.

"I know."

"Heard they found her by the river," the Irishman said. "Some maniac did her in."

He took in Gunther's beat-up face. Not with suspicion, Gunther thought, but as confirmation of information he already knew.

"You say you were friends?"

"Old friends," Gunther said. Something in the Irishman's eyes made him trust the man; he couldn't say what it was. "We'd lost touch until recently."

"I liked Ulla," the Irishman said. "I don't care what they say about her."

"What do they say about her?" Gunther said; but of course, he thought he already knew.

"She poisoned those boys!" the bald woman said. Her savagery startled Gunther, who hadn't noticed her creeping close. "The poor boys in Great Ormond. It's a hospital," she said into Gunther's bemused face. "For children. They needed medication, pain relief."

"Do you know what Heroin is?" Doyle said.

"Yes," Gunther said, surprised. "It's a medication made by Bayer."

"You can't get it here," Doyle said. "So.…" He shrugged.

"She cut it with rat poison," the bald woman said, then spat. "Twenty-one children, dead, in agony."

"Now, Martha, you don't know that," Doyle said. Gunther felt sick.

"She was always good to you," Doyle said. "Who do you come to when you need your medication?"

"You and your filthy comrades," the woman said. "We should have stood with the Allies in the war, Doyle. We shouldn't have stayed neutral." She spat again. "Neutral," she said. "Isn't that just another word for collaborator."

Doyle slapped her. The sound, like a gunshot, filled the room. "You're getting above yourself, Martha," he said. The woman glared at him defiantly; then the fight went out of her.

"I need it, Doyle," she said, whining. "I need it."

Gunther watched. He felt sick to his stomach. He could not look away. He could not believe what the woman had said about Ulla. Doyle reached into his pocket and came back with two small pills which he tossed to the woman, like dog biscuits to a pet. She caught them eagerly. "Don't go opening your big gob of shite, now," Doyle said.

"I won't, Doyle. Honest."

"I liked Ulla, whatever they said about her," Doyle said again, sadly. He turned back to Gunther.

"Let's have a drink," he said.

5

IT MAY HAVE occurred to Gunther at this point that all the men he'd so far encountered belonged to countries that remained neutral during the war. The Swiss, the Luxembourgians, and the Irish were rewarded for their careful noninvolvement with the status of sovereign protectorates of the Third Reich, and enjoyed a great deal of autonomy as a consequence.

"Ulla spoke of you," Doyle said.

"She did?" Gunther said, with a mixture of pleasure and surprise.

Doyle's smile transformed his face. "She called you the one who got away."

They were sitting in the back room of the pub. A bottle of whiskey sat between them. Gunther only sipped at his glass. Doyle drank steadily; it didn't seem to hamper him in any way.

"You were foolish to come see me," Doyle said. "You are lucky to be alive."

"Would you have killed me, then?"

"People who come to the Dials asking questions don't always come out again."

Gunther shrugged. "So why spare me?" he said.

"I'd heard you were in town. Heard you were picked up by the Gestapo, too." He downed a shot and refilled the glass and grimaced. "Filthy animals," he said.

"The Gestapo is a necessary organ of the state," Gunther said, primly. He was still a good German.

Doyle shot him a look of disgust. "Have you asked yourself why they let you walk?" he said. "By rights you should be floating past the Isle of Dogs around this time. Depending on the tide."

Gunther shrugged. I think he had an idea. "I want to know who killed her," he said.

"She's dead," Doyle said. "Let it go. This isn't your country, or your cause. Go back to Berlin, make movies, find yourself a nice girl."

"A nice girl? In Berlin?" Gunther said. Doyle smiled; reluctantly, it seemed.

"What did she say about me?"

"She said you were a good man, and that good men were hard to find. She was drunk when she said it, mind."

"That does sound like Ulla."

"Good old Ulla," Doyle said.

"Did you kill her?" Gunther said, softly; the question hung between them like a cloud of ash. They stared at each other across the table.

Doyle broke eye contact first. He shrugged indifferently. "I had no reason to kill her," he said. "We did business, that's all."

"Drugs."

"I don't advise you to go around asking questions," Doyle said. "Go home. Be a good German."

"But Heroin?" Gunther said.

"It is a powerful analgesic," Doyle said. "We need drugs, Herr Sloam. If the Reich won't provide, someone should."

"I don't believe she was involved—" Gunther began.

Doyle banged the glass on the table. "Never trust an actress," he said. "Oh, Ulla knew what she was doing. Whores, black-market medicine—other stuff, too, I heard. Nothing to do with me. She knew. She was planning her retirement. Unfortunately, someone retired her first."

He drank. The bottle was half-empty.

"It's nothing to me," he said.

Gunther said, "Where can I buy a gun?"

*   *   *

Everyone so far was being very helpful. It was as though London was going out of its way to be obliging to her accidental German tourist. He was as rare and unwelcome as a three-pound note. So why, Gunther wondered, was he practically being given the keys to the city?

Back in the pre-war days, in '32 or so, when he was young and carefree, and National Socialism sounded, on a good day, like a bad punch line to an off-color joke, Gunther had worked on a picture called Der Traumdetektiv for the Jewish director Max Ophüls. Gunther's commission was to produce a surrealist piece of film noir, a sort of unreal history in which Germany, faced by her many enemies, nevertheless won the Great War. He recalled little from the finished product—which he had done quickly and for little money—but that the detective figure, whose name he could not remember, at some point entered a dusty old bookshop whose strange proprietor was played by the Hungarian actor Szõke Szakáll.

He remembered it now as he entered Blucher's, across Charing Cross Road from W. & G. Foyle and next to a florist. The shop was low-ceilinged and dark. On a rack outside, copies of the Daily Mail were displayed. It was Britain's sole remaining paper. Gunther picked one up and leafed through it quickly. He found it at the bottom of page five: Mystery Woman Discovered Dead. The article was only a few paragraphs long. The unknown woman was believed to be a dancer—the implication was clear—and likely took her own life. Gunther thought of Ulla Blau on the mortuary slab with her face shot clean off and fought a rise of bile. He replaced the newspaper on the stand and stepped carefully into the store. A bell rang as the door opened and poor yellow light fell down in drops. All about Gunther, books were piled up in haphazard piles. They were dusty and rust-spotted, many of them damaged by fire. Gunther smelled old smoke and cat piss.

"Can I help you?"

The man really did resemble the actor Szakáll a little. He was bespectacled and rotund, with the kind of hair that looked like a hairpiece but wasn't. He sat behind a desk laden with books, his hands folded over his ample stomach.

"You're Blucher?"

The man spread his arms as though to say, Who else can I be ?

"You sell many books?"

"Books?" Blucher said. His myopic eyes looked at Gunther sadly. "Who today has need of books."

"They look like they been in a fire."

"Oh, these are all approved titles," Blucher said. "But you know how it is, people get carried away."

Gunther remembered the public book burnings in Berlin, after the Führer's rise to power. "Anything you'd recommend?"

"Have you tried Mein Kampf ? It sells like plum cakes at a church fundraiser."

"I read it," Gunther said.

"Which part?"

"Chapters One and Two, and most of Chapter Three, I think," Gunther said, and Blucher laughed, shortly and abruptly. The laugh made him cough. He drank water, daintily, from a glass perched on his desk, then dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief.

"Yes," he said. "It is no Sebastian Bruce Heftromane, I'll admit as much. You are visiting London?"

"Yes."

"It is a pleasant time of year."

Gunther stared at him.

The man shrugged. "Perhaps you can visit the countryside?" he suggested. "Yorkshire, I am told, is very nice."

"You have not been?"

"I would go, but who'd mind the shop?" the man said.

"Frau Blucher?" Gunther suggested. Outside, he thought he heard the neighing of a horse; but it must have been in his imagination.

"Alas, I have not been blessed with a wife," Blucher said. "Not for many years. She died, you see."

"In the war?"

"Appendicitis."

"I'm sorry."

Blucher shrugged. What can you do, he seemed to silently suggest. The silence dragged. The books lay still, heavy with ash and ink.

"I was told you'd be coming round here," Blucher said. "Gunther Sloam. You are becoming quite notorious, in some circles."

"How do you know me?"

"London is a small place. Word spreads. You were a friend of the actress, Ulla Blau."

"You knew her?"

"Her talent spoke for her. She was magnificent in Die Große Liebe. "

"It was her best picture," Gunther said.

Blucher shrugged again. "It was schmaltz, but you knew that already."

Gunther looked at him with new suspicion. The man laughed. He took off his glasses and polished them with the handkerchief. When he put them back on, his small, shrewd eyes assessed Gunther. "I am not a Jew," he said. "If that is what you were thinking."

"Where are you from, Herr Blucher?"

"A small town in Austria. Not unlike our illustrious leader," Blucher said. "I came out here in 1947, shortly after the war. I have always admired the English writers. Who knows, some of them may even still be alive." He stretched his arms to encompass his shop. "As you can see, I prospered."

Gunther said, "I need to buy a gun."

"It is quite illegal, Herr Sloam."

"A man has a right to defend himself."

"Why not ask your friends at the Gestapo?"

Did everyone in London know his business? Gunther tapped his fingers on the cover of a book. The smell of burnt paper disinclined him from wanting to light a cigarette.

"Did you know her?" he said.

"Ulla?" the man's eyes misted over. "She was a beautiful woman," he said.

"Do you know who killed her?"

Blucher looked at him mildly. "I thought you did."

"That is a lie!"

Blucher sighed. He pushed back his chair with great deliberation, and stood up, panting. He pressed a hidden button, and a hidden drawer popped open in his desk. He brought out an object wrapped in cloth and unwrapped it. It was a Luger, perfectly clean. It was the sort of gun Gunther had used in the war. The sort of gun that only a day earlier took care of Ulla Blau.

"Will this do?" Blucher said.

"I want to know who killed her."

"Forget Ulla Blau," the bookseller said, with infinite sadness. "Finding her killer won't bring her back. Go home, Gunther Sloam. There is nothing for you here but death."

"You know something, I think," Gunther said. He took the gun and examined it. "I would need bullets," he said.

"Of course."

Blucher brought out a clip of ammunition from the same drawer and handed it to Gunther. "The fee is fifty Reichsmarks."

"Where did you get this gun?"

"A gun," Blucher said, sadly. "Are we short of guns, Herr Sloam? Of those we have an overabundance. It is not guns but medicines we need. But how do you heal a broken soul?"

Gunther loaded the gun. He gave the bookseller the money. The man made it disappear.

"I'll tell you a joke," Blucher said. "One day Hitler visited a lunatic asylum. When he came in, all the patients raised the arms and cried, ' Heil Hitler!' Suddenly, Hitler saw one man whose arm wasn't raised. 'What is the meaning of this? Why don't you salute like the rest?' he demanded. The man said: 'My Führer, I'm an orderly, not a madman!'"

He gave Gunther an expectant look, then shrugged in resignation.

"Where did Ulla get her drugs?" Gunther said.

"Who knows," Blucher said. "I try not to ask questions that might get me killed. You'd do well to do the same."

"What do you wish to tell me, Herr Blucher?" Gunther said. He sensed that underneath the bookseller's placid exterior there was a current of rage.

"Did you love her?" Blucher said. Gunther looked away. He was embarrassed by the naked look in the man's eyes. Blucher was hurting .

"Once. Yes."

"She was radiant. So alive. She understood that a man cannot live by violence alone. There must be joy. There must be light, and music. Without her, London will be unbearable."

"Tell me what you know," Gunther said. He felt a pulse of excitement. "Tell me. Was it the dwarf?"

"The dwarf!"

The bookseller made his way ponderously around the desk. "I should not be talking with you," he said. "You are putting us both in danger." He looked like he was trying to reach a difficult decision. "Wait here," he said, at last. He waddled away toward a small door. "I'll make us a cup of coffee."

Gunther stood, waiting. He tucked the gun into the small of his back, under his shirt. He browsed the shelves. Hitler's Mein Sieg, the book he wrote after the victory. Books on natural history, in English, with hand-painted plates depicting vibrantly colored birds. It occurred to Gunther that he had not heard birdsong since he arrived.

The silence grew oppressive. The dust tickled his nostrils and made him want to sneeze. The books stared at him in mute accusation. It wasn't me, he wanted to say. I was just following orders . The seconds lengthened.

" Herr Blucher?"

There was no reply. Gunther let the moment lapse. He fingered the spine of an ancient volume on moths. It was loused with worm tracks. The dust tickled his throat. The gun felt heavy in the small of his back. He went to the door and knocked, softly.

" Herr Blucher?"

Still there was no reply and Gunther, with a sense of mounting dread, pushed the door open. He was afraid of what he would find.

Beyond, there was nothing but a small kitchenette. Gunther heaved a sigh of relief. Blucher was sitting in a folding chair by the sink. A kettle began to shriek on the open-top stove. Blucher was smiling faintly. His hands were folded quite naturalistically in his lap. He evidently fell asleep, and slept so soundly, even the mounting cry of the kettle would not wake him.

"Wake up, Blucher," Gunther said. "Blucher, wake up."

Later, in my office, he could not explain why he acted the way he did. Why he paced that small kitchenette, entreating Blucher to wake up, Blucher to stand, Blucher to speak to him. When all the while, of course, he was perfectly aware of the smell of gunpowder, of the smell of blood, as familiar and as intimate as a comrade on the Eastern Front; and of the small, neat hole drilled in Blucher's forehead. He was aware of all that, and yet as in a dream he spoke to Blucher; he told him of Ulla, of time spent in a high attic room, of stolen kisses in Unter den Linden, of the whistle of a train taking soldiers to battle. That whistle, long ago, seemed to him now to intertwine with the hissing kettle. It brought with it instantaneous memories long kept at bay: of Ulla's sweat-slicked body in the moonlight, of the feral call of air-raid sirens, of the march of booted feet, of jubilant voices crying out "The Horst Wessel Song." He thought of the Führer's voice on the wireless, of crumpled bedsheets and her voice, thick with sleep, saying, "Please, don't go."

It was those last words that he carried with him on the way to the east; those words that kept him company amidst the snow and the blood. "Please, don't go." But when he returned, a different man under a different sky, she was long gone. Sometimes, under the blanket of the cold Russian night, he looked up at the stars and imagined he could see her.

At last, Gunther removed the kettle from the stove. He turned off the gas. He took one last look at Blucher's corpse. A second door, he saw, led out of the kitchenette. He pushed it open and stepped outside, into an alleyway running at the back of the bookshop. He looked left and right but saw no one, and he slipped away. My men, who were only watching the front of the shop, lost him then.

6

When Sloam failed to reappear, my men finally entered Blucher's. They found the proprietor slumped in his chair with the bullet hole between his eyes, and Gunther gone. Then they called me with the bad news.

I did not mind Gunther on the loose. After all, I had set him free myself. I had telephoned Blucher earlier that morning, and advised him that Sloam might well pay him a visit later in the day. I also told Blucher he could sell Sloam a gun. A man with a gun, sooner or later, makes his presence felt.

What I had not expected, however, was for Blucher to be so stupid as to commit suicide by gunmen.

For a time, I considered that Gunther might be the killer. His whereabouts were unknown. He was armed, and potentially dangerous. But I had sent him to rattle a nests of wasps. That the wasps stung back, I supposed, was only to be expected.

Blucher must have been killed to keep him quiet. That fact stared me in the face, and the fact that the lying scum Austrian piece of shit had held out on me.

If there was one thing you could say about Hanns Blucher, it was that the man was a professional liar. His story for Gunther was good. Parts of it were even—almost—true. He was born Erich Dittman, in Gratz, Austria, the son of a shoemaker and a seamstress, the middle child of five. His criminal career began early. He was a good little pickpocket, graduated to burglary and robbery by the age of sixteen, and after a time in prison settled on the more tranquil profession of fencing stolen goods. When war came, he escaped to France; then, when France fell, to Luxembourg. By then he had changed his identity twice. When the war ended, Hermann Blucher was a well-established rare-books dealer in Luxembourg City. He had avoided the deportations and the camps, and he thought his papers were good.

They were; almost.

How he got out of Luxembourg alive I never quite learned. He reappeared in London and was ensconced in his premises on the Charing Cross Road as though he'd always been there. In truth, he had taken the lease on an empty shop at No. 84, formerly owned by a Jew named Marks.

He called himself Blucher. He was as enmeshed in criminal enterprise as ever. And he was still a Jew.

When I first marched into his shop and he saw me, he knew it was over. He did that little shrug he always did. By rights I should have had him tortured and disposed of. But he was more useful to me alive.

Only now he was dead, like Blau.

Someone was tying up loose ends.

*   *   *

Gunther walked through the city that day haunted by the shadow of deaths. Usually the ghosts did not bother him overmuch; he had made his peace with the atrocities of war. What he had done, he had only done to survive. In a post-war screenplay, never produced ( Das große �bel, c. 1948), the love interest dies in the arms of the hero, a veteran of Normandy on a quest to avenge the death of his sister at the hands of blackmarket speculators. As she lies dying, she kisses him, one last time, with lips stained red with blood, and tells him he was not a bad man for the things he did. He was just an imperfect man in an imperfect world, trying to do the right thing.

She dies. The hero embraces her. Her blood soaks into his shirt. The hero walks away, into the shadows.

When he sent the script in to Tobis, he was told quite categorically not to waste his time. Demand was for domestic comedies, lighthearted affairs, adventure. "Write another Western," Rolf Hansen told him over coffee, before he got up and left him with the check. "There's always demand for that sort of thing. Oh, and Gunther?"

"Yes?"

"There is no black market in Germany. You should know better by now. Heil Hitler."

No, Gunther thought, walking through city streets slick with defeat, bounded by empty buildings like skulls, where the dead whispered through the gaping eye sockets of broken windows. There was no crime in this new Reich, no prostitution unless one counted that of the soul, no murder but that carried out by the state.

It was a land of hard-working, virtuous, and prosperous people. A dream come true.

Already they were bringing civilization even to Britain. Viennese pastries and public concerts of Wagner and Bruckner, Reinheitsgebot beer, shining gymnasiums where the soldiers of tomorrow could be taught, new factories in the north where the goods needed for the empire could be cheaply and efficiently manufactured. And no more Jews, but for a few desperate survivors like Blucher, living out their last days like rats in the shadows.

He was not usually this bleak, you understand. All of this just brought back the bad memories. When we got him later, he was done, he said.

"It's just something about this godforsaken island," he told me. "The cold and the damp and the bloody futility of it all, Everly. It starts to seep into your soul after a while."

"I'm afraid we did not present London's best side to you on your visit," I said, and he snorted.

"Oh, but I think you did," he said. "Don't worry, I won't be coming back."

Like I said, it wasn't much of a time for tourism.

Gunther retraced his steps. He tried to ensure he wasn't being followed. He wrapped himself tight in his good cashmere coat. He went back to the Lyric. A different bartender tended bar. The same indistinguishable faces drank in the corners. No one spoke German or, at any rate, no one was answering his questions.

He did not see the Luxembourgian, Klaus Pirelli, and he left.

Then he went back to the start. The house on Dean Street stood with its door closed and red lights burning behind the windows. He banged on the door but no one was answering and he did not see the old woman, Mrs. White. There was a new watcher across the street: not one of mine. He sidled up to Gunther as Gunther turned to leave. It was dark by then.

"You are looking for a girl?"

"I am looking," Gunther said. "For a dwarf."

The other man shrugged. "I see it is true what they say about you Germans. You have peculiar tastes. But each to their own, as my old nan always said."

Gunther stared at him. He had the urge to do violence. The man was too thin, his teeth too crooked, his coat too shabby, his hair too coarse. Gunther took out the gun and grabbed the man hard by the lapels and shoved him against the wall and put the gun in his face. The man looked at him placidly.

"Do you know a man called Klaus Pirelli?"

"What's it to you, friend?" the man said.

"I could shoot you right now."

"You could indeed, Fritz."

Gunther slapped him across the face with the gun, hard. The man's head shot back and slammed against the wall. He crumpled to the ground. Gunther put the gun to his forehead. "Tell me where I can find him."

The man moved his jaw, grimaced, and spat out blood. "Everyone's tough with a gun in their hand," he said. "Why don't you try asking nicely, or buying me a drink."

"I don't understand you English," Gunther said, frustrated. He pulled away from the man. He felt ashamed. The man got up slowly to his feet. Gunther took out cigarettes and offered one to the man, who took it. Gunther lit them up.

The man took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke. "If you're not looking for a girl," he said, reasonably, "why are you hanging about outside a whorehouse?"

"I came here for a girl," Gunther said shortly. "She died."

"I'm sorry."

"I almost believe you," Gunther said, and the man laughed.

"I can take you somewhere where there are other girls. It's best to let go of the dead, friend, or soon you become one yourself."

"You're a philosopher as well as a pimp?"

"I'm neither, friend. Just a man doing what he has to do to survive."

"Do you know where I can find this man, Pirelli?"

The man considered. "I can't tell you where he is," he said at last, "but I can tell you where he'd be."

"Where is that?"

"Somewhere where there is drink, and music, and girls."

"And you know all these places, I assume?"

"What can I say, I have a thirst for knowledge."

Gunther laughed. He stuck his hand out. "Gunther Sloam," he said.

The other man looked at the offered hand. Finally he took it. "You can call me Janson."

"One name's as good as the next," Gunther said amicably.

7

There began a night in which perception began to fracture like a mirror for Gunther. The city was a nightmarish maze of dark streets in which faceless gunmen haunted every corner. He thought about dead girls and dead Jews, and wondered who would be the next to die.

They started at the Albert, a cavernous pub where ancient families feuded with each other over pints of watery beer; continued to the Admiral's Arms, where everyone looked like a vampire; and settled for a time at the Dog and Duck over glasses of potent, home-made sherry.

"When the occupation is completed there I will go to America," Janson said. "I have a great admiration for the Americans, for all that they lost their war."

"What will you do?" Gunther said.

"I would become a writer for their pulps."

"It's a living," Gunther allowed. "Not a very profitable one, though."

"I write quickly and I have what it requires most," Janson said.

"And what's that?" Gunther said.

"Despair."

Gunther shook his head and swallowed his drink. Visions of Ulla Blau's ruined face kept rising in his mind.

"Were you in the war?" he said.

"Does it matter?"

"No," Gunther said, tiredly. "I suppose it doesn't."

They rose from their seats and stepped out into the night. It had truly fallen by then, and here and there, solitary gas lamps began to wink into being, casting murky pools of yellow light around them. Janson palmed a pill and dry-swallowed. "You want some?" he said.

Gunther said, "Sure."

During the war they had functioned as little more than animated corpses: kept alive by minimal food rations and handfuls of drugs. Gunther's memories of the march on Moscow were fragmentary. They killed for the sake of killing, killed because it was the only thing left for them to do. It wasn't glory or the Führer that kept them on that march. It was the little pills manufactured by Bayer's; that, and simple, total desperation.

The veneer of humanity was stripped off Gunther during the long march, during the slaughter and the occupation. He had never hated Jews, had no feelings at all for the Russians, but he was just one man; and when it came down to it, he wanted to survive.

In this world, I think, you do what you must to live: another minute, another hour, another day.

Sometime during that long evening they stumbled into the Berlin. It is a club situated on the Embankment, next to the gardens—or what used to be gardens before the war—and facing the South Bank. Gunther stopped outside. The Ferris wheel rotated slowly on the opposite side of the river, softly illuminated against the night sky. Gunther was drunk. His body was on fire from the methamphetamine. The Thames snaked dark and in its depths he saw Ulla's face rising up to him, laughing bubbles. He tottered.

Janson said something to the doormen and they laughed.

Money changed hands. The money was Gunther's. They went inside. It was a large room with a stage at one end. Girls danced on the stage, naked but for the fans they held. They moved about the stage in complicated patterns. A piano played, softly. Gunther heard conversation, laughter, the clink of glasses. He saw SS men in uniform sitting at one table, each officer with a girl in his lap. Important locals in last year's suits swanned about. They had bad skin and bad teeth and great big booming laughs. Gunther ordered a drink and thought he'd had enough of this town.

It was then that he saw him.

The Luxembourgian stepped out of the door marked Bathroom, his hands still wet. He dried them on his trousers. He wore a pinstripe suit and a pink shirt and a muted tie. His eyes darted nervously from side to side but he put on a smile as charming and shiny as a false diamond bracelet. Then he, too, saw Gunther.

The smile hovered but stayed in place. Gunther got up. He did not dare pull out the gun. Not with the officers present. The Luxembourgian's smile grew more assured. He passed through the throng of people like an eel until he came to Gunther.

"Sit down."

"I've been looking for you," Gunther said, and he matched the man's smile with his own, cold and hard.

"I said sit down !"

Gunther looked down. Held in the Luxembourgian's manicured fingers was a small Röhm .22 Derringer gun.

Gunther sat down. Pirelli sat on a stool opposite. He trained the gun on Gunther, holding it between his legs. "Don't bloody move, man."

"I wasn't going anywhere."

The bartender arrived. She was a young girl bare to the waist but for dark kohl painted over her nipples. She brought the Luxembourgian a drink without being asked. He kept one hand on the gun and with the other downed his scotch and grimaced. "They know me here, you see."

"You're a difficult man to find."

"Hardly!" The man's eyes kept shifting. Gunther was primed, every muscle in his body singing alertly. "Listen, if this is about the other night—"

"What do you think it's about?"

"You didn't have to kill Blucher!"

It came out almost as a shout. A couple of heads turned. Then the girls on the stage began to gyrate erotically and what attention they'd been given was gone. It was just the two of them on the bar at the Berlin. At this point, too, one of my men spotted Gunther. He did not approach but quietly went for a phone.

"I didn't kill him," Gunther said, startled.

"Didn't you? You come to town, start poking about, and two days later both Ulla and Erich are dead?"

"Who's Erich?"

"Blucher." Pirelli was sweating, Gunther saw. And he realized Pirelli, too, must be on Pervitin. He was wired worse than an S-mine. "That was his real name."

"How did you know him?"

Pirelli was so jumpy, Gunther was worried he'd press the trigger by accident. But the man seemed almost eager to talk.

"In Luxembourg. I helped him when his trouble got bad. Helped him get out and establish himself here." He sneered at Gunther. "What are you going to do, rat on me to your pals in the Gestapo? They can't touch me. I have connections. I'm a foreign national."

"You could try telling that to the fishes," Gunther said, with a touch of cruelty. "When they dump you in the Thames."

"They wouldn't dare!" A flash of anger or defiance in his eyes. "How do I know you didn't kill Erich?"

"Why did you set me up? You spiked my drink at that godawful pub."

"The Lyric's decent," Pirelli said; almost offended.

"Why did you do it!" Gunther said.

"Listen, friend, I'm the one holding the gun," Pirelli said.

"Blucher knew something. He was going to tell me. Then someone shot him."

"Someone, someone!" But he could see it Pirelli's eyes. The man was afraid of something. He kept looking everywhere but at Gunther.

"Who are you working for?" Gunther threw at him.

"I work for myself."

"A man like you? You're just the hired help."

Gunther thought to needle the man. But Pirelli's mouth curved in a mocking smile. At that moment one of the SS officers approached them, accompanied by a woman draped on his arm.

" Signore Pirelli!"

Gunther reached between them and grabbed Pirelli's hand in a painful grip, twisting it. He yanked the gun from the Luxembourgian's hand, hearing a bone break. Pirelli cried in pain.

"You are not happy to see us?"

Pirelli put on a pained smile. "My apologies, Sturmbannführer, " he said, through gritted teeth. "I seem to have hurt my hand."

The SS officer was round and jolly. His companion was buxom and blonde.

"Let me look at that," he said, grabbing for Pirelli's hand. Pirelli screamed. The Sturmbannführer laughed jovially and called the bartender for ice. "You'll be fine in no time," he said. He turned to Gunther and studied him, and under the jovial exterior Gunther saw cold, dark eyes.

"Who is your friend?"

"Gunther Sloam, Sturmbannführer, " Gunther said stiffly.

"Sloam, Sloam," the SS man said. His companion leaned over his shoulder and eyed Gunther with interest. "Where did you serve?"

"258th Infantry Division, sir."

"The heroes of Moscow!" the Sturmbannführer declared delightedly. "Why do I know your name, Sloam?"

"I'm sure I can't say, sir."

"A drink for my friend here," the SS man called. "A true hero of the Reich. So good to hear civilized German in this godforsaken place. How is Berlin?"

"Still there, last I checked."

"Magnificent!" The man laughed. His belly shook. His eyes remained cold and suspicious. "You two appear to be having a bit of an argument."

"It's nothing, sir. A minor disagreement."

"Good, good. We do not like trouble here in London, Sloam. This is a peaceful place. The natives are most obliging." He squeezed his companion's bottom and she squealed delightedly. Gunther averted his gaze. The girl's eyes were colder even than the Sturmbannführer' s.

"So I see, sir."

"Well, Pirelli, about that thing we discussed—"

"I will have the shipment to you by tomorrow," the Luxembourgian said. He was nursing a pack of ice on his broken hand and scowling.

"First thing, Pirelli. Sloam—" He nodded, cordially, and waddled off with the girl on his arm.

"Drugs?" Gunther said.

"Nudie pictures," Pirelli said. "The Sturmbannführer is a connoisseur."

"So I see."

"Give me back my gun."

"Why don't we take a walk?"

"No!"

"What is it, Pirelli? I'm not going to kill you."

"Listen to me, Sloam. It's safer in here. I don't want to die like the others."

"Who killed them?"

Unexpectedly, Pirelli laughed. "No one," he said. His whole body shook.

"Get up. We're going outside."

"You won't dare shoot me here."

"Only one way to find out. Move."

Pirelli got up. "You're a fool," he said.

"Why was Ulla killed?" Gunther said. They walked to the doors. It was cooler outside, quieter. There were few cars on the street. In the distance he could hear the clop-clop-clop of a horse and carriage. The lights of the Ferris wheel spun.

"She was tight with the SS," Pirelli said. "She supplied this place with half the whores. And then the other half too. They turned a blind eye to the drugs. First she bought from the soldiers her girls were sleeping with. Then, when that dried out, she put the pressure on me."

"How did she do that?"

Pirelli shrugged. "Do you have a cigarette?"

Gunther kept one hand in his pocket, where he held Pirelli's gun. He offered him the cigarette case with the other. The Luxembourgian lit up and coughed. "Filthy stuff," he said.

"What did she have on you?"

"She knew about Erich. We had our own racket going before she came along. Everyone in this town has a racket. But she wanted it all."

"You don't sound as if you liked her much."

"We did business. Business was good."

"You were bringing the drugs in from Luxembourg? Shipping them inside what, old books?"

Pirelli smiled tiredly. "You're not as stupid as you look."

"You and Blucher were close?"

"What the hell do you mean?"

Gunther nodded, the pieces falling into place at last. Perhaps he'd been wrong about Ulla, he thought. Perhaps he'd been wrong all along. People changed; and she'd always had that hard, selfish core inside her, even in Berlin, during the war. He didn't hold it against her. She was just another survivor in the end, and you can only survive for so long.

"Blucher didn't know, did he?" Gunther said. "How you felt about him."

"He loved that bitch!"

He opened his arms. His mouth opened, to speak, perhaps even to smile. There was a soft pop, like a bottle of champagne was opened. Pirelli fell on Gunther, his arms enfolding him in a hug. Gunther held him. When he lowered him, gently, to the ground, Pirelli's mouth was a vomit of blood and he was no longer breathing.

8

They were down near the river by then. The shot could have come from anywhere. The Thames ran softly. The mud swallowed sound. Overhead clouds shaped portents of rain.

Gunther swore. Pirelli's cigarette was on the ground, still burning. Gunther picked it up and put it to his mouth and took a drag. He knelt beside the corpse and searched through Pirelli's pockets. He found a bottle of Pervitin and dry-swallowed a handful. The hit was almost immediate. He stood up straighter, all his senses alert. Apart from the pills he found three hundred Reichsmarks, which he pocketed; the photo of an old woman in an old-fashioned dress with her arm around a tall, thin boy; and a comb. The boy in the photo could have been Pirelli. The comb was fine-toothed and made of ivory. Gunther stuffed both back into Pirelli's pockets and added rocks—as many as he could find. Then he rolled up his sleeves and dragged the corpse by its feet into the water.

When the last of Pirelli's head disappeared into the Thames, Gunther walked away. Something kept nagging away at him. Pirelli's use of the past tense, he realized. As though their little operation here in London had already come to its end.

Had it been wound down, even before Gunther arrived? Or was Ulla's death the catalyst? And why did the Luxembourgian spike his drink at the Lyric?

He needed to find the dwarf, he thought. The last piece of the puzzle.

Instead he found himself a girl.

*   *   *

"She reminded me of Ulla, that was all," he told me later, in my office. "She was German, can you believe that? She was sending money back to her family in Munich. She said she was an actress, only times are hard."

"They are all actresses, Sloam," I said. "And if you can believe that, you can believe anything."

"She was a good girl!" He turned on me. He was a romantic to the core, even if he couldn't admit it, not even to himself. "She was just doing what she could to make a life."

"She'll be used up within a year," I told him. "And dead in two."

I was being harsh on him; I wanted to provoke him.

He only shook his head tiredly. Like I said, by then the drugs had worn off and he was dead on his feet; he was done. "She was a good trooper," he insisted.

"You can't fight a war on your back."

"What is it about you, Everly? Did someone you loved one day suddenly abandon you?"

"You could say that, Sloam. But then you could say a lot of things. What was her name?"

"Anna," he said.

"They're all called Anna."

"What do you want from me, Everly? Shoot me and be done with it."

"I still might," I said. "Now answer my damn questions."

*   *   *

Gunther met the girl walking back from the river. For a moment, the light framed her face and he thought it was Ulla, and his breath caught in his throat. But her nose was different and her face worn in a way Ulla's never was, though this girl was young.

("They're all young, at the Berlin."

"You sound quite the expert, Everly. Are you sure you weren't there?"

"Just keep talking, Sloam.")

He saw that she was crying. She hurried her steps when she saw Gunther. " Herr Pirelli—have you seen him?"

" Herr Pirelli has gone for a swim."

She looked up at him with dark eyes. Her makeup was smudged. "I don't understand."

"I'm sorry," Gunther said. "I was only making a joke. He had to leave. Urgent business elsewhere, he said. You look distraught."

"It's nothing, really." She tried to smile, failed.

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"That's awfully kind," the girl said. "Only I need something a little stronger first, you understand? Just to take the edge off things."

Gunther stuck his hand in his pocket, came back with a pill. The girl took it without a word. This time, she managed a smile.

("They know how to smile, Sloam, believe me. They all smile like Ulla Blau in Die Große Liebe. "

"You sound bitter, Everly."

"You're an incurable romantic, Sloam."

"You keep saying that. But it's just basic decency."

"Only you slept with her."

"It wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all.")

Only maybe it was, a little bit. My men were only now getting there. The girl put the Pervitin pill between her teeth. She leaned into Gunther. He kissed her, hungrily. The pill dissolved between them. Her lips were hot and her eyes fevered. He imagined himself kissing Ulla. The girl threw her head back and laughed. "Let's go!"

She led him at a run and he followed like a fool. My men pursued but then lost them. It took us a while to realize what had happened to Pirelli. It wasn't that Gunther hadn't been observed. It was just that people don't willingly talk to the Gestapo.

She took him up the hill, along St. Martin's Lane where the theaters still displayed playbills from the last decade. She had a room on the third story of a boarding house in Denmark Street. There was a wilted rose in a vase on the table—"From an admirer," she said—and the bed was neatly made. Her only books were Mein Kampf and a copy of the Bible. Her only other reading materials were several out-of-date issues of Deutsches Kinomagazin, the latest of which had a radiant Leni Riefenstahl on the cover, posed with a camera on a tripod against a gloriously empty African savannah.

"Can I offer you a drink?"

Gunther sat on the edge of the bed. The girl slipped off her shoes and her coat. Underneath it she was wearing nothing but lingerie. She moved about quite unconcerned.

"Sure."

"Scotch?"

"If you have it."

The girl laughed. "You're such a gentleman," she said. Her eyes went over his body but dawdled on his pocket; where the pills were. "I keep drinks here for, you know."

"Admirers."

"Sure." She opened a cabinet and brought out a bottle and poured him a glass and one for herself too. They clinked glasses. Gunther's body was on fire and his mind was elsewhere. He kept thinking she was Ulla, and he knew that he wanted her.

There had been other girls, other rooms like these, hurried romances carried on in the dark. He'd never really let himself feel, after the war. Love was just another kind of transaction, another kind of scam.

He left the drink unfinished. He reached for her and she came willingly. Touching her lips was like completing a circuit. Electricity burned in him. "Ulla…," he said.

The girl recoiled. Her hand was on his naked chest. He did not remember when he'd taken off his clothes.

"She's dead," she said. "She was always good to me."

"You're crying," he said, wonderingly. The girl shook her head and smiled sadly through the mist.

"No," she said. "I'm not."

Gunther touched his eyes and realized they were wet. He could not remember when he had last cried. He wondered if he should feel good for it. He felt nothing.

The girl pushed him on the bed. He lay on his back. The ceiling was cracked, the paint peeling. The girl climbed on top of him.

"Ulla…," he said.

"Shh," the girl said. "I'll be your Ulla."

Gunther closed his eyes. The girl rocked above him. Gunther wondered if he'd ever loved Ulla, or if he was merely in love with the idea of being in love. After a while, it didn't matter, nothing much did, only the slow build and the urgency, the creaking of the mattress springs, the girl's soft cries.

*   *   *

He half-awoke in the night to find the girl smoking a cigarette by the window. He saw her profile in silhouette. She reclined, nude, her long legs drawn up to her chest. There was a long cigarette holder between her lips. He stood up, naked also. The girl didn't turn her head. He went to the sink and filled a glass with lukewarm water, and downed it. He turned to the girl. From this angle he could see her face.

"She made us watch her in this old movie," the girl said. "Over and over again, to teach us how to walk and how to talk."

" Die Große Liebe ?"

The girl looked at him vaguely. "What's that?" she said.

"An old movie. It was very successful."

"This was Der blaue Mond . It was all right. She played a good-time girl in trouble with the law. There's a detective always chasing her. It was silly."

"I never saw it."

The girl shrugged. "No, well," she said. "Why would you."

"We were lovers, in Berlin."

"She had many lovers," the girl said. "I think the only one she really loved was herself."

"Why were you looking for Pirelli, earlier?"

"He's always been good to me. He's not, you know.…"

"I know."

"He liked to pay us for our time and then just listen to us talk." She laughed. "Most men just want us to shut up and get on our backs. One of the SS men likes me to spank him. He just doesn't want to, you know. Have a conversation about it."

"And Pirelli? You looked distraught."

"It was nothing, really. One of the other girls hasn't been in to work for a couple of days. I thought maybe he'd seen her."

"Does she owe you money?"

The girl laughed. "No, silly. She's my friend."

She got up and advanced on him. The cigarette in its holder was left to smolder by the window. "Why do you have a gun in your coat?" she said.

"In case I get into trouble," Gunther said.

"You look like the kind of man who's always in trouble."

"That's just a role I play. In real life I'm a sweetheart."

She melted into his arms. She was good at that sort of thing. "Shut up and kiss me," she whispered.

So he did.

When they parted for air some of the fire inside him had calmed. The girl reached for his coat draped on the chair and reached into the pocket and took out the pills. "Do you mind?" she said. He shook his head, mutely.

He wondered if the line she'd used was from Ulla's film, that the girl had memorized. He thought it was the sort of thing he would have written himself, a throwaway line in a B-movie script on a long afternoon.

The girl popped a pill.

Gunther decided it didn't really matter. He took her in his arms and lifted her and carried her to the bed and she was laughing.

She lay there looking up at him. "I'll be your Ulla," she whispered.

"No," he said. "This time, just be yourself."

The night faded into torn strips of time. For a while, he slept.

When he woke up the girl was in the corner putting her stockings on in a businesslike fashion, and sitting in the chair facing Gunther was a man with a gun in his hand.

9

"I THOUGHT I was gone for sure," Gunther said. He looked at me a little sadly, I thought. "But of course if they'd wanted me dead, I'd have been dead before I ever woke up."

"And the girl?"

"She got dressed and left. It wasn't her fault," he said, almost pleading. "What could she do?"

"Did she take your money?"

He smiled. "And the pills."

"You're a sap, Gunther."

"Yes," he said. "That's what people keep telling me."

*   *   *

There were two of them. One on the chair, facing Gunther, and the other at the door. Both had guns.

The girl got dressed. "Are you going to hurt him?" she said. She didn't look at Gunther once.

"What's it to you, girl?"

"It's nothing," she said. "It's nothing to me."

"Then get lost, would you?" the gunman on the door said. The girl gave him a stare, but that's all it was. She got lost.

"Get dressed," the man on the chair said. Gunther sat up in bed. "I can't," he said. "I'm shy in front of strangers."

"He thinks he's clever," the gunman on the chair complained. The gunman by the door looked over, slowly. "Everyone's a comedian these days," he said.

"He's a regular Karl Valentin," the other gunman said. "Come on, Sloam. Get dressed. You don't want to be late."

"He'd be late for his own funeral," the gunman by the door said, and they both laughed. Gunther didn't. He thought it was a cheap line. He got up and got dressed and he followed them outside.

A long black Mercedes was parked in the road. Gunther got in at the back. The gunmen sat on either side of him. A third man was driving.

"Where are we going?"

"To church."

He let it go. He didn't have a choice. They drove through the dark city streets. Few cars passed them, going the other way. London after the war wasn't a place where people dawdled after dark. It was warm inside the car. The men on either side of him smelled of wet wool and incense. It was a peculiarly English smell. Outside the city projected like the flickering images of a black and white film. Bomb damage everywhere. He'd seen newsreels of the Luftwaffe bombing over the city, waves of bombers flying over Big Ben and St. Paul's Cathedral, over the Thames. It was not uncommon for children to play in the ruins of a house and find an unexploded ordnance. People died of the bombs even now.

He thought about Hitler announcing the successful invasion of England. The ships at Dover and the submarine that made it up the Thames and blew up the House of Commons. It'd taken them six months to hunt down Churchill. He'd been hiding in a bunker all that time.

Swastikas waving over Buckingham Palace. No one knew where the royal family was. Or knew but wasn't saying. So many things you couldn't say anymore. His mind wandered.

How does every German joke start? he thought.

By looking over your shoulder.

In time, London would be rebuilt and there'd be no sign left of the war.

"Wake up," someone said. He was prodded awake. His heart was beating too fast and there was an acrid taste in his mouth. Beyond the car's headlights he saw the lit front of a small church.

"Oh," he said. "I thought you were kidding."

"Just move it, will you? Boss wants to see you."

Gunther got out of the car obligingly. There was a large electric red cross above the door. Its light spilled over the driveway and ran down the walls. It made everything look covered in blood. Gunther went inside the church. The two gunmen remained outside. The door shut behind Gunther.

There was an altar straight ahead. Stained-glass windows showed nativity scenes. The pews had been pushed aside and there were half-shut crates and boxes everywhere.

"Mr. Sloam. Thank you for coming. I understand you have been looking for me."

Gunther started. For a moment he couldn't locate the voice. Then a diminutive shadow detached itself from the chancel and approached him with the tread of soft feet. "Welcome to the mission, Mr. Sloam. We do God's work here."

Jurgen, the dwarf, wore horn-rimmed glasses and a crisp white shirt. The rolled-up sleeves showed muscled arms. His hair was reddish-brown and fine.

"With guns?" Gunther said.

Jurgen laughed softly. "These are dangerous times. One must take precautions."

"How did you find me?"

Jurgen shrugged. "It wasn't hard," he said. "I have the ear of the poor, the desperate, and the dispossessed. I understand Pirelli is dead."

"Pirelli, Blucher, Ulla Blau," Gunther said. He ticked them off one by one on his fingers. He watched Jurgen but Jurgen's face bore nothing but a polite expression.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil," Jurgen said.

"Did you kill them?" Gunther said.

"Why would I do that, Mr. Sloam?"

"To protect your little racket," Gunther said. "I knew it couldn't be Ulla behind it all. Running drugs, suborning women. Those children who died in the hospital. It was all your doing, wasn't it. Wasn't it!"

He was shouting. Jurgen flinched. "Mr. Sloam," he said. "Please. This is unseemly."

"Just tell me," Gunther whispered. The fight wasn't in him anymore. "Tell me the truth."

Jurgen rubbed his eyes. "I came to London to help these people. The poor, the needy. The war had destroyed their homes along with their futures. We provide medical supplies, food, bibles." He shrugged. "The Führer won't challenge the church. This much we still have."

"You're a banker."

"I'm wealthy. My family is rich."

"Did you kill them? Did you kill Ulla?"

"You want me to confess?" Jurgen looked amused. "We are in church, after all."

"I don't know what I want," Gunther said.

"I believe in God, Mr. Sloam. I believe that the sins of the present age are but the prelude to the flood that is to come. This is Sodom and Gomorrah. The End of Days. Evil has won, Mr. Sloam. But evil cannot rule the world forever."

"My God," Gunther said. "You're an agitator. A…a subversive."

"Mr. Sloam, really," Jurgen said. "Don't be so melodramatic."

"How are you still allowed to operate? Why is the Gestapo not knocking on your door as we speak?"

"Someone has to fund this occupation," Jurgen said complacently. "Someone has to rebuild. Even Nazis need money, Mr. Sloam. I think you have the wrong impression of me. I did not kill Ulla. God knows I had reason to. You paint me so blackly, but Ulla Blau was exactly what you deny she was. She was a whoremonger and a poisoner. And a blackmailer, too, and many other things besides. I do not hold it against her. She did what she thought she must do. She had all the morals of an actress and all their brittle ruthlessness. I do not judge, Mr. Sloam. Only God does."

"What other things?" Gunther said; whispered.

Jurgen shrugged. "Lives," he said. "She sold lives."

"I don't understand."

"Don't you? Then perhaps it is better that way."

"Whom did she blackmail?" Then realization dawned. "You?"

"I have certain proclivities," Jurgen said. "I am not proud of them, but I have my needs. And Ulla had a knack for finding these things out."

"So you funded her?" Gunther said.

Jurgen shrugged again. "I paid her some money," he allowed. "What she mostly wanted from me was a way of putting that money somewhere safe. She had saved almost enough, she told me. She was looking forward to retiring. She wanted to go back to Germany, somewhere far from Berlin. She dreamed of opening her own theater. Can you believe it?" He gave a sudden, unexpected bark of a laugh. "She was never much of an actress," he said.

"That's not true."

"Oh, Sloam. I liked her, too, you know. But I never went to bed with her."

Gunther took a step toward him. Jurgen stood his ground. He smiled sardonically. "I'm sorry," he said, and he sounded almost genuine. "I don't know who killed her."

"But you're grateful," Gunther said. He loomed over the smaller man, who looked at him evenly, unafraid.

"What's one death," he said, "amongst so many?"

Footsteps sounded behind Gunther. He began to turn, only to see a dark shape rise in the air toward him. The butt of a gun connected with the back of his head. Pain flared, and he fell to his knees.

"Take him outside. Dump him somewhere with the garbage."

He tried to rise. They hit him again and, this time, he stayed down.

"I thought I was dead," he said. "Until I woke up covered in rotting cabbage with a rat nibbling on my shoe. They really did dump me in the garbage."

"Did they give you back your gun?"

"What gun?" he said. He looked at me blankly.

I sighed. "So who killed Ulla?" I said.

Gunther rubbed his eyes. "I don't know," he said. "And I don't care anymore. I've had it, Everly. I'm going home."

"You're lucky to be alive."

"Like you said, you can't just kill me—I'm a faithful citizen of the Reich."

I laughed. He looked hurt by that. "Who's going to miss you, Gunther? I have your file. You're a third-rate hack for pictures no one makes anymore. You have no wife, no friends, and not much of a future. Face it. You may as well be dead."

He shrugged. He must have heard worse. It's harder to break a man when he has nothing.

"If you're going to do it, just do it," he said.

"I would," I said, "only I like you. We do things a little differently here, in England."

I think it was true, too. He wasn't a bad guy. He just kept believing the wrong people.

"Then that's it? You're just going to let me go?"

"There's the door," I said. "There's a transport plane leaving in a couple of hours from Northolt. Why don't you do yourself a favor and be on it this time."

"I will," he said, fervently. "I'll be damned if I spend another minute in this town."

I watched him get up. He walked to the door. He hesitated with his hand on the handle. "You're a good sort, Everly," he said.

"We're a vanishing kind," I said.

10

WHEN WE picked him up he didn't have the gun on him. He must have stashed it somewhere in the trash. From us he should have gone straight to the airport. He didn't.

He made his way back to Dean Street. Back to the start. A car was parked in the street with the trunk open and packed suitcases on the ground. The old woman straightened when she saw him and said, dismissively, "Oh, it's you."

"Mrs. White. Going someplace?"

"The cold's no good for my bones," she said in her atrocious German. "I thought perhaps somewhere warm for the winter."

"Can I help you with your luggage?"

"I'd rather you didn't."

Gunther took his gun out and pointed it at her.

She squinted. "What's that for, then?" she said.

"Could you step away from the car?"

"You're not going to shoot me, Gunther."

He stared at her; but the gun never wavered. She straightened up, slowly. When she next spoke she seemed to shed forty years and her accent. "You came. I wasn't sure you would but you did."

"Just keep your hands where I can see them, Ulla."

She smiled. It was her old familiar smile. He wondered how he didn't see it before. "People keep telling me you're not much of an actress," he said, "but by God, you are!"

"You were always too kind to me," she said. Gunther could see now under her makeup and the wig: it was her eyes she couldn't truly mask. They were large and startled and innocent, like a wounded bird's. It was her eyes which dominated the last few seconds of screen at the end of Die Große Liebe, as the picture slowly faded to black. How could he have ever forgotten them?

"How did you know, Gunther?"

"I didn't, not for sure. It was just something this girl said."

"My, you've wasted no time getting over me."

He ignored her. "She was crying because one of her friends was missing. One of the other girls. And I thought how much she looked like you, how much all of them did. The Gestapo man said they all smiled like you."

"Chance would be a fine thing!" she said, with a flash of anger.

"And there was no face, of course."

"No," she said. "There was no face left, was there."

"How could you do it, Ulla? All of it? Not just the girls or the drugs, I can understand that, but those dead children, too?"

"They'd have died sooner or later, Gunther. This whole stinking country is a waiting room in a hospital's terminal wing. You can't pin that on me."

"But why?"

"Why, why," she said, aping him. Her voice was cruel. "Maybe because I couldn't get a role anymore. So I had to make one for myself." She shrugged. "Or maybe I just grew tired. It's over now, anyway. It was just something to do to pass the time at the end of the world."

"And the others?" he said. "Blucher, Pirelli?"

"I only did what I had to do."

"Why me, Ulla?"

"Do you mind if I light a cigarette?"

"Do it slowly."

"I do everything slowly, Gunther."

She reached into her pocket and came back with a silver case. She put a cigarette between her lips and lit it with a match. She blew out smoke and looked at him, unconcerned. "I always liked you," she said softly.

"Liked?"

"Maybe it was love. It was so long ago and who can remember anymore. You were just easy, Gunther. I don't know how you're still alive."

He just stared at her. The sunlight framed her head. It was just an ordinary day.

"Put the gun down, Gunther. You know you're not going to shoot me." She wiped makeup off her face and smiled at him. He thought she must still be beautiful, underneath. "Come with me," she said. "We'll go back to the Continent, away from this awful place. I have money. We'd never have to work again. Come with me."

"No."

"Then step away!" She began loading the cases into the car. Gunther stood and watched her, helplessly.

I watched them from across the road. Neither of them saw me. It was obvious he wasn't going to shoot. She knew it and I did. I think the only one who didn't was Gunther.

I crossed the road to them. I wasn't in a hurry. Gunther heard my footsteps first. He turned his head and looked at me in bewilderment.

"Give me the gun, Gunther."

"No," he said, "She's got to pay, she's got to pay for what she did."

"To them, or to you?" I said. "Give me the gun, Gunther."

I watched her all the while. She straightened up again, slowly, her eyes never leaving my own or blinking. She didn't say a word. She didn't have to.

"Give me the gun."

He gave it to me. Ulla watched us without expression. I couldn't see her hands.

I raised the gun and shot her.

A Luger makes a surprising amount of noise when it's fired. The gunshot echoed from the walls. She fell slowly.

I'd blown half her face off, and the wig, which fell and lay on the ground matted in blood. Ulla Blau collapsed after it. She lay by the car and didn't move. There was a small gun in her hand where she'd intended to shoot me.

I walked over to her and fired another bullet, just to be sure.

Gunther stood there all the while. He didn't move. His eyes found mine at last. "What did you do that for?" he said numbly.

"You never asked her," I said.

"Asked her what?"

"What else she did to earn a living. Someone must have told you."

I could see it in his eyes. Someone must have said something but he never thought to follow it up. I said, "You want to know why she was so protected? She sold us Jews. To the Gestapo."

"So?" he said.

"She worked in the theater in the aftermath of the war. She recruited the girls. She knew where people were hiding. It was just another way to make a living, and buy some protection on the side."

"So what?" he said. "They were just Jews."

"Sure," I said. "Sure. They were just Jews."

He really looked at me then. I think it was the first time he really started to see things for what they were and not for what he thought they should be.

"But you can't be," he said. "You're not—"

"I knew Tom Everly in Berlin, before the war," I said. "We were at university together. He became a committed Nazi, and when he went back to England he was already working for the Abwehr. "

I was watching Gunther's eyes. He wanted to run but there was nowhere to go. You can't outrun a bullet.

"We found him in the last few months of the war. Just enough time for me to take his place," I said. "He had a wife and a son, but it's no use having a family in this line of work."

All Gunther did was keep shaking his head. No, no. "There are no more Jews," he said.

"I told you," I said. "We're a vanishing kind."

Later, I stood over him. I knelt beside him and put the gun in his hand. They looked good together, he and Ulla. I felt bad for Gunther. He wasn't a bad guy, and none of this has really been his fault. He came to London following a woman, which is how these stories usually start, and he found her: which is how they usually end.

The Desert of Vanished Dreams

By Phyllis Eisenstein | 9505 words

Alaric the Bard made his first appearance in F&SF with "Born to Exile" in our August 1971 issue, and for the last forty-five years he has been a regular if not a frequent visitor to these pages, making this one of the longest running series in the magazine. And yet, as this tale shows, the author has not run out of fresh twists and surprises.

ALARIC THE MINSTREL looked westward across the great desert. A line of dunes lay behind him, and the hard-baked desert pavement stretched ahead as far as the eye could see, good footing for both man and beast, though hot underfoot by day if the man were actually foolish enough to walk. Alaric rarely walked. A minstrel by trade and a traveler by choice, he rode his camel as he had formerly ridden a horse, with practiced ease, his teachers all members of the caravan that had accepted him into its company for the sake of his lute and his songs. Moving forward slowly beneath the relentless sun, that caravan seemed to him like an endless string of beads, each bead a man with a story that might be fashioned into yet another song. Alaric could have made the crossing in a few dozen heartbeats, using his witch's power to flit from horizon to horizon till he reached the desert's western edge, but those men and those potential songs drew him and made the journey worth as much as the destination. The man who rode ahead of him had told his own tale beside a campfire one night, and Alaric had found a song in it, and made the man smile at his own life. There would be another campfire tonight, another tale, another song—the minstrel never doubted that. Young though he might be, he was skilled at transmuting those tales and those lives into entertainments any crowd would pay good coppers—or even silver—to hear.

Just now, he had no interest in coppers or silver. Just now, he was thirsty, as was every other man of the caravan. The last three wells had been dry, not even a trace of dampness in their depths to show that water had once seeped upward in them. Now the goatskin water bags that every camel carried were thinner than Alaric had ever seen them, and the men of the caravan were rationing their drinks to make the contents last. Alaric, of course, could have visited any of the wells they had passed farther east, could even have gone beyond the desert itself, to any place he had ever been or seen, and quenched his thirst and filled his bag there. But he did not—not as long as Piros, the caravan master, was certain that another well lay not far away. The man had not led caravans across the desert for three decades without knowing where water could be found. And so, like all the other men, Alaric sipped sparingly from his bag, grimacing at the stale and brackish taste of the liquid, and wondered where in all that seemingly endless landscape they would find the next well.

On his left, toward the southern horizon, hovered the phantom city that sometimes kept pace with the caravan. At least, it looked something like a city, blurred with distance, its towers and walls wavering shapes in the desert sunlight, with silver water all around them. On some days, the towers were tall and slim, on others squat and fat, as if pressed down by some giant hand. Sometimes they disappeared entirely, fading away like frost in the spring warmth of the North. They were illusions, like the shimmering water that surrounded them, that sometimes spread across the desert ahead of the caravan, never to be reached. The desert air played tricks on men, he had been told, and one could never trust the visions that it offered. He had tried to craft a song about the phantom city, the phantom water, but it had eluded him so far, perhaps because his mind was taken up with the problem of real water.

He tilted his water bag and took the tiniest possible sip, barely wetting his tongue, and wondered how far Piros was willing to go before asking for his help. Of all the men in the caravan only Piros knew his secret, and because he owed Alaric his life, he kept that secret to himself. But how many men might die of thirst because two men were keeping that secret?

Alaric moistened his lips again and rode on, thinking of the rushing rivers of the North.

That evening, at the caravan master's fire, Alaric pled that he was too dry to sing, and Piros gave over his own share of the tea they all drank so that there could be some entertainment. The rest of the men crowded around, listening, and when Alaric finished his song and gave back the cup with a mouthful remaining in it, Piros stood and stretched his arms out to command attention.

"I know you think that too many wells have dried up," he said. "That we may die out here because of it."

The faces that had turned to him were stark, the eyes red-rimmed, the lips cracked and peeling. No one said anything. He looked from one man to another. He had promised to pay them from his profits when they returned to the eastern edge of the desert. It had sounded like a fair enough bargain at the beginning of the journey.

"There is a place where the water never fails," he told them. "I had not planned on stopping there, but now we have no choice. We turn southwest at first light. Find what rest you can, and if any man feels he might fail before morning, let him ask for some of my water. I don't plan on losing a single one of you."

Again, none of them said anything, and Alaric thought that must be because their throats were so dry. And he felt remorse for having drunk the tea and traded only a song for it.

Later, in the deepest darkness of the night, when the stars shone overhead like so many gemstones and yet shed precious little light, he went to Piros's tent and whispered the caravan master's name. A moment later, the man emerged, as if he had never been asleep.

"A word in private," Alaric murmured, and the two of them walked some distance from the camp. Even so, the minstrel kept his voice low. "You haven't asked for my help."

"There will be magic water enough tomorrow," said Piros. "No need for you to take the blame for it."

Alaric shook his head in bewilderment.

Piros laid an arm across the minstrel's shoulders. "I'll need your courage tomorrow. And your strong back. Will you lend both to me?"

"Of course."

"Then that will be enough. Find your rest, lad. We have a long ride in the morning." Without another word, he turned and went back to his tent.

The caravan roused in the dawn twilight, and everyone was mounted well before the sun began to show itself at the horizon. Piros sent his most experienced men up and down the line to encourage everyone to drink freely. Most did so, and a few muttered that they might as well, for if there was truly water at their next destination, it would not matter, and if there was not, it would matter even less. Mounted, waiting for the signal to move, Alaric took two mouthfuls from his water bag. Then he offered some to the man behind him but was refused, though the man's lips were dry and cracked.

Tonight, he thought. Tonight there will be water, one way or another, and he began laying his plans.

By midmorning they were moving almost directly south, and the phantom city, with its many towers and its illusory surrounding water, lay before them in what appeared to be the far distance. By midafternoon, the towers and the water had faded away, but something remained ahead, something like a wall, gleaming white beneath the high sun, and it did not disappear but rather increased in size and clarity as they rode toward it, until it was unmistakably real. The caravan halted some distance from it, and all the men sat their camels and stared as if they had never seen its like before.

Alaric knew he had not.

It was a wall indeed, wide, stretching left and right as far as a man could walk in five hundred heartbeats and as high as several men standing on each other's shoulders. It had a smooth façade, the wall merging seamlessly with an arching roof, its only blemishes a series of shoulder-high square openings too small for a man to squirm through, though a child might have done so. Windows, Alaric thought, showing only darkness within, though that might have been the result of coverings on the inside. Four times, instead of such a window there was a large panel, taller than a man and slightly less white than the wall, that could have been a door, though closed tightly now. In front of the wall, spreading in a semicircle from one end of it to the other, was a broad plaza with a white pavement, clean-swept, not a trace of sand upon it, rimmed by a low white wall, just knee-high, with occasional gaps, each gap wide enough for half a dozen men walking abreast to pass through. And in the center of the plaza was a sculpture that might have portrayed some kind of low, fanciful tree, standing in a shallow, circular basin.

Piros was moving along the caravan, telling the men they would camp where they were and a party would go with him to fetch water.

From where ? Alaric wondered. He saw no well and no sign of residents such as always lived around other water sources.

They made camp, and Piros told off a dozen men and mounts to accompany him. Alaric volunteered, as promised, and helped load sacks of grain and salt on the animals—and half a dozen times as many empty water bags as there were camels. At the caravan master's signal, the chosen men mounted for the short ride to the nearest gap in the low wall. There, they left their camels in the care of one of their number, and the rest walked into the plaza, each carrying at least one sack of grain or salt and several empty water bags. Piros himself strode forward with purpose, the sculpture his obvious goal. So close, Alaric could see that the branches of what he had thought a tree had openings at their tips. They were pipes. The sculpture was a fountain, the basin intended to catch its flow.

The basin was bone dry.

Alaric sighed. Perhaps there had been water here in the past, but it was long gone. How many years had it been, he wondered, since Piros last visited this place? Yet there was no sign of disappointment on the caravan master's face.

Piros directed his men to set their bags of provisions some paces to one side of the basin. Then he opened the mouth of one of his water bags wide and held it beneath the end of one of the pipes with his left hand while his right curved around the pipe an arm's length above the end. When the water began to flow, his men gasped and stepped back. When his water bag was full, its mouth snugged shut with sinew, he half-turned to them and said, "Well, do you want water or no?"

For a long moment, no one moved.

Piros leaned close to the end of the pipe, opened his mouth beneath it, and took a long drink. Then he doused his head till the liquid dripped down his face and over the shoulders of his desert robes. Straightening up, he wiped his chin with one sleeve and turned back to his men. "Are you too frightened to live?" he said. "The spirit of the city will give us what we need. Fill those bags!"

Alaric was the first to step forward. He cupped his hands beneath the flow and drank. The water was as cool and sweet as any from the North. He filled his water bags and gestured for the other men to join him.

The first to break from the group drank and drank and, with a deep, satisfied sigh, began to fill a bag. The rest crowded behind him, jostling to be next. Stretching out his free hand, Piros gripped a second pipe, and as water began to flow from it, some of the men diverted there.

"Minstrel," said the caravan master, and he tilted his head toward the next pipe to his right.

Alaric understood and touched it as Piros had touched his. When its flow began, he did the same with the next pipe beyond, and the men broke into two more groups to take advantage of those. Slowly, the pale basin at their feet accumulated what their bags did not catch.

It took some time for all of the bags to fill, but at last Piros looked over the group and nodded. Taking one more drink for himself, he let go of the pipes, gesturing for Alaric to do the same, and almost immediately the flow of water stopped, leaving only the pool of liquid in the basin. A few heartbeats later, it, too, was gone, vanished down barely visible slitted drains. Piros signaled his men to start loading the camels with the now-heavy water bags. He and Alaric were the last to load their bags and climb into their saddles.

"We'll do this again tomorrow," Piros said, "until every bag and pot and man in the caravan is full. Then we'll water the camels. They don't truly need it, but they'll drink if the water is in front of them."

"And the salt and grain?" asked Alaric.

"Payment," said Piros. "There must always be payment for the city's water."

"Payment to whom?"

Piros smiled. "That's a story you might want to make into a song. I may tell it tonight."

"I've seen no one," said Alaric.

"Oh, but they've seen us."

Back at the encampment, the men who had stayed behind were gathered together, every eye on the returning camels. There were some anxious faces in the crowd, but most of the men surged forward to help unload the water bags. Soon enough, tea was being brewed, supplies had been broken out to make a good meal, and men were beginning to laugh around their campfires. The sun was long gone before Piros succumbed to Alaric's encouragement and began to tell what he knew of the city's past.

"It's an ancient place," he said. "Some say from the dawn of time, though I can't guess how anyone could know that. Few enough from beyond the desert have visited it. I have, and my father before me, and his father as well. I once met another caravan master who said he'd been here, and I had little reason to doubt him. Still, in spite of its water, caravans avoid it. There are powers here that men fear, and rightly so. At night, lights can sometimes be seen in its windows, and not firelight, nothing so welcoming." Every face turned toward the city, but it was lost in the desert darkness, with no hint of light about it anywhere. "The doors will open now and then," Piros continued, "but few dare to go inside, and no one has ever spoken of what he found there. A door once opened for me and I looked in, but I did not have the courage to enter. Yet people do live here, perhaps the descendants of its first inhabitants, perhaps travelers lost in the desert and glad enough to find a refuge. There are a few who know our language, and I spoke to them years ago, but they sounded mad to me. I think it would be easy to be driven mad by such a place." He looked at Alaric. "Does all of this make you curious, minstrel?"

Alaric smiled and sipped some tea. "Somewhat. Yet I am wary of places that others fear. Usually there are good reasons for that."

Piros nodded. "Then you'll have to invent quite a lot if you plan to make a song of this place."

"I've had some experience at that."

Piros poured himself another cup of tea. "Let us hear some of those inventions, then, while we all drink our fill of this good water."

Alaric's lute was never far away of an evening, and he swung it into his lap now, tested the strings, and launched into the most humorous tunes of his vast collection. He thought the caravan men needed humor to justify the thin laughter he had already heard, and indeed, they were ready enough to chuckle at the least jape.

Four songs later, as his listeners began to drift away toward their tents, Alaric watched Piros speak softly to a number of them, and those men scattered to form a night guard around the camp. A night guard was common enough on the desert journey, but on this night, Alaric thought, Piros was being especially selective, delegating that duty to the toughest men of the caravan. As the minstrel crawled into the low tent he shared with two other men, he wondered how many dwellers there might be in the city. Not many, he judged, for there was no sign of anything edible in the immediate area, not even the date palms that flourished at many another desert waterhole. Would those bags of grain and salt truly sustain more than a few inhabitants, and for how long a time?

He fell asleep thinking what madness it was to live in such a place.

He woke to a furor in the camp. Someone had disappeared from the night guard and could not be found.

"Who saw him last?" Piros was shouting the question, but no one seemed to have an answer.

"He must have gone off on a call of nature and gotten lost," said one man.

"There was a fire," said another. "I kept it alive all night, and it would have guided him back."

"It was the city," said a third. "They've taken him, and they'll eat him. Better than bread, as long as you have a little salt. And Piros made sure of the salt."

"And when was the last time you ate human flesh, that you know how it tastes, either with or without salt?" said Piros. He silenced the hubbub with a sharp gesture. "We will not leave a man behind. Spread out in parties of three and search the immediate area. Mark your paths with camel dung—we have enough of it—so that you don't lose your way. Call his name loudly. He is not foolish enough to have gone far. And shout his name louder if you find him, alive or dead." The men began gathering in their groups. "As for the city, who will come with me to look there?"

They stopped then and looked at him sidelong, none willing to meet his eyes.

"I'll come," said Alaric.

Piros nodded. "Anyone else?"

There was some mumbling, but no one stepped forward.

Piros pointed at the nearest man. "If you had been taken, you'd want someone to come after you."

"If I were still alive," he replied. "But he'd have found a way to come back if he were alive."

Piros took a deep breath. "Well, as caravan master, it's my responsibility. I can't fault you for fearing something so unknown. Even so, is there no one else who has either enough courage or enough curiosity to come with the minstrel and me?"

"Don't take the minstrel!" called another man. "We'll need his songs for the rest of the journey."

"The choice is his," said Piros. "As the choice of a new leader is yours if we never return."

A soft muttering arose, but still no one stepped forward to join them.

"Come along, minstrel," said Piros.

"I leave my lute behind in my tent," Alaric said loudly. "You can be sure I'll return for it."

Piros and Alaric mounted their camels and moved quickly out of the camp toward the city. They heard no cry from the searchers as they rode. Sound carried far in the desert, and so they knew that the missing man had not been found, whether alive or dead.

"He is in the city," said Piros. "They have secret ways of raiding visitors. Some say they travel beneath the sand without disturbing it, but I think they are just a stealthy lot. When they walk, you cannot hear the slightest footfall. Like dancers. They are graceful as dancers."

"You've seen them?" said Alaric.

"Of course I've seen them. I've spoken to them, as did my father before me. Their own language is strange, but they know ours, some of them. They've learned it from captives." He nodded. "Yes, they sometimes keep captives, at least for a time. That's why I have hope that he's alive. And I've brought something to trade for him." He dug into the sleeve of his desert robe and brought out a fine knife, its hilt set with what looked to be well-cut colored gems that flashed in the sunlight. "I had hoped to trade this for something better on the far side of the desert, but I suppose a man's life is worth this much. The gems are glass, of course, but finely wrought."

Alaric leaned forward on his camel. "You've been inside, haven't you?"

Piros shrugged. "Some small distance. Perhaps I'll go farther this time." He glanced at Alaric. "Only as far as necessary, though. It's easy to become lost. You'll have to take care and stay near me."

Alaric smiled a little. "It's very difficult for me to become lost."

"That will help, then."

At the wall, they left their camels hobbled together, and Piros strode directly to one of the large panels. There, he set his palm against the white surface and spoke a word that Alaric had never heard before, some foreign word that sounded like " Orbansez. " Whatever it was, whatever it meant, it caused the panel to slide sideways, revealing the dark interior of the place. Piros leaned into the opening, looked left and right, and when he was satisfied with what he saw, he stepped over the ankle-high threshold and gestured for Alaric to follow him.

Inside, the windows bore translucent covers that admitted patches of desert sunlight, revealing a long, narrow corridor studded on the opposite wall with man-tall panels, a few of them open to show small, barren rooms. But though the windows admitted light, they did not admit the hot desert breeze. Instead, the interior of the city was as cool as the Northern spring.

Piros called out the missing man's name. "Arnay!"

"Shouldn't we be quiet?" said Alaric.

"They already know we're here," Piros told him. "They knew as soon as the door opened." He started down the corridor to the left, Alaric following. Some distance along was a stairway leading downward, with handrails against the walls on either side. Piros stood at the top for a moment, gripping the right-hand rail. A pleasant breeze wafted up the stairway, as if something below were the source of the city's coolness. Alaric wondered how far down the steps continued; there was not enough light from the corridor to show. "There is another level beneath this one," said Piros, "and perhaps another below that. The city is larger than it appears." He took a single step downward. "It may be that the leader I am looking for has died since I was here last and someone else has claimed his place." He called loudly: "Ronnel! It is Piros, your old friend, come to trade." When there came no answer, he descended a few more steps and called again. There was still no answer.

"If you intend to keep going down, we'll need a torch," said Alaric.

"I think not," said Piros, and he moved down three more steps. And as he moved, patches on the walls to his left and right began to glow till they were bright as so many burning brands. He went on, and with each step another light kindled, and hard as Alaric peered at them, he could not see any source beyond the blank walls themselves. Gingerly, he touched one of the glowing areas, and it was as cool as the air around him.

As Piros descended and lights bloomed into existence one by one, he called for Arnay again, but still there was no answer. At last, the bottom of the stairway became visible, and dozens of lights flared as he reached it, illuminating a floor that stretched from the foot of the stairs to a wall far in the distance, and all of it covered densely with a layer of low, leafy plants.

Alaric gaped at the vast underground garden. He could see the lacy tops of carrots, the orange roots showing beneath, and turnips, white and purple, and green onion sprouts, celery, lettuce, radishes, and melons, beans of half a dozen varieties, and squash, yellow and green.

Piros shook his head. "There is less here than the last time I visited." He bent to finger one of the carrots, brushing the greenery aside to show Alaric that it was growing in water as deep as his hand was long. Alaric looked at some of the other plants and found they all grew in the same way, in broad, shallow vats of water. "You see," said Piros, "there is water in plenty here. It comes from deep under our feet—deeper than any desert well, so they say."

"So who says?" asked Alaric. In all that vast underground garden, beneath the lights nearly as bright as natural sunlight, he could see no movement save that of Piros and himself.

"They're hiding," said the caravan master. "They fear us. Almost as much as we fear them."

"And yet you think they stole Arnay."

"Or lured him. Fresh vegetables might have been too much for him to resist." He pushed some greenery aside with his foot to reveal a narrow pathway between vats. "Come, let's see if we can find someone. And don't take any of their vegetables. Perhaps we can barter for some later."

Alaric nodded. Stealing their food would be a poor way to convince the residents to return the missing man.

He followed Piros down the long aisle, past cross-aisles, one after another. At last they came to a cross-aisle wider than the rest. On their right side it continued far into the greenery. On their left it led to the nearer wall of the garden room, where the entrance to a broad, arching, shadow-filled passage could be seen.

"There's a gathering place yonder," said Piros, pointing to the passage. "I shared a meal there, long ago, with several of the folk who called the city home. We might find some sign of them there." He turned toward it and gestured for Alaric to follow.

As they entered the passage, newly illuminated patches on the walls dispelled the shadows, and the passage itself opened into a chamber large enough for the feasting of forty or fifty men, had there been any tables or benches furnishing it. At this moment, it was empty save for a single large bone that lay on the floor close by a man-tall opening in the far wall.

It was a human leg bone, chopped off below the knee, the flesh and skin dry and shrunken, a sandal still fastened to its foot. The severed end rested just outside the raised threshold that marked the entrance to another chamber. And inside that chamber lay the rest of the body, a man as dry and shriveled as the leg, clad in the ragged remnants of a cloth jerkin and short pantaloons.

"Not Arnay," said Piros. He made no attempt to enter the room, just looked long at the dead man. "Well, they didn't eat this one," he said at last.

"He's dead a long time," said Alaric.

Piros nodded and then reached out to grip Alaric's arm. He pointed past the dead man.

At the far end of the chamber, on a low dais, stood an elaborately carved wooden chair, its curving arms gilded and padded, as were its seat and back, with plush velvet, much rotted. And on that chair, as on a throne, sat a gray-robed man who wore a crown of gold filigree spangled with myriad cabochon gems glinting red, blue, and green in the pale light that emanated from half a dozen places on the chamber's walls. He was dead—as dead and dry as the man on the floor—his closed eyes sunken deep into his skull, a few loose wisps of his white hair fallen to his shoulders. A dead king, thought Alaric.

"This door was closed when I was here all those years ago," said Piros. He touched the wall outside the chamber door and half-lifted one foot, as if to step over the threshold, but a voice shouted, "Stop!" and he recoiled from the entrance and turned.

A small man stood behind them, at the near end of the passage from the gardens. His light hair was shaggy over his ears, and he, too, wore a gray robe, tattered at the wrists and hem. Below the robe, his feet were bare, the nails long and chipped, jagged enough to hurt a foe.

"Ronnel," said Piros.

The man tugged the collar of his robe closer, tearing the fabric slightly as he did so. "You're the one who came before. With your father."

Piros nodded. "We were both young then, you and I."

The man pointed at Alaric. "Is this your son?"

Piros shook his head. "But the men of my caravan are all like sons to me, Ronnel. You must return the one you stole."

"I stole no one," said Ronnel.

"But you did." Piros took a single step toward the man, who backed away an equal distance. "Or one of your friends did. It makes no difference to me. I offer you a handsome knife in ransom for him. It is my own, my favorite. I give it to you freely if you set him free." Slowly, he drew the glass-jeweled dagger from his sleeve and held it out, hilt first, tilting it one way and another to make the finely cut imitation gems glitter.

"I have many knives," said Ronnel. "But if you have a fat pig or a pair of goats, we might make a bargain." He licked his lips as if he were testing the flavor of the meat.

Piros seemed to consider that for a moment. "We might give you a camel," he said finally.

Ronnel grimaced. "I've been told that camel meat is…unpleasant."

"Not if you're starving."

"You've seen our gardens," said Ronnel. "There's no starvation here."

Piros smiled with one side of his mouth. "Then why steal a man?"

"He's young. His flesh is tender. With a little salt, a welcome change. You have other men."

"I won't willingly lose one."

"You might lose more than one," said Ronnel.

Alaric caught at Piros's arm. "Look," he said, pointing toward the passage to the gardens. Two men stood side by side at the far end. Both held naked blades.

Piros flipped the glass-jeweled knife around, the hilt coming to rest snugly in his hand. He stepped back then, pulling Alaric with him until their heels were hard against the raised threshold of the dead king's chamber. A heartbeat later, they had both leaped it and were inside, ready for an attack.

Suddenly, a panel hidden within the wall slammed across the doorway, sealing them into the room.

Piros's knife was caught by that closing, the blade snapped off and the hilt torn from his grip. Like the dead man on the floor, part of it was on the other side of the door.

"Well, now we know what happened to his leg," said Piros. He pushed at the panel, trying to urge it back into the wall; then he tried to shove it outward, but it would not move either way, not even when Alaric lent his strength to the task. Piros pressed his palms against the panel, murmuring the strange word that had first admitted them to the city, but nothing happened, nor when he tried pressing various places on the wall all around the panel. He took a deep breath. "Ronnel!" he shouted.

There was no answer.

"They think they have us," said Piros. "They know how to open this door, else it wouldn't have been open when we first saw this chamber." He smiled. "But we don't need them to free us." He turned toward the dais and stepped up beside the dead king. "I'll wager there's been more than one other visitor who entered this chamber. To get that. " He pointed at the filigree crown. "What fine workmanship it is."

Alaric looked all around, keeping the sealed entrance always in view. There was something about the chamber that made his skin prickle. Looking more closely at the nearest wall, he realized that its pale color was patterned all over with a fine grid of irregular lines, and for a moment he thought he could see faint lights racing through that grid, although when he leaned closer—close enough to touch the wall, though he did not stretch out even a single finger to do so—the impression vanished. Then he realized that all of the walls, as well as the floor and ceiling, shared the same delicate pattern. Seeing it, he felt a sudden chill, as if a cold wind were blowing past him. He tried to take a deep breath to dispel the feeling, but the air seemed suddenly too thin to fill his chest—so thin that his head began to spin, and the walls of the chamber seemed to loom toward him. "Piros," he choked, and the sound that came out of his mouth was thin, too, as if his body were barely able to sustain his voice. He reached for Piros, but his legs wobbled, and he knew the dais was impossibly far away, though it was scarcely more than a few steps.

In a heartbeat, he was beside the caravan master, wrapping both arms around the man's middle, lifting him clear of the floor with desperate strength, and willing them both to safety.

An instant later, they were in the North, collapsing to frost-rimed grass and gasping at cold, crisp air.

Alaric squeezed his eyes shut and rolled away from Piros, breathing harder than ever before in his life. With some effort, he lurched to his elbows, his knees. His chest ached, the Northern air like needles inside it. When he opened his eyes, the world spun around him, and so he closed them again. Long moments passed before he felt steady enough to open them again and, shakily, to stand.

Piros lay at his feet, his breathing loud and labored. Alaric knelt beside him and shook his shoulders. The man's head turned, and his eyes blinked a few times before staying open. "Minstrel," he whispered. "What happened?" He touched his throat with one hand. "I felt as if I were being choked by some invisible giant."

Alaric nodded. "Somehow, all of the air in the room fled, leaving us nothing to breathe. I felt it rush past us, sucked as if by a bellows expanding to blow on a fire."

"One more magic in a city full of magics," said Piros.

Alaric shook his head. "Ancient knowledge, I think. Hidden from the rest of the world. Light without fire. A garden without soil or sunlight. But I don't see the use of a chamber that can kill by banishing air."

Piros climbed to his feet and looked around, as if seeking other men, but Alaric always tried to use his witch's power to travel to secluded places where there was no one to observe, and this was one of them. "Perhaps the chamber was guarding this," Piros said, and from deep within his sleeve he drew the dead king's filigree crown.

"You took it?" said Alaric.

"They weren't going to give Arnay back, not for any food or salt or jeweled knife we could offer. You could see that as well as I. Now we have something to bargain with."

"You think they'll trade him for that? You think they haven't killed him already?"

Piros held the crown up to the Northern sunlight. "One way or another, we'll profit from our visit to the city. We have the water, a fair trade for what we gave them. Now, if I can't have the man, I'll take this. See how it gleams in the sun? What good does gold do them in the desert?" He held it out toward Alaric.

It was, indeed, a beautiful thing—Alaric could not deny that. Not rigid metal, like other crowns he had seen, but a flexible band of gold links and cabochon gems that seemed almost to drip from Piros's fingers. Alaric stared at it long and hard. Finally, he reached for it, and his hand was shaking as Piros let it drop into his outstretched palm. As it touched his flesh, the shaking spread through his whole body, as if the freezing Northern gale were biting him deep, though the day was only mildly cold. He closed his fingers about the diadem, and he could feel its strength surging through him. He felt its power, felt that it knew him and he knew it, and they could not resist each other. He raised it to his head, wrapped it about his temples, found the secret of fastening it as if he had always known it, as if he had worn the crown since childhood. The filigree mingled with his hair and came to rest against his scalp, and it was faintly warm.

Claim me.

There was no sound to the words, but Alaric heard them anyway.

Claim me.

"Alaric," said Piros, his voice no more than a whisper.

"We must go back," said the minstrel. "We must return it to the city." He held out his arms. "I will take you there."

Piros hesitated. "Pull it off," he said. "Then we'll return it."

Alaric shook his head. "You don't mean that. But I do."

"Alaric."

"I'll leave you to the east of the city. You can reach the camp from there and say you escaped."

Piros still hesitated. "You look strange. Your eyes are wide, not good for the desert."

"I'll only be in the desert for a moment. Come."

Piros finally stepped close to him, and Alaric enfolded the caravan master in his arms. Two heartbeats later, they were a few hundred paces from the camp, too far away to be noticed when all eyes were on the city. Alaric released Piros, and one heartbeat later the minstrel was outside the chamber that had tried to kill them.

All around was impenetrable darkness.

In spite of the darkness, he knew exactly where he was. The short passage to the gardens was to his right, the gardens themselves beyond, as dark as the rest. He stretched out a hand and a pool of light sprang into being half a dozen steps from him, revealing Ronnel and a few other gray-robed men clustered together, clutching each other. They squinted against the light, looking at him with terror on their faces.

"Who are you?" said Ronnel.

"I am your new king," said Alaric. He waved, and more patches of light kindled. The door to the king's chamber, closed tight, became visible, and now Alaric could see that there were words carved into the wall above that door, just beginning to glow in sunset red, and he knew what those words said, though he had never seen that language before: COMMAND AND CONTROL. He gestured for the door to open, and it did. Inside, gem-sized lights of blue, green, and gold were clearly visible now, chasing each other across the walls, the floor, the ceiling, in a dense pattern that mimicked the filigree of the crown. He could feel those lights calling to him, and he let them pull him into the chamber.

The one-legged man still lay on the floor, and the dead king still sat in his carven chair on the dais. Alaric went to the king, lifted him up, and gently set him on the floor beside his throne; he was as light as a bundle of dry grass. Then Alaric sat down himself, his hands on the chair's arms. He tried not to shred the velvet padding any more than it was already shredded, but that was impossible, and pieces of it dropped away at his touch. The wood beneath was warm to his skin, and that warmth seeped into his hands, his arms, his chest, climbing up the back of his neck to merge with the filigree crown. And then he realized that the city itself was seeping into him, until he was the city, and lights began to bloom all around him, the walls glowing not just with those small racing specks but with an overall mellow light that spread outward from the king's chamber to the gardens, the stairs, the myriad rooms that were sometimes empty, sometimes occupied by Ronnel and his like. With that light, Alaric himself stretched outward along corridor after corridor, winding through them like mushroom filaments seeking nourishment among the roots of oak trees, stretching onward until he and the light were in every part of the city, and he knew everything about the place, including where Arnay was hidden and that he was still alive.

And knowing it all so intimately, Alaric realized that the city was like a living creature whose life extended back and back to its birth long ago and somewhere else. The story he had heard in the North, of the ancient folk who had journeyed through the Great Night in search of a new homeland, he now understood to be true. This place was the refuge they had found, the end to their wandering, and this was the city they had made from the vessel that had brought them here, that had served them so well for so long. Gradually, they learned to live in this new and strange place, and gradually they spread far and wide across the world—they and their children, and their children's children—at last leaving behind only a few folk too unwilling—or too afraid—to walk away from the city that had been their home for so long. Nor did the last man who sat that chair in COMMAND AND CONTROL leave, for at the end of a long life he died in his chair, and now he lay, a dried husk, on the floor at Alaric's feet. Yet the city went on without him, if only a fraction of its former self without a human master, but well enough to sustain those who remained and the children they bore, to give them light and water for the gardens, and to sweep the plaza and its fountain clear of wind-blown sand.

Generations had passed. Occasionally, men and camels bound east or west across the great desert stopped at the city and traded novelties for water—cloth or wine or salt. Sometimes the languages they spoke had changed since their forebears had gone away, and the city dutifully recorded those changes against any future need. Sometimes they knew the secret of coaxing water from the fountain or of opening the city doors, knowledge carried off by their ancestors. Sometimes they did not. Sometimes the descendants of those who had remained stole a man or a camel from them, for life was not easy in the ancient city, and they did what they must to cling to it.

As time passed, visitors became less and less common. Then, one day, a man arrived who did not lead a caravan, a man accompanied by a few dozen followers, tall men on tall camels, without the burden of trade goods. They came to the city's door, he spoke the word that would open it, and they entered, carrying torches and striding confidently through the corridors, down the stairs, into the gardens. They plucked vegetables from the troughs and ate them, standing amid the greenery, shouting for the city's people to come out and trade. But when one did venture to greet them, they seized him and demanded water, food, clothing, and gold—especially gold—and they offered nothing in return. When he said there was no gold, they beat him till he bled, threw him to the floor, and kicked him as he lay there moaning. There was gold, of course, in the master's filigree crown, but the gray-robed man did not speak of it, even as he bled.

They left him there and stalked through the city, stopping in rooms that were sometimes occupied, sometimes vacant, filling their arms with whatever poor possessions they found. And at last, they reached the master's chamber.

The door was open, for there had never been any need to close it. The men stood just outside it for a time, pointing toward the dead master and gabbling among themselves. Suddenly, their leader stepped across the threshold, and because the city understood that he intended to take the crown, not to wear it—and that no man who led such a group was worthy of wearing that crown—it slammed the door shut on him. His leg, which had not quite cleared the threshold, was sliced off below the knee, and he fell to the floor, screaming, writhing, as the city removed the air from the chamber, something it had done occasionally, long ago, when it was still a vessel gliding through the Great Night. The city's structure had been different then, the door to the master's chamber the gateway to the airless Night itself, a door that could be opened without endangering the rest of the passengers. The city had never before removed the air from the chamber without instructions from a master, but it knew what would happen to an unprotected person when the air was gone.

Never before had the city killed. But it had to protect the crown.

A long time later, when both the old master and the new man were no more than dry husks, the city allowed the door to open once more. No one was outside that day, and though occasionally, in the days and years that followed, someone would come to look into the chamber—the gray-robed folks or a visitor or two—no one else tried to enter. Not until Alaric and Piros arrived. They had said nothing about gold, but they had looked into the chamber, they had drawn weapons, they had crossed the threshold, and once more the city had done what appeared necessary. When Piros laid hands on the crown, the city had set the air extraction in motion and waited for the strangers to die.

Instead, they disappeared, and the city knew at that moment that Alaric was the master it had been waiting for.

Alaric slid his hands along the arms of the master's chair. His chair.

Welcome, the city whispered to him. All I am is yours.

Alaric looked toward the door. Ronnel and his fellows knelt just beyond the threshold. When the old master had been alive, he had controlled that door, opening and shutting it as he wished, just as he had controlled the entire city, ensuring that there was food and water and light enough for all who continued to live here. But with his death, the city itself took over those responsibilities, and, masterless, it protected this chamber and its contents just as it kept itself free of encroaching sand, as it provided water from the fountain whenever someone asked for it properly, while it waited through the long years for someone who might never come.

Alaric rose from his chair, and the gray-robed folk scuttled away from the doorway on their knees.

"Bring my friend to me," he said to them. His first royal command.

They hesitated, staring at him, and then they scrambled to their feet and ran. When they were gone, even the soft sounds of their pattering footsteps faded away, Alaric touched his crown, one hand on each side of his head. The crown's power thrilled through him. It was power a man could become accustomed to.

Arnay came at last, with hunted eyes and pale cheeks. Ronnel pushed him into the COMMAND AND CONTROL chamber.

The door did not close behind him.

Alaric stepped off the dais, took Arnay by the arm, and walked him back through the door. Then he pointed at Ronnel. "Escort my friend outside and set him free, unharmed. Use one of your tunnels."

The gray-clad man dropped to his knees again, bending so low that his forehead touched the floor. Then he sprang up and started off, gesturing frantically for Arnay to follow. Ronnel's fellows were waiting at the entrance to the gardens, and when he and Arnay reached them, the whole group hurried away.

Inside the master's chamber once more, Alaric gave a silent command that made a map of the city form on one of the walls, and moving within that map was a cluster of blue lights, marking the group's route. On the far side of the gardens, a tunnel splayed outward in a dozen branches leading under the desert pavement and ending at a larger tunnel that encircled the city like a wheel. There were more than a score of outlets, Alaric knew, along that wheel, and the city's people could emerge from any of them to steal from travelers too fearful to sleep close to the city itself. That was how they had stolen Arnay. He watched the map, saw the symbol that indicated the opening of a door to the surface, saw one of the blue lights move past the symbol to the desert outside, where it faded away. The rest of the lights retreated toward the hub of the wheel.

My subjects, he thought. His kingdom in the desert, its people his responsibility; his servants, both living and insubstantial, obedient to his every whim in exchange for his care. For the rest of his life.

At the dais, Alaric stooped and lifted up the dead master, cradling the desiccated body in his arms as if it were a child. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and he set the dead man back on his throne. Then he unfastened the golden filigree crown and peeled it from his brows. It stuck to his scalp and hair for a moment, as if reluctant to let him go, but it came away at last, and he wrapped it gently about the dead master's fragile skull. He dislodged a few last wisps of white hair in the act, and they fell to the dead man's thighs. Alaric left them there. The map of the city had vanished, the specks of light on the walls extinguished, the lighting overall dimmed from what it had been. Yet there were still incandescent patches scattered here and there, as before he had donned the crown—enough to illuminate the COMMAND AND CONTROL chamber and the passage to the gardens. The door—that deadly door that had guarded its treasure so jealously—still stood open. Alaric did not approach it again. Instead, he stood in the middle of the chamber and stretched his arms out toward the walls.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I don't really want to be a king. I'm just a minstrel who collects stories and makes them into songs. I'll make your story into a song, O city of wonders. I promise that. And wherever I go, people will hear about you and marvel. Or disbelieve, if that's their inclination. But you must return to what you were before I came to you. That will have to be enough for those who call you home."

He heard one last whisper from the city, plaintive as the breath of wind among the dunes: Claim my power. And in the filigree crown, the cabochon gems sparkled briefly, red, green, blue.

"I don't want your power," said Alaric.

Then, very slowly, the door to the chamber began to close.

"You know you can't keep me here," said the minstrel.

Still the door continued to ease shut.

In a heartbeat, Alaric was outside the chamber, and the door was still moving, sealing its dead master into his throne room. Alaric could hear footsteps approaching from the gardens—Ronnel, he assumed, and whatever friends accompanied him, back after freeing Arnay. Before they reached him, Alaric was gone.

Standing out in the desert, not far beyond the caravan's camp, he could see the camels clustered together, and, nearby, the men all crowded around Arnay. He walked toward them, and one man noticed him and pointed, and a good deal of shouting began. By the time he joined the group, Piros had managed to wave them to some semblance of silence.

"There's a tunnel," said Piros, gesturing toward the west, "and a trapdoor opening upward from it. They set Arnay free there."

Alaric nodded. "There are others all around the city. We should move our camp and set up guards to prevent them from raiding us again."

"They're afraid to do that," said Arnay. "They're afraid of you. "

"That may pass," said the minstrel. "I'd rather not tempt them."

Piros gave the order. "We have enough water to carry us to the next three wells. One of them must be usable. Load the camels and move out."

"They said you were their king," said Arnay, looking wide-eyed at Alaric.

"I was foolish enough to try on the crown," Alaric replied. "They are so desperate for a king that any man who wore it would be called one. But I'm a minstrel, nothing more. They would have been disappointed in me soon enough."

One of his tent mates handed him his lute, his blanket, and his bundle of meager belongings. The tent itself had already been struck. Alaric went to his camel, where his full water bag awaited him, and he slung the rest of his possessions over the saddle. The camel knelt for him to mount, and he saw that he was one of the last to do so. As quickly as that, the caravan had packed up, riders and mounts ready to resume their journey west.

Piros worked his way through the crowd to Alaric's side. "Will the time before sunset be enough to see us safely beyond their reach?"

Alaric nodded.

The caravan master gave the signal, and the camels began to move. At first they were a confused mass, as no rider wished to straggle and perhaps be taken by the people of the city, but gradually they formed their usual line, with Piros ranging up and down its length. They moved directly south to avoid the known trapdoor, and then west. The sky was deepest blue, the first stars visible, before he called a halt and let his men dismount and kindle their fires.

Supper was quickly prepared and small, for no one felt very hungry, though much tea was brewed and drunk. As Alaric sat by the caravan master's own fire, plucking at his lute and humming a song he had sung a hundred times, Piros sipped at a cup of tea and looked long and hard at him. "How many men would give up a crown?" he said at last.

"A crown in the middle of a desert," Alaric replied. "It didn't seem a pleasant prospect to me."

"A soft life, I think," said Piros. "Servants, food, cool breezes within the city itself. And nothing to stop you from visiting other places whenever you wished."

Alaric laughed softly. "I've never much wanted a soft life. And a king has a great many responsibilities."

Piros poured himself another cup of tea from the communal kettle. "You would have been a good king," he said.

Alaric shook his head. "You don't know me, Piros."

"Oh, I think I do. I think I know you can go back to the city whenever you like, and it will welcome you. Did you know that, while you were inside, the fountain flowed freely from its every branch, and its basin filled to the brim? The windows became transparent, and one could see the corridors inside through them. And music played all around the plaza, as if the city were holding a fair—or a coronation. Arnay said the men who brought him out sounded alternately happy and fearful when they spoke of you, and they asked him questions about you that he did not understand and could not answer. I think perhaps I could have answered them. I think you are what they and the city have waited for, these many years." He sipped at his tea, both hands clasped about the metal cup. "I think I saw it in you when you first touched the crown."

"Are you so anxious to be rid of me?" said Alaric.

"You must have been tempted."

Alaric looked back toward the city, cloaked now in darkness and distance. "The city didn't know me, either." Claim me, the city had begged, but Alaric the minstrel knew he was the one who would have been claimed.

He plucked at his lute strings again. There were any number of ways to begin a song of the city, and he would find the right one, someday. And like so many other songs, he would carry it with him to distant lands, where other minstrels might hear it and pass it on, and so the city would live on, and not just as a legend in the North.

Sleep, he thought. You served your purpose long ago, and there is nothing left but the dreams that brought you here. That should be enough for you.

In the deep darkness of the desert, the horizon was invisible. But still it beckoned him, as Alaric knew it always would.

Vishnu Summer

By David Prill | 11023 words

David Prill grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota in the 1960s. This next story evokes those Midwestern summers in all their familiar Bradburian glory—the smell of dry grass and gas mowers, the incessant buzz of grasshoppers, the shiny whirl of carnival rides—and then takes us someplace unexpected. This is Prill's first story for us since "Dating Secrets of the Dead" appeared in our June 2002 issue.

SO I WAS OUT SLOPPING THE hogs while pondering Vishnu. I did my best pondering in the hog barn. Pigs are ruminatin' creatures. Deep dreamers.
There was a thick, thinking aura when I was among them. You couldn't help but be part of it.

For my part, I hadn't thought about Vishnu in ages, not until Ma painted him on the back of the barn last week, one more piece of her never-ending mural. It shook loose a memory, a grade school trip to a museum in the Cities. While the other kids ran screaming through the hall of mummies, I stood silently before a many-armed figure in its display case. I didn't know who or what he was, but I felt an odd kinship with him. See, I had one less arm than everyone else and he had many more, while the rest of the world went along more or less well balanced.

Farm accident, case you were wondering. Happened a lifetime ago, back when Pa was still around. Helping in the fields and tried to clear a stalk of corn that had jammed the combine snap rolls. Pulled my left arm right in and tried to get the rest of me, too. It didn't take the arm off all the way, but enough of the way so that the doctors had to sharpen their saws. An armectomy, I believe is the scientific term for the procedure. Don't remember much of what happened. I asked Pa where was my arm and he said, Audrey honey, it went to heaven. Hope it'll wait there for the rest of me, I replied. They told me I was a brave little girl, only after I left the hospital I didn't feel so little anymore.

I tried to get my teacher Mr. Berch to tell me about the many-armed figure in the museum, but he wouldn't have any of it. I got my nerve up and visited the town library. Mrs. Eck, who ran the library like a bank, just flicked a disapproving glare my way and pointed a witch finger at the kids' stacks. I pretended to be delighted by a book about a singing giraffe who became an opera singer, almost missing his big debut due to a sore throat, but secretly I was waiting for Mrs. Eck to get distracted. When the mailman who had a thing for her came in, I ducked under a table and followed the wall around to the parts of the library where the colors weren't so primary. I wasn't sure where to look and had to give up when I heard Mrs. Eck's boot-steps. In my hometown, a Journey Through Bookland is a trip through a minefield. I snuck into the wider world more than once in the days that followed, eventually coming across my quarry in a doorstop picture book about India. Too heavy to make a five-finger withdrawal, so I sat on the dusty wooden floor and paged through its wonders.

Vishnu. The Preserver and Protector of the Universe. He had a kind face, and more arms than I had worries.

His role, so I read, is to return to the Earth in troubled times and restore the balance of good and evil. So far, he has been incarnated nine times, but Hindus believe that he will be reincarnated one last time close to the end of this world.

So why, all these years later, was Ma painting Vishnu, the Many-Armed One? Maybe she was just trying to make me feel better. But part of me scooted up to the edge of my seat, because she has always been able to see further down the creek than anybody else.

I found out just how far that afternoon.

Not sure what the difference is between a convoy, a caravan, and a motorcade; all I know is that one of the three was coming down our road. Usually it's just tractors and wayward chickens. The caravan motorcade convoy had five cars in all, a mix of police cruisers and big dark sedans. They were going fast. Like they were late to somewhere important. Only quiet-like. No sirens. Nothing to warn folks to get out of the way. I wondered why didn't they take the highway. It was just repaved in the spring. Real nice road.

I moved closer so I could see better as they went by. They didn't slow down a bit. If I would have walked right out into the road I would have been dust, too.

Funny, though, as they passed by it felt like they slowed down. Like someone dropped time into a jar of blackstrap molasses.

And so I saw him, staring out at me through the back window of a dark car. Weary boyish face, thin red scarf with a knot looped around his neck. He looked quietly amused. Did I look funny to him? My clothes were old and worn. My hair was a mess. Maybe he was just being friendly. Maybe someone in the car had told him a joke. Who was he? Did I know him?

He waved, and there was something odd about his wave, although at the time I couldn't figure it out. A wave that was more than a wave. No, not more, maybe less, maybe not a wave at all.

One not-really wave and he was gone. The dust washed over me as I watched the motorcade head toward town.

*   *   *

The sheriff hadn't been out to our place since the day Pa's car plunged into Flagger's Pond. I felt bad for him. The sheriff, I mean. Who decided he should be Death's messenger? Nobody else wanted the job, I reckon. Not much room for advancement. Imagine you had to keep your emotions in a safe place, too, in a place where there was hardly room to turn around. I wanted to tell him I understood, about the emotions, and the places you had to keep them sometimes, but I didn't think he wanted to hear about that.

"Hi, Sheriff," I said, coming out onto the manure-caked step.

"Mornin', Audrey. Your mom around?"

"Is there trouble?"

"More of a misunderstanding. Tell her I'm here."

"She's out behind the barn. Come on."

I always covered my eyes, at least most of the way, when I went back there. It was as throat-grabbing as a gaudy dawn's early nightmare. I didn't want to see what she painted, but I couldn't look away, neither.

Ma was up that durned rickety ladder, paints on the top step, her big brush working, more paint on her than the brush, her eyes shut, guided by another set of laws, muttering oaths, prayers, incantations, who knew, a laundry list of the strange. I tried to avert my eyes from the never-ending mural, partly because I was afraid Ma was gonna fall, mostly because the subject was me and my life. She started the mural right before my accident, painted my soon-to-be-ex-arm planted in a field, just one more stalk of corn waiting to be picked. Painted me falling off my bike before it happened, except it was a giant centipede instead of a bike. Lost a tooth chasing a fox out of the henhouse and she painted that, too, only instead of a fox it was a devil with horns and a butcher knife. My whole life, painted like a winding creek across the backside of a barn. Her paintings didn't always make sense right away. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and bingo, I got it.

Looked like she was putting the finishing touches on Vishnu's face. She always does faces last, says it's the sum of the other body parts.

"Ma, Sheriff's here to see you," I told her. Didn't figure it would take. I had to help her down from the ladder and pry the brush from her hand to get her to pay attention. She didn't recognize me at first, then I could see her come back, at least part of the way. About as far as she ever did.

"Ma, Sheriff wants to talk to you." I turned her to face him.

"Mornin', ma'am. Got a call from Betty over at the courthouse. Says you were supposed to be on jury duty today but didn't show. Did you know you were on jury duty? You should have gotten a letter from the county about it."

"Which one?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Which letter did they send me? I like H the best. Friendly, sturdy letter. Wouldn't complain a bit if somebody sent me an H."

The sheriff looked over at me for help. I was used to it. Trying to have an A-to-B conversation with Ma wasn't always a good use of your time. Ma usually went from Z-to-A to some letter in an alphabet that nobody had ever heard about.

"Don't blame Ma, it's my fault. I get the mail every day. I was afraid to look at the letter. I was afraid it was gonna say we had to move out."

"Jury duty is a serious responsibility," he explained. "It's part of being a good citizen. Everyone deserves a right to a fair trial in front of a jury of their peers."

"Jury of my fears?" Ma said.

"Peers, Ma."

"Don't like that word. No H in it."

"Not only that," the sheriff continued, "it's the law." He led me out of earshot. "Look, Audrey, the judge can cite your mother for contempt of court if she doesn't show up."

"What does that mean?"

"It means a fine, or even jail time."

"It's hard to get her to do things."

"I'll help you bring her down. Chances are she'll be excused anyway. But she has to show up."

"She's got her own mind. More than one, sometimes."

"She'll listen to you, Audrey." He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. "You need to make her understand."

I went back over to her, feeling like a duly sworn officer of the law.

"Gotta go into town, Ma."

"Have a good time."

"No, you too."

"No, no, no."

"Got to. Sheriff says."

"He says what?"

"They picked you for jury duty. You might even get on a trial. Wouldn't that be exciting?"

"No, no, no."

"You have to, Ma…it's your civic duty."

"That means what?"

"That means you have to do something you don't wanna do."

Her clothes were a rainbow mess. "I can take her into the house and get her cleaned up," I told the sheriff.

"Let's just bring her down to the courthouse as is. Judge don't like to wait."

So off we went in the cruiser. Never rode in a police car before. Sheriff didn't use the siren. I was glad. I didn't want people to stare. For a change I made it all the way downtown without even one screwy look.

Once we got to First Avenue, I could have riding on a Mr. Electric parade float and nobody would have noticed. Folks all over. Folks in city suits and uptown dresses. Folks with cameras and microphones, stay away from me with those. The County Fair had started this week, but this didn't have nothing to do with that.

"What's goin' on?" I asked the sheriff. "Is there a circus in town?"

"Yeah, it's a circus all right," he said, driving around behind the courthouse.

He parked in his assigned spot and led us in the back way. I had never been in the back way. I had only been in the front way. It scared me to be here. Four stories of trouble. It was the only building in town I ever got lost in. Pa used to take me along when he went to pay his taxes or buy a bingo license. They have forms that would make your hair curl.

The sheriff held the door for Ma. Didn't want to go in until she spotted the mural on the wall inside. A farmer plowing a field while in the distance Indians rode by on horseback across a setting sun and a church poked its nose up over a hillside. In my opinion it lacked a necessary nightmare quality.

It got Ma inside, anyway. She stood in front of it and stared for a second before turning away, like for that moment she thought it was hers. I guess in her world there was only one mural; everything else was just wallpaper.

We followed the sheriff up the stairs to a plain-looking door. He opened it, and then we were in the courtroom.

It was as packed as the armory when the wrasslin' matches came to town, but nobody had throwed a chair at the judge yet. Your honor was talking. He gave us a nasty look, then the sheriff whispered for us to set down on the benches along with some other folks who looked like they didn't want to be there, either. They nervously smoked and watched the clock on the wall.

Somebody else was looking at us, too. Still wearing that red scarf, like he was a movie star. He stared at me the same way he did when the motorcade went by. But I couldn't focus on him long because I was doing my best to keep Ma still. She kept trying to get up. She wanted o-u-t.

The judge called her name. She heard that. I prodded her, but that sent her toward the exit. The sheriff corralled her and led her to a box by the judge's desk.

His honor started off by asking her name, so far so good. Then the lawyers began quizzing her, and she didn't answer, or answered in a way they didn't understand. I got what she was saying, but that's only because I spend a lot of time with her, and even then I usually scratch my head at her ramblings.

"Could you tell me what your definition of 'reasonable doubt' is?"

"It's marigold yellow, yellow like a baby chick."

"Have you ever seen the defendant before? Is there any reason why you could not fulfill your civic duty and come to an impartial verdict in this case?"

"Civic duty means doing things you don't wanna do," she said in a singsong voice.

That got a laugh, except from the judge. As they continued to question her, she began to ignore them and focused instead on the bench where the fellow who smiled at me was sitting. She squinted at him, shook her head, and squinted some more.

Eventually the judge gave up and excused her. She got out of that box like it had a beehive in it.

But she would have to wait for the judge to excuse us to go home, and when he did, everyone in the courtroom stood, and one person not only stood but turned around.

The man from the motorcade.

The man who smiled at me.

The man with three arms.

His extra arm didn't look out of place at all. It was positioned comfortably between his right arm and his waist, sort of resting on his hip. It poked out through a little hole in his blue shirt. His third arm seemed a little smaller than the others. The runt of the litter.

Ma grabbed my hand. "I need to go home and paint."

As we began to move toward the aisle, the Three-Armed Man said in a quiet drawl, looking right at me, his face sincere, "If I could, I'd give you my third."

That sent a wave of good feelings through the room and made my heart feel warm, too. People go to the warmth, can't help themselves.

As we left, I asked the sheriff, "What's this all about? What happened?"

"The Three-Armed Man is on trial."

"What'd he do?"

"He didn't do anything until they prove it."

"What are they trying to prove he did?"

"Kill two people."

"A Three-Armed Man killed two people?"

The sheriff wouldn't say anything more, but everybody else in the courthouse wasn't as shy about it.

"Killed three people, one with each arm.…"

"No, it was just two.…"

"Strangled one while shooting the other.…"

"One of them was his wife.…"

"Girlfriend.…"

"Caught her with another guy.…"

"I don't know about a three-armed guy. Most of the guys I've gone with, two arms are plenty!"

"You spoke a book, honey. You spoke a book."

The sheriff drove us to the farm, Ma disappearing right away.

"Can I ride back into town with you, Sheriff?"

"What for, Audrey?"

"I want to go to the fair."

"Sorry, I have to take a run down to Nine Mile Road. Got a report of some kids messing around at the old filling station."

I climbed out and the sheriff left. I checked on Ma. She was in full trance-mode, slapping paint onto the barn, so I took my bike and rode back into town.

When I got downtown, people were milling around outside the courthouse. I guess court was done for the day. Like I always do, I went over to prop up my bike against the tree by the statue of Harriman Crane, founder of Beggar's Creek, then saw that underneath the tree sat a messy-haired fella in a rumpled suit, little notepad poking out of his breast pocket, a swath of sweat on his forehead. A camera lay on the ground beside him.

He didn't see me until I got impatient.

He turned to me, a tuckered look on his face. I expected him to stare at my arm that wasn't there, they all do, but he didn't. He acted like he didn't care.

"I bet this is one of those sleepy towns when jokers like us aren't around," he said.

"I'm not tired."

"So how long have you known Marty Earles?"

"Who's Marty Earles?"

"That fella in the courtroom. The one who said he'd give you his extra arm."

"Oh, him."

"Do you know him? He acted like he knew you."

"No, I don't know him. Don't know anything about him."

"You know why he's on trial?"

"I heard a few things."

"Like what?"

"Double-murder over in Greentown."

"Everyone knows that."

"Strangled his girlfriend with two arms while he shot her lover with the third."

"Sleepy little town, not too sleepy of a girl."

"Why didn't they take him to court in Greentown, then?"

"He's got the best lawyer in the quad-county area, Monte Clawe. Talked the Greentown judge into a change of venue. Talked your judge into letting his client stay at the hotel; after all, your honor, where in this world can a three-armed man hide?"

"My cousin Sylvester can talk birds right out of the trees. Is he like that?"

"He's exactly like that."

*   *   *

THERE WAS A RUCKUS over by the courthouse entrance. The newsman stood, scooping up his camera. "Gotta run, kid, but I want to meet with you later."

"I don't know what I'd have to say to you."

"Don't worry, I'll ask all the questions. What's your name?"

"Audrey."

"Mac."

I followed this Mac to the courthouse steps, where the Three-Armed Man's lawyer was holding a powwow with the press. Three-Arm was standing alongside him but the lawyer did all the yakking.

"…a good day for us. It was a pleasure to meet so many fair-minded people, and I believe we'll have an excellent jury."

"Are you going to let Mr. Earles take the stand in his own defense?"

"Sorry, I can't answer that."

"Why didn't you think you could get a fair trial in Greentown?"

"Because Mr. Earles has been dealing with prejudice and scorn all his life due to his unfortunate condition. I presented Judge Lomax in Greentown with a detailed logbook of those prejudicial events."

"What kind of prejudicial events?"

"Childhood taunts became criminal acts. Bullying, harassment, even physical assault. Refusing to serve him in local eating establishments. Refusing to rent lodging to him. Refusing to employ him in positions for which he was highly qualified. The judge quite rightly determined that it would have been impossible for my client to receive a fair trial in his jurisdiction. My client is unknown in Beggar's Creek. The people of Beggar's Creek and the jury selected from them for this trial will be able to look upon my client with an untainted eye, no matter how many arms he has, and they will see that my client could not possibly have done what he is accused of doing."

"Are you going to lay out a scenario about how those two people were murdered that didn't involve your client?"

"I don't have to lay out anything. The burden is on them, not us."

"Mr. Earles, do you have anything to say to the people of Beggar's Creek?"

"Sorry, he's not answering any questions today."

But Three-Arm stepped forward anyway. "I can speak for myself—might be the last time for a while."

The reporters cackled.

"Are you going to take the stand and tell everybody what happened that night?" one of them asked.

"I don't know." Three-Arm glanced at his lawyer, who responded with a curt shake of the head. "Guess we'll have to see when we get there."

"What's it like to have three arms?"

Another glance. His lawyer shook his head emphatically.

"What do you think of Beggar's Creek so far?"

He hesitated. The lawyer shrugged. "Well, from what I've seen, seems like a real nice place."

"Do you have any plans while you're in town?"

"Think I'll be pretty busy in court. But we drove by the fairgrounds on the way in. Looked like the County Fair was going on. Might want to check it out."

"Good idea," his lawyer said, quickly stepping in front of him. "Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen. We'll see you in court tomorrow."

Mac grabbed my arm. I hated when people did that, left me feeling so defenseless. "I'll give you five bucks if you show me where the fairgrounds is."

"You don't have to give me anything," I told him. "You go to the end of the block, take a left at the Big Swirl drive-in, then down two more blocks and take a right at the old canning plant, and then you take—"

"Don't tell me, show me!"

"My bike—"

"Bring it along. I'll throw it in the trunk."

"No you won't."

"Back seat?"

"Deal."

I showed him. It wasn't far. You could hear the fairgrounds before you could see it—kids hollerin' for their lives on the midway rides, announcements you couldn't make heads or tails out of over the loudspeakers. You could smell the fair before you even reached the gate—nothing like swine barns in the summer swelter. It was midweek, the crowds weren't too bad. After we parked, Mac slipped me five, then scoped out the area, checking the entrances and exits, the angle of the sun, everything. He took up a position with his camera near the main entrance.

The crowds came then. A dark car pulled up to the gate, and there was the Three-Armed Man. They had dawdled, allowing the courthouse crowd to tag along.

I could see Mac wasn't expecting this; he was hoping for some solo time with Three-Arm, but he adjusted in a hurry, moving in before the crowd did.

What was funny, though, was that I got some attention, too. People kept repeating the line from the courtroom.

If I could, I'd give you my third.

It wasn't said in a mean way, it was said with maybe a little respect. Like I was somebody important. But I didn't do anything important, other than stick my arm somewhere it didn't belong. So how could I be treated like I was important? What kind of world is it that treats somebody important when they ain't hardly nothing at all?

Mac tried to toss a few questions at Three-Arm but his lawyer stepped in, hand up like a railroad crossing sign. Or maybe dangerous road ahead.

"It's been a long day, and Mr. Earles only wishes to relax and enjoy the fair. So please, give him that courtesy, won't you?" As the press men protested, he smiled in a way that people around here usually didn't. "Your post-trial interview opportunities depend on it."

That got their attention, and the Three-Armed Man and his lawyer headed into the heat of the fairgrounds. I couldn't get close to him, and he didn't see me.

The crowd surrounding Three-Arm grew right along. Word-of-mouth. Everybody wanted a spittin'-distance look at him, especially the kids. I tried to figure it out. I was missing one of my arms and folks tended to shy away from me. Maybe they felt sorry for me. Maybe they were afraid something bad might happen to them, too. Like my luck would rub off on them. Like I was carrying a disease that would jump into them and make one of their limbs to fall off, clunk. Folks always want more, I guess. Never enough. If everyone had three arms, then a four-armed man would be the stuff of dreams.

The Three-Armed Man headed to the midway, rode the Octopus, a whole sky full of arms.

The House of Mirrors. Three arms, thirty arms, as many arms as there are stars in the movies. I ran in, too. Only saw him once, the mirrors making him look like he had just one arm and me with three.

Down to the end of the midway, where Pa told me I should never ever go. He was afraid the carnival people would take me away, I guess. Might not have been a bad life.

At the end of the midway, they never let you see anything without paying first, just the posters, just the promise, just the same things you see in your dreams. When Three-Arm showed up, though, that changed. The Human Flytrap and the Bearded Lady and the Half-Gorilla All-Girl came out and greeted him like a long-lost brother.

The manager's eyes were job-offer blue.

Funny thing, though, Three-Arm acted like he didn't want to have anything to do with them. His eyes looked for a way out.

"You could have a real bright future with our show," said the manager, gaze locked hard on number three.

Three-Arm's lawyer stepped in. "Not anytime soon, I'm afraid. We're currently booked for a series of personal appearances before one of the most important public officials in the county."

Three-Arm and company wandered back out of the midway area and meandered through the livestock buildings, the 4-H building, the FFA, the Hall of Industry. When he saw a girl walking by carrying a tuba, he went over and asked her, "Do you play in a band?"

"No, I'm a soloist. I'm in the talent show."

"I'd like to see that."

So it was off to the band shell. A juggler was onstage. Three-Arm politely waited until he was finished, then hopped up beside the juggler, borrowed the balls, and began. One ball, one arm. Two balls, two arms. Three balls…well, that sent the crowd into delights.

Just a warm-up for what was to come. Somebody in the wings had a guitar. Three-Arm didn't even have to ask. A quiet look was all it took and the guitar was in his many hands.

"Don't mean to horn in on your fun," he said, tuning the guitar to his liking, "but it's such a beautiful day out, and I've been stuck inside all morning, and, well…see, I'm not much of a musician, but I do enjoy playing.…"

Three-Arm began strumming the guitar in a three-armed way, and it was the most beautiful sound ever. All three hands moved across the guitar like po'try. His third arm, short thing that it was, mostly stayed down on the lower end of the instrument. It was like the music you hear in dreams. Even the flying birds found a perch on the drooping electrical line so they could listen.

All at once, the caramel-corn mood changed. Three-Arm stopped strumming, got a serious look on his face. No, serious isn't the right word. Melancholy. He put on a face that showed something deep, the long, dark roads he had traveled. Was that a tear in his eye?

"Now, folks, the song I'm going to sing next is not a happy song. I wrote it while I was sitting in a jail cell. Got a chance to reflect on my life. Not always a pretty thing to see yourself in the mirror, especially if you're someone who looks like me. But in the end it's a song of hope. It means a lot to me and I thank you for the chance to share it with you. It goes something like this.…

"Son, said my mother, when I was but wee,
"While most children have two arms, you, my boy, have three.
"There is no shirt
"For a boy with three arms,
"Nor sweater nor jacket for keeping you warm.
"And gloves!
"Why must they always come in pairs…"

I don't remember the rest of it, but it was real heartfelt.

When he was done, the final strum from his guitar hung in the air like it knew how wonderful it was and didn't want to go away. Three-Arm bowed his head for a minute, then folks began clapping and hooting and carrying on.

His modest grin came back, then he seemed to get self-conscious and handed the guitar back to its owner. The fella looked like he had never seen it before. He held it like a precious thing, put his ear to it like he couldn't believe the sounds that had come out of it. He never took the stage, guessing he went home and thought about some important things. Maybe he hung the guitar, like a sacred ornament, right next to the Jesus face that you plug into the wall.

The talent show went on but they shouldn't have bothered. Three-Arm was given First Prize, a blue ribbon the size of a sunflower.

Mac fired questions at me all the way back to the farm.

"…don't know why he waved at me. I wasn't doing anything. I was just standing there alongside the road."

"You never saw him before?"

"Don't you think I woulda remembered him?"

"If he tries to get in touch with you, would you call me? Here's my card."

I took it and looked at it, then stuck it in my shirt pocket. "Why would he want to get in touch with me? He never even said one word to me at the fair."

"I know. And that was important."

"What are you talking about?"

"Just call me if he contacts you, okay?"

I didn't tell him about the mural. Shoot, I didn't want to think about it myself.

*   *   *

Ma was resting when I got back. She must have been painting all day. She looked like all of her had been emptied out into a bucket.

I tucked the five-dollar bill into my dresser drawer, then went outside and did my chores. By the time I finished and cleaned up, Ma was still asleep and I began to fret.

Round about sunset she finally come to. She had perked up some, but her eyes still looked hollowed out. She asked me if I had ate my dinner. I lied, then asked her how she was feeling.

"Good," she said. "I'm seein' things, hearin' things."

*   *   *

I SLEPT A LOT the next day, while Ma worked out behind the barn. I still didn't think she was herself but I had my own problems. I get these headaches. Mostly when the weather changes and the crows fly east. Big-time nausea. See the aura. Feel like I'm gonna croak.

By the next morning I felt like my old self again. I was behind on my chores, so I didn't go nowhere except to the hog barn and the chicken coop and the duck pen and the vegetable garden. Didn't even have time to do any hog-style musing.

So it had been a couple of days since I was last in town, and when I got there, I couldn't help myself but head to the courthouse to see what was going on. The room was jam-packed. People were fanning themselves even though it weren't that hot out. I squeezed into a corner and watched.

Mostly just jawboning, dictionary words flyin' around that room. Nothing too fingernail-chewing. Lots of fidgeting in the audience, until they showed the pictures.

One strangled, one shot.

In color and everything.

The victims looked like busted dolls.

Folks gasped. I felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs; I didn't make any sound at all.

That was too much on a nice summer day, so I scooted on out of there, my spot taken by someone right away, like water in a rainstorm rushing into a hole.

That evening, after supper, I had an antsy feeling. Just reckless as heck. Restless. The words will find their way out if I just be patient.

"I'm going into town and look at the movie posters," I told Ma, who was at the sink, cleaning her paintbrushes.

"I'm going to paint what I see."

"Well, don't hurt your eyes painting in the dark."

"Okay."

I rode my bike into town. Having only the one arm made my balance a little off, had to lean the other way so I wouldn't ride in circles. Couldn't ride daredevil like I used to, but as long as I took it slow and easy I was good. Real fine thing to ride your bike down the road this time of year, in the latter hours of the day. Peaceful. Frogs chirping in the ditch. Cows and sheep caught in the sinking sun. The air feels different, too. Sleepy-feeling. Been around all day, getting ready to settle down for the night.

I didn't know what was playing at the Princess, didn't much care, really. Just wanted to be out after suppertime, in the sleepy-feeling evening. I think it was a space movie. Folks from the future fly to space and realize you can't go home again. Or that there's no place like home. Or maybe it was a dog movie. Just chasin' my tail here.

When I got uptown, though, there was a line outside the Opera House. Don't think there had ever been an opera at the Opera House, not even one with a giraffe. Just a fancy way to say a big room with not a lot of places to set your seat. Usually just polka bands and fellas telling you to cast asunder thy sinful ways, O wretched ones.

Left my bike at the tree, then got in line and asked the person ahead of me, "What are we seeing?"

She shrugged. "I dunno."

"I was going over to the Princess and look at the movie posters."

"It's that space movie where they learn that the strength of a chain is its weakest—"

"Oh, I've seen that poster already."

"It's not so good."

"This has to be better."

"I think it's worth the chance."

The line picked up speed and before long we were inside. Looked pretty full, but folks are always shy about sitting down front, so I found an empty spot near the stage.

People were chattering but I couldn't make out what they was saying. It didn't matter, because before long someone came on stage. I sort of recognized him, one of those faces you see around town but can't really put a name to. I think he worked at the radio station, KBEG, the Voice of Beggar's Creek. On the radio, you can't see their faces. Like ghosts. Just lonesome voices in the dark.

"Welcome, everyone. I know this event came together on short notice, but at KBEG we're always ready to promote fresh talent and bring you, the wonderful people of Beggar's Creek, the finest entertainment in the quad-county area. And in that spirit, let's give a warm welcome to a new face on the Beggar's Creek scene.…"

It was him.

Coming out onto the stage, the Three-Armed Man. Toting a guitar. Smiling shyly. He dragged a stool over to the microphone stand with two hands while pulling a harmonica out of his pants pocket with his third. Three-Arm looked a little scared. Like this was more than he was ready for. Like any one of us would feel.

"Uh, I guess, uh, I didn't really expect to be here. Been pretty busy this week."

A couple of laughs, but it looked like most folks weren't sure of him.

"Well, they asked me if I would play and sing for those of you who didn't get a chance to hear me at the fairgrounds. I was going to say no, but then I got to thinking. There's a lot of trouble in the world. Both outside—" he made a gesture with his right hand "—and in." He touched his left hand to his heart. His third hand stayed out of it. "So maybe I can take folks away from their troubles for a time. Or better yet, give them something that will make their troubles feel less troubling. Music can do that. Music can heal the whole troubled world."

So he sang some old favorites, like "O Death, Where is Thy Sting" and "John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man" and "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground."

He took a breather, just gently plucking at his guitar strings, then said, "You know, folks, I have three arms, which is nice for strumming, but I only have the one voice. Or do I? I have all of you, all of your voices. Let's sing 'Home Sweet Home.' If you know the words, won't you sing with me?"

So the whole hall was filled with voices singing that old favorite, although most folks just sang the chorus over and over 'cause they didn't know the words to the rest of it, me included. I'm not much in the voice department. I can call hogs as good as the next person, but proper singing, no. It was a beautiful sound, hearing all those voices filling up the hall. When we were done, nobody clapped. Everybody just sat there and thought about the words we had sung. A bond had been made. No place like home. He was one of us. I felt it. You couldn't help but feel it. He was home. Just like that, he was home.

Then Three-Arm stood up and said, "And now I'd like to bring someone onstage who I'm sure you all know. She might be a little shy, so give her some encouragement." Three-Arm drifted across the stage to where I was sitting. He looked at me and smiled, then offered his hand. The one at the end of his third arm. I thought of it as his gun hand. I know, reasonable doubt and all, but I couldn't help it.

The crowd began cheering.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't sit there like a lump, so I reached for the hand.

It was warmer than I thought it would be. Had a friendly feeling to it.

He pulled me up onstage. Didn't want to be there, but his look said everything would be okay. He leaned in. "Sorry about this," he whispered.

Three-Arm led me to the center of the stage, right near the edge, and we stood there side by side, facing the audience, a full set of arms between us.

The crowd murmured in a way I didn't understand.

Three-Arm cleared his throat. "As I said before, if I could—"

And then he broke into song.

"I'd give you my third,
"I give you my word.
"It's not something I need
"In order to succeed
"At living a life
"That has true meaning.
"One, two, or three,
"It doesn't matter to me,
"When at heart we're all the same.…"

Or something like that. I don't remember exactly because my head felt like it was on the Octopus ride. Like I was goin' somewhere fast and could only hang on. I got off that stage like it was on fire. My face felt hot. I didn't return to my seat, I kept going along the row and left through a side door.

"That was cute," said Mac, leaning against the lobby wall.

"It didn't feel cute."

"What's it like to be in show biz?"

"Lousy."

"He chose you, out of everyone in the theater."

"He felt sorry for me. I'm used to it."

"Hard to believe he's a cold-blooded killer, isn't it?"

I didn't say anything to that.

"Haven't seen you at the trial lately. Playing hard to get, huh?"

"How can you stand to be in there every day? Maybe if you didn't have to be in there every day you wouldn't be the way you are."

"Well, that's fair. It's pretty grim business."

"When's it gonna be over?"

"Don't know. A few more days before the jury gets it, I guess."

"That long?"

"Why don't you go on home?"

"You trying to get rid of me?"

"Looking out for you."

"I don't need lookin' out for."

"Suit yourself." He headed into the auditorium, then turned back and said, "If you change your mind, let me know and I'll give you a ride home."

I didn't say nothing. I didn't want to go home, but I didn't want to go back in there, neither. I stayed put for a minute, as Three-Arm started warbling again, then left and grouched on the bench outside the drugstore.

I was glad to be out of there. That reporter Mac was bugging me. He acted like he knew what was going on, but if he really knew what was going on, he wouldn't have to ask so many durned questions. Anyway, I'm not the indoors type. Main Street wasn't too busy. Most of the stores had pulled their shades for the day. Drugstore was still open, the lunch-counter part, anyway. They stayed open late during the summer to catch folks after they left the Princess.

And after they spilled out of the Opera House, too.

They came this way, looking like they belonged to something special. Maybe I shouldn't have run out. Then I could have belonged to something special, too. A bunch of them beelined for the lunch counter. The malt machine started whirring almost right away. I kept my eyes on my dirty boots. Should have changed them when I come into town, I guess. I tried to knock off a hunk of dried mud that was stuck to the bottom.

"Can I buy you a soda pop?"

I glanced up.

Three-Arm was standing there on the sidewalk, looking at me like he had onstage. His kindness spilled out like gravy from a bowl. The after-hours sun hit the drugstore window and made his blue ribbon glow something pretty. His third arm was sort of resting at his side, all tuckered out from strumming the guitar.

I couldn't even find a mumble inside me.

"Didn't mean to embarrass you back there."

I shook my head instead.

"So can I get you a soda?"

"Okay," I managed to push out.

He went inside and my legs said run.

But they didn't. I stayed put, my foot wrapped around the bench leg. I wasn't going to run. I wasn't going to be scared.

He came back out and offered me the soda. Lovely orange bottle.

I took it.

"Thank you," I told him. It looked sweet and cold and tasted like summer.

"Haven't seen you in court lately."

"That's 'cause I haven't been there."

"Why not?"

"'Cause it's awful."

"Can't argue with that. Wish I didn't have to sit in there all day, either."

"Did you do it?"

"You don't think I did. Otherwise you would have run away, all the way home. Otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here, with me, enjoying a soda pop."

"I sit a lot of places."

"I wish you were sitting in the jury box."

"My ma almost did."

"I wish she would have made it. The looks I've been getting from some of those jurors—"

"Don't worry. I get those looks, too."

"Your folks know you hang out at murder trials?"

"My pa's dead."

"Sorry."

"It's okay. It wasn't yesterday."

"That's tough, though. I mean, you already have your share of troubles."

"It's not so bad. I get by."

"Were you born without the arm?"

"No. It got caught in some machinery. My fault. Wasn't paying attention. My mind was goin' fifteen places at once like it usually does." I sipped some pop. "So were you born with an extra arm?"

"Yeah, born with it."

"I guess you woulda had to. They probably didn't fix it on you later."

Three-Arm moved forward a step or two, past the yellow and brown striped awning. Without looking back at me, he said, "Have you ever been anywhere? I mean, anywhere real?"

"Took a field trip to the Cities when I was a little kid," I said. "Went to the mummy museum."

"Someone wanted to put me in a museum once. In a jar. Tried to talk me into signing a paper that said they would get me after I was gone. I said no thanks, I'd rather have people remember me the way I am."

I thought of Vishnu, and tried hard not to stare at number three.

"I really want to travel," he said. "See the world. There's a big world out there, you know. I've seen a little of it, and I plan to see more."

Didn't say it straight out, but he must have been sure of how the trial was going to end. Or maybe he was just wishing and hoping, like we all do. Sometimes that's all we can do, when the world's playing hide-and-seek with our dreams.

"We have a lot in common, you and I," he said, and it didn't feel like he was changing the subject.

"We're outsiders. Folks may act polite toward us but we'll never be one of them, not really. Part of them will always keep their distance. Their world is not ours."

"Folks aren't so bad here," I said.

"They never made fun of you? Called you names? Made you cry?"

My face got warm. Was he a mind reader?

"It's human nature," he continued. "Goes back to the darkest caveman days. Leave the sick and the lame behind so the tribe can survive. Just the way things are. Sometimes I want to throw my life aside and make a new start. Big world out there. Lives waiting to be lived."

Right about then the cavemen and cavewomen who shunned folks like us came over and gushed about how wonderful Three-Arm's performance had been. While he was busy basking, I got up and got out of there. I was confused. I liked the things he said. They were true. I had thought them myself a thousand times before. Doggone it. I wasn't used to being around people so much, especially strangers.

But he didn't feel like a stranger. Not at all.

*   *   *

WHEN I GOT HOME, Ma was in the kitchen, burning the midnight oil again. I told her not to put so much wood on the fire. She didn't look too hot, pale even in the heat of the flames, but there was something on or maybe in her mind.

"The colors of the guilty, the tint of the sinners, are muddy and impure, aren't they?" she asked me.

Wasn't sure if she was quizzin' me or if she had forgot. How could she forget something so important? "That's what you always told me, Ma."

"Not seeing the colors too good these days, I guess."

"The Three-Armed Man bought me a pop," I told her.

"What color?"

"Orange."

"His colors…are changing."

"He doesn't talk to me like I'm a poor crippled girl."

"Do I even have those colors…"

"He even brought me up onstage and sang a song to me."

"Muddy and impure…"

"I don't see how he could have killed those people. He looks so kind."

Words came out of her, but I couldn't pick up on any that made sense.

"He said he wants to see the world," I went on. "The world outside Beggar's Creek, can you imagine? Not just picture books, not just the Corn Palace, the real thing. And that there's lives out there just waiting to be lived."

Ma suddenly looked at me, her eyes saying she had caught every bit of my ramble. She spoke in a clear voice that had a lot of hush in it: "They are the colors of death.…"

*   *   *

The next day Ma still looked sickly, but in a brittle little voice told me she needed a new paintbrush, a bigger one, and would I go into town to get her one. She wore them out like nobody's business. I didn't want to leave her alone, but I said okey-dokey.

Before I left I went around to the back of the barn. Vishnu was still there, but his colors looked off-kilter. The colors were all muddy. Maybe Ma didn't mix the paints right. Maybe I should ask Mr. Buckbee down at the hardware store about it.

The hardware store made my heart glad. It smelled like the past, reminded me of the times before my accident, the days when Pa was still around. The store already had rakes and ghosts in the display window. Not a good sign for our chum Summertime.

"Can I help you find something, Audrey?"

"Need another paintbrush, Mr. Buckbee. Biggest one you got."

"You folks sure do a lot of painting out there."

"It's my ma. She's real fond of the arts."

"What's she painting now?"

"The back of the barn."

"She's been working on it a long time."

"It's a big job, especially the way she does it."

"Anything else for you?"

"Mr. Buckbee, can I ask you a question about paints?"

"You sure can."

"If the colors get all muddy-looking, is there a reason why that happens?"

"Could be mixed wrong. Could be a bad batch of paint. Or the surface wasn't cleaned properly before the paint was applied. Any number of reasons."

"Okay, thanks."

"I'd be happy to take a look at the paint if you want to bring it in."

"Okay, might do that."

"Anything else I can get for you?"

"No, I reckon that's it for today."

"Help yourself to bubblegum."

I stuck my hand into the big glass globe on the counter and took one. He grabbed a handful himself and dropped them into my bag.

"Thanks a lot."

"You take care of yourself now, Audrey."

"Okay, bye."

Outside, I ran into Mac again. Tracking me like a dog.

"Can't keep you country girls down on the farm."

"Just doin' errands."

"Not going to stick around and watch the show?"

"You mean at the Princess?"

"I mean at the courthouse."

"That's a horror show. I don't like horror shows."

"What kind of shows do you like?"

"I like space shows best."

"And why would that be?"

"'Cause they show you what could happen down the road." Ma did that, too, only she usually got it right.

"I saw that space show at the Princess," Mac said. "What a stinker."

"I was going to go look at the posters last night, but—"

"You went to the Opera House instead."

"Yeah."

"Gotta tell you, Audrey, I thought it was going to be an open-and-shut case, but now I'm not so sure."

"How do you mean?"

"People seem to like Three-Arm. Shouldn't make a difference, but it does."

"Do you really think he could go free?"

"You saw it, didn't you? At the fairgrounds, in the theater. He's got a quiet charisma about him. People in these parts respond to that. Besides, the way his lawyer's questioning is going, he's making people think maybe it was the other fellow who killed the girl, then turned the gun on himself. Or maybe the gun went off during a struggle. Self-defense. Or maybe it was Three-Arm who tried to stop the killing. That the girl and the other guy were having a big row and Three-Arm walked in on it."

"I wish it was over."

"I'm sure you folks will be happy to be rid of us."

"You ain't so bad."

"I guess the circus always has to move on. Wouldn't be much fun if it never went away."

"The town's going to feel lonely after everyone goes. People will start looking at me screwy again."

"But in admiration, because…," Mac grinned and pretended he was holding a microphone. "'I'd give you my third, I give you my word—'"

"Oh, be quiet, you."

*   *   *

When I got home, Ma was on the kitchen floor, not moving much, maybe not at all. She was in an awkward position, arms going one way, legs the other. I tried to wake her up but she wouldn't, so I drug her into the sitting room and rested her head on a black velvet Mount Rushmore pillow with golden tassels that my Aunt Dorothy brought back from South Dakota. I didn't know what else to do. Usually she came out of these spells before too long but I wasn't sure about this one. She looked different. Taken deeper. Maybe taken all the way.

I dug through the bureau drawer and found a hand mirror, right alongside the Canasta deck. Held it up to her. Not to her mouth but above her head, to see if she had the Rainbow of Death. It happens when someone passes, can only be seen upon reflection. Like a firework that you can still see after it goes out. Looks like an oil sheen. Ma told me all about it when I was little. Studied the mirror carefully, but I wasn't sure. I thought I saw some colors, but by now the colors were in pretty much every part of her.

I stowed the mirror in the drawer and didn't know what to do. Wished the phone was still working. Ma never wanted it fixed, said she didn't like to hear any voices in her head except the ones that were already there. I kept telling myself that it was just another one of her spells, but I wasn't sure. Pa was gone, and now I feared Ma was on her way to join him. I was scared.

Decided to go fetch Doc Ochs. He had a world of knowledge inside him, a regular walking library. He had so many plaques on the walls he didn't need wallpaper.

I got on my bike and raced into town.

When I reached the corner by the drugstore, I tried to cut a sharp loop, daredevil-style, but didn't lean in far enough and ended up going way out into the street.

Never saw Sammy's Septic truck. Think he was taking a left from Elm. In a panic I tried to grab the other handlebar with my missing hand. I smelled him right before he hit me. Just a sideswipe. Knocked me down good, though. I didn't know what world I was in. A world of hurt. I had been there before.

Then I felt myself cradled in a pair of arms, while another arm untangled the bike from my legs.

Three-Arm carried me to a shady spot beneath the drugstore canopy, set me down gently.

Folks had gathered around, but he wouldn't let them near me.

"I'm okay," I told him. "Just a bump." I touched my knee. It felt wet. "I have to go get the doctor—for my ma."

"He needs to look at you first."

"But my ma…," I said woozily.

I heard him tell the bystanders to hurry and get Doc Ochs. Then he leaned in and began talking softly, steadily to me.

"Wanna sleep," I told him.

"Listen, Audrey, you need to stay awake until the doctor gets here."

"Well, I'll try."

"You're going to be okay, and then we'll go see about your ma."

"Have to get back to her—"

"Before long I'll have to get going, too."

"Going…gone?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Mac says…what was that he said again? Oh yeah, that the town is on your side."

"Folks around here have been civil to me, and I appreciate that. Guess I'm something different to look at for a change. Seeing the same people, the same buildings, the same trees, the same fly in the window at the cafe, gets old after a while. Like the town is frozen in time. Then I come along. Maybe I'm showing them some new possibilities. It's about their lives, not mine. They don't even know me. Maybe the third arm is inside us all, waiting to get out."

Hard to picture myself with three arms when two was still a dream.

"But when they get into that courtroom, there's a different kind of look in their eyes. The kind of look that shouts trouble. Audrey, I have to tell you something important. I have to tell it to you now because there might not be another chance. Are you listening to me, Audrey?"

"Sleepy.…"

"Over in Greentown, I got in with the wrong crowd. That's the only kind of crowd that ever wanted me around. See, she…she pretended she liked me. I was gullible. I wanted to believe. So when we were together for the first time, in her bed…well, we weren't as alone as I thought we were. I should have run out of there, but I didn't. When I saw his camera, I just lost my mind." His third hand started fluttering like a bird.

"Strangled one while shooting the other," I hazily recited.

"After I killed them, I realized that I could write my own story. For once, I could control what people thought about me. My parents tried to hide my third when I was a kid, worked fine in the winter, but in the summer, those long, haunted summers.… So I'd rather have the story they tell about me be a classic one, a love triangle, not a freak-show tragedy. This one time, my story can be like everyone else's."

The fog thinned for a moment. "But if you told the judge why you did it, maybe he'd let you go."

"Wouldn't matter. They never threatened me, those two. Just wanted to make a buck off me, selling pictures to the magazines you won't find in the drugstore. I couldn't let myself be humiliated anymore, that's all."

"But you have to at least try to explain it to them."

"No, the only way out now is to run. Get out of town and get out of town fast. Get out of town and don't look back." His third hand touched mine. "Come with me, Audrey. We belong together. I knew it the first time I saw you, a one-armed girl standing by the side of the road. Like you had always been standing there, waiting for your future. We'll hop a train and go west. Don't stop until we see the ocean blue. Leave behind all these people who don't understand us."

"Are you Vishnu?" I asked him.

"Fish who?"

"Vishnu, the Many-Armed One. A Hindu God. They say that when the Many-Armed One shows up, it's a sign that the world is gonna end."

"The world's not going to end, Audrey, it's going to begin. There's lives out there just waiting to be lived."

Right exactly then Doc Ochs pulled up to the curb in his black sedan.

Three-Arm leaned close and whispered, "I'll come for you at dawn."

Doc got out, medical bag in hand.

"Wait for me."

*   *   *

Doc checked me out, poked and prodded and fussed, then got me on my feet and said I was a lucky girl. I told him about Ma. As we drove away, I watched Three-Arm out the back window, just like the first time he saw me.

When we got to the farm, Ma hadn't budged from where I had left her on the Mount Rushmore pillow. Doc checked her eyes, listened to her chest, held her hand.

"She's had spells before," I told him, "but never like this."

"Help me, Audrey," he said, and we got her up and onto her bed.

"Is she gonna be okay, Doc?"

"Her heart sounds good, her temperature is normal. Her breathing is a little shallow, but not dangerously so. Has she been working hard lately?"

"Been painting pretty much nonstop."

"Then it's likely she's suffering from simple exhaustion." He removed a muddy brown bottle from his bag. "I'm going to give her a sedative so she sleeps through the night, and then first thing in the morning I'll come back and check on her."

"In the morning?"

He smiled like doctors do. "She'll be fine, Audrey. All she needs is rest."

Doc left then, although I wish he would have stayed longer. Like the rest of the night. I'm ashamed to say I was afraid to be in the house with my own ma. I ran upstairs and hid in my room. Shut the door tight as a nut. Got into bed and pulled the covers up to my chin.

My thoughts rolled back to the Three-Armed Man. The killer man. The gun hand. Said he'll be coming for me at dawn. Gonna run out on his trial. Go find the oceans blue. What if he wants to kill me, too? I can't leave Ma behind, can I? Doc said she was gonna be okay. He'll be here in the morning. But where will I be?

Guess I wore myself out worrying because sleep found me long before I thought it would.

Later on, I wasn't sleeping. Wasn't one of those wake-ups that happen slowly, peacefully, naturally. Woke up for a reason. Didn't get up right away, just lay there with my eyes wide and my heart wondering.

It was light out. Had I slept that long? Was it morning already? How could that be?

If it was morning, the roosters would have clued me in.

Was Three-Arm ready to take me away? Shining a flashlight in my window? A signal to start our new life?

I crawled out of bed and went to the window.

It was still full-on night, except for the golden light that was emanatin' from behind the barn. Almost like a halo over the barn roof. Made the rooster weather vane look like the real thing.

I went downstairs. Ma was right where we had left her. She hadn't budged a bit, was snoring lightly now.

I walked across the farmyard, wet clover poking between my toes.

I hesitated when I reached the corner of the barn, afraid of what I would find on the other side. Afraid of what I would find inside myself.

I poked my head around.

Ma's paints and brushes were scattered everywhere, as if her brush had been in a frenzy.

I made a wide circle as I came around so I could see what she had wrought.

Dropped to my knees at the sight, my eyes watery with wonder. It was mind-jiggering. It was heart-attacking. It was the greatest mural ever. No wonder she was exhausted.

Ma had painted over all her other murals. Replaced them with one giant super-mural. Only it didn't look anything like her other murals. It wasn't a mural, it was a world. It was a maze. A maze of corn. Endless rings of cornstalks, each one smaller than the last, nested inside one another like the hypnotism spirals I saw a magician use at the County Fair.

I felt mesmerized by it. I felt drawn to it. I felt like it was calling my name.

I approached the mural. Reached out for it. The paint didn't even look dry. No, that was wrong. It's not that it didn't look dry, it didn't look like paint at all. It almost looked alive.

I reached out.…

And I fell in.…

Or maybe the mural fell into me. That might be a better way to write it.

It wasn't night anymore. The sun was high and the air cried summer.

I was in the green maze, ripening corn rising far past my shoulders. I followed the path, the circle, deeper into the maze. Deep enough that I couldn't see a way in or a way out. There was only one way. I had run into the corn rows before and lost myself, found the exit by following the sun. But I couldn't see the sun here. All I could see was corn. It sucked in everything, the same way it got me. Just a hole that grabbed everything it could. Like quicksand that was alive.

I felt like something was being stripped away from me. From inside. Like something was being unwound. I don't know if that's the right way to explain it. I couldn't explain it. It was just one of those feelings without a name.

The air grew stovepipe hot and the cornstalks wilted. I kept going, deeper and deeper into the maze, until all of a sudden I got the feeling that I wasn't alone.

At first I thought it was just a lost breeze playing with the cornstalks, or me muttering to myself, then I realized that someone was calling my name.

"Audreeee.… Audreeeee.…"

I tried to follow the voice. Couldn't tell where it was coming from. Every which way. I pushed ahead.

"Where are youuuu.…"

Boy, it was hot.

"Wait for meeeeee.…"

Then the voice seemed to shrink and go away, like a puddle on a two-popsicle day.

How hot was it? I began hallucinatin'. I saw the cornstalks as arms—thin, freckled, familiar arms.

Took me back to that first mural, the original mural, the mural where all this began, my life before I met up with that durned combine. A maze, a circle, a world.

Drunk in the sun, seeing things, I whirled and stumbled and panicked and pinballed, and suddenly, somehow, there I was back behind the barn again.

I felt dizzy in the head. Didn't remember much of anything. Had I got lost in the field? Stroked by the sun? Knocked off my bike?

I weaved back around to the farmyard. Where was Ma? My stomach felt like I had gone on the Zipper ride right after Sunday dinner. I cupped my hands to my mouth and called out her name. Didn't think there was anything peculiar about it at the time.

I crossed the yard to the house. Was meaning to go in and look for Ma but an Amber White, one of our best egg-layers, had wandered out into the middle of our rural route. Her sister had gotten run over by the mailman last month. My mother-hen instincts came through again.

I ran over to the road, clapped my hands, making a brittle, dry sound, and shooed her back to the safety of the yard.

Clapped my hands!

Who doesn't!

I felt the motorcade before I saw it.

Just a little trembling beneath my feet.

I waited, saw the dust cloud, then the cars.

Speeding hooky-fast down our little lane. What were they doing? Where were they going? I worried about the neighbor dogs, those wanderin', poker-playin' souls. And my chickens.

The caravan approached, the dark cars of the day, kicking up dirty clouds as they rolled, passing by me in a thunder line.

Ma had painted Vishnu to warn me, painted the corn maze to protect me.

In the rear window of a car in the middle of the pack, I saw a man wearing a red scarf, turning his head to look back at me.

I hesitated, then took a deep breath…and yanked off my left arm.

His eyes met mine, moved over to my missing arm. He smiled in a quiet, amused way, waved, then turned back to the road ahead. The rest of the motorcade tore by, a monster cloud of gravel dust sweeping over me, a big swirl of darkness blocking out the day. I bowed my head and dropped to my knees. I could feel the grit in my teeth.

As the sun broke upon me again, I stood.

There was a dry-looking cornstalk at my feet, the tassels like long fingers.

The dust from the motorcade lingered in the road. I ran through the ditch and back into the yard, finding my bike on the ground by the pump house. I used my feet to start it rolling, got my balance, then pedaled up the driveway to the road and followed that big ol' dust cloud all the way into town.

The Thing on the Shelf

By David Gerrold | 15149 words

We've been sitting on this story for a while, waiting for a special occasion to share it with you. That occasion has arrived and we'll tell you about it at the end of the story.

David Gerrold informs us that "The Thing On The Shelf" is a grateful homage to the Horror Writers Association. "In 2013, they handed me a Stoker award for 'Night Train To Paris'," he writes. "It's a beautiful trophy, designed by Harlan Ellison and artist Steven Kirk. It's in the shape of a haunted house, with various eldritch horrors creeping up its sides. While I was admiring the exquisite detail work, I began to suspect that this weird little mansion might actually be haunted. After that, the story was inevitable."

DEAR GORDON,

Here's my report on what happened at the World Horror Convention. And afterward.

To be honest, I'm not sure why you wanted me to write a report on it. I've never been to a horror convention. I wouldn't know what to look for, let alone what to say.

You do know I'm trying to lose weight, don't you? I keep a spreadsheet to track my progress. I weigh myself every morning and the spreadsheet does its stuff and tells me how much I've lost, how much I still have to lose, how many days more to reach my target, and that my moving average loss is a tenth of a pound per day, or usually just a smidge less. I'm surviving on soup, salad, and tuna sandwiches. It's frustrating as hell because I'm determined to get my weight down far enough that I no longer have to shop at Big, Tall, and Grotesque.

The reason I do not want to attend a convention—any convention—is simple. It disrupts my progress. Even a three-day weekend at a convention will trigger a gain of three pounds. A five-day convention, five pounds. Even if I make a rigorous effort to stay on my diet—skipping meals, only ordering salads—I still gain weight.

I can only assume I'm living inside some kind of transmetabolic morphic field. The farther I travel from my metabolic center, the more mass I accumulate. Something about a rolling scone going straight to my ass. I'd prefer to stay home, resting comfortably on the aforementioned glutei, and write.

Which is why I found your suggestion that I attend the World Horror Convention so puzzling. It appeared to come out of nowhere. Have you been talking to Dr. Morgan behind my back again?

But as it happened, I did have an incentive to attend. Somehow, that little adventure I had on the night train to Paris—and the story I wrote about it—had found a place on the final ballot for the Bram Stoker Award, the Hugo of horror.

I don't have much experience winning awards. I have a lot more experience saying it's an honor just to be nominated, but I usually end up at the award ceremonies anyway, because if something of mine ever does snag a trophy, I'd be really annoyed with myself if I weren't there to pick it up in person.

Besides, I have a friend in the area. Dennis had moved to Portland from Seattle. I hadn't seen him since the last misadventure, the one we don't talk about anymore. I could spend a couple of days with him. He'd pretend to be happy to see me. Dennis is one of the few people I know who can talk enlightenment and mean it, so the trip wouldn't be a total loss. I could justify the effort.

Anyway, that's how I motivated myself. I grabbed the laptop, found some clean underwear, threw a pair of socks and some black shirts into the suitcase, gassed up the car, and pointed it north toward Portland. But before I even turned the key in the ignition, I knew I was heading for a weird weekend. Portland? Really?

There are two things you have to know about this trip.

First, the fact that I packed socks should prove I intended to be serious about this event. I haven't worn socks since my mother's funeral, and that was under protest.

Second, even though it's a fourteen-hour drive, that's still better than an hour drive to the airport, an hour spent going through security, another hour waiting for the flight to board (if there are no delays), three hours bouncing around the sky in a seat that would be too cramped even for Peter Dinklage, and another hour on the ground waiting for luggage to survive the conveyor-belt trip to the baggage claim. And, in this case, not being a guest of the convention, the added expense and hassle of renting a car. I'm not even going to mention what passes for in-flight food service.

Fly? No thanks.

If I drive, I can pace myself. I can pick my own snacks, I can eat food that won't kill me at restaurants that Yelp users have survived long enough to post a review, and mostly, I can set the cruise control and listen to all the music I want—as loud as I want.

Usually, I go with show tunes. I can sing along without the embarrassment of alarmed neighbors knocking on the door. After a few hundred miles, I will have murdered The Lion King, Cabaret, Man of La Mancha, and Annie. (Yes, Annie. So what? Everyone has their own dark secrets. The trick is to own them.)

But this trip I decided to do something different. Perhaps that was a bad idea. I chose thematic collections of Bernard Herrman, Max Steiner, and Michael Hoenig. Not exactly the most cheerful and upbeat accompaniment. Departure from the Northern Wasteland (Michael Hoenig) includes the howling of hungry wolves as a thematic counterpoint.

And yes, before you ask, yes, I did stay on I-5 the whole drive. No more adventures on back roads. Not after what happened last time. (Although the business loop through Dunsmuir looking for a restaurant was a little disturbing, but that's another story.)

California is called "the Golden State" because there's nothing green south of Sacramento. It's all brown and yellow. If there are trees in Los Angeles, they're either palms from Hawaii or eucalypti from Australia.

There are no real trees native to Southern California, only imposters and shrubs with delusions of grandeur. It isn't until you get far enough north that you start to see real trees—oaks and pines and even the occasional willow. Right there, the feeling of unease starts to settle in. Green is not a familiar color to me. Or to anyone from south of Santa Barbara.

The farther north you go, the worse it gets. After green, there are other colors that defy easy description. You can call them green, but they're darker, deeper, and suggestive of things going thump in the knight—like armor-piercing arrows going thump into the rib cage of the knight.

Gordon, you've known me for a long time. You know I can tell the difference between delusions and reality. Reality is the stuff that everybody agrees on—except not always, because sometimes there are things that only a few people can perceive. Like tetrachromats—people with four kinds of cones in their eyes instead of three—they see colors that the rest of us mere mortals can't. What if there are other senses that only a few people have? The one-eyed man in the country of the blind? Not a king, just insane.

No, I'm not claiming any kind of extra-sensory-perception ability, but sometimes I get feelings. And when I don't listen to my feelings, I usually end up paying a price.

That's the point. I've always felt that there's something strange going on in the northwest corner of this continent. Like those green man sightings I told you about a couple years back—and before you ask, yes, I am staying on my meds, and the doctor gave me permission to skip my regular meeting and go to the convention—but just the same, putting my own concerns aside, what if there really is something strange going on in the northwest corner of this continent? Personally, I think Portland might be the local focus.

We already know there's an east-to-west psychological incline. It's been tracked and measured in several independent and peer-reviewed studies. All the crazies roll westward, most of them piling up against the Rocky Mountains like tumbleweeds against a fence. They settle in Colorado—either Boulder or Colorado Springs. But the ones who are really determined, the ones who are crazy enough to build up serious momentum, they're rolling fast enough and hard enough to get over the Rocky Mountains. They keep going until they hit the Pacific—and that explains Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Malibu, and most of San Francisco. For the longest time, you couldn't find anyone in any of those cities who'd actually been born in California. It's still a rarity.

I don't have a lot of experience with either Seattle or Portland, but the few times I've been to either city, I've had the same feeling—that the tumbleweeds of eccentricity are piling up here. Seattle feels like the place where the '60s went to die. If that's true, then Portland is the place where the '60s have joined the undead, still staggering around like a confused zombie in search of the last uneaten brain.

This cultural chronosynclastic infundibulum, this refusal to be buried under the avalanche of Velveeta-processed corporatism, is probably the reason why Portland has so many unique and marvelous restaurants— and Powell's Books, one of the last great bookstores on the left coast of the continent. Powell's may be the best justifications for any trip to Portland. (Incidentally, Powell's is expanding ! So there's a lot to be said for a city that can still support a store that sells printed books.) You don't need to file a missing-person report in Portland, just go to Powell's to find your lost genre fan.

But.…

Somewhere in the middle of Oregon, where you actually start seeing signs that tell you how far it is to Portland, that's when you begin to feel it.

The change.

That's what I call it, anyway.

It's a warm chill at the back of the neck. Yeah, I know that doesn't make sense. You have to experience it to undestand. Maybe it has something to do with the weather. The closer you approach, the gloomier the world becomes. Somewhere past Eugene, California's puffy white marshmallow clouds give way to Oregon's overhanging gray curtain. It's a permanent thing.

Nobody in the northern half of the state has ever seen the sun. Sometimes at a gas station, if they notice you have a California license plate they'll stop you to ask if there really is such a thing as the sun in the sky. Then they'll ask you to describe it, but the more you try the more you get looks of puzzlement and confusion in return.

Portland itself is a city that hasn't yet decided what it wants to be when it grows up. It's all rivers and bridges and highways, oversized and mismatched, all of which appear to go everywhere but where you want to go. Any trip longer than two miles, you have to get on a freeway and drive over a bridge.

Portland must have been a beautiful town once. What's left of its history is still visible in the occasional patch of land that hasn't been improved or gentrified, but the rest is an architectural horror story. Whatever charm the older city had, it's fast disappearing under bloated hotels and franchises of all kinds. Between IKEA, Best Buy, and Walmart, every place is starting to look like every other place. That's why I wish I could still drive the back roads. But if the northwest is truly as haunted as I believe, then the back roads would have to be the worst place to drive alone. Green men, right? And who knows what else?

On the plus side, the World Horror Convention was one of the better conventions I've attended. Horror fans are clean, well dressed, intelligent, polite, and enthusiastic. I have no idea why this is so. (Although I do have to admit I was a little put off by the beautiful woman who came up to me and said she wanted to lick my Stoker. I wasn't sure what she meant by that, and I'm not up on this year's crop of new slang terms.)

But.…

I also have to admit to sensing a peculiar undercurrent of strained anticipation throughout the entire proceedings—a feeling like being a newcomer to a Shirley Jackson lottery drawing, as if everyone there was in on the secret. Everyone except me, that is.

And yes, Gordon, I am staying rigorous with my prescriptions, I am taking all my little yellow and white and orange pills every day, always on schedule, always with food—which is making it hard to diet. My equator continues to expand like a producer's ego (you know which one I mean), but nevertheless, despite all the various odd side effects and the excruciating need to pee every forty-five minutes, I am religiously keeping to the regimen. I say religiously because it hurts to pee now and I'm always saying, "Oh my god!" when the need suddenly and painfully punches me in the right kidney.

I have an app on my phone, another on my Kindle, a third on my laptop, and I get email warnings at the half-hour, fifteen-minute, ten-minute, and five-minute marks, plus three separate alarms to alert me to the actual moment of medication. Between you and Harlan and my son and both my agents checking up on me every week, it's like being tag-teamed by a herd of Jewish mothers with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I won't say "trust me" because in Los Angeles, that translates as "bend over," but I don't know what else I can say to reassure you that I'm all right. At least, as all right as an overweight, aging, science fiction writer with paranoid delusions of grandeur and self-esteem issues can be. (The doctor's words, not mine. And no, I am not in denial.)

Nevertheless, what I'm telling you here is true. That peculiar feeling of anticipation and dread at the convention was real. Very real. It had something to do with the awards banquet on Saturday night.

It wasn't like a Hugo Award ceremony, with everybody pretending they hadn't been campaigning like a Southern politician for the past year and a half. No, this was different. This was more like the warm up for a funeral, with everybody smiling politely and trying not to say what they really thought of the guest of honor.

When we finally got to the banquet—oh, that's another thing. There used to be Hugo banquets a long time ago. They were big and sprawling, sometimes with as many as 500 fans all dressed up in their finest kilts and jerkins, sitting in one place and behaving themselves for hours at a time.

Now there's no banquet, just an overblown award ceremony with so many thousands of people in attendance the convention has to display the whole affair on a huge screen above the stage so the people in the far-back rows can actually see what's happening. So why bother to attend when you'd have a better view staying in your hotel room and watching the Internet feed?

But the horror fans still remember the great literary tradition of an awards banquet—first you eat your dinner, then you eat your heart out. Particularly appropriate for this genre, of course.

Anyway, as a nominee, I got to sit at one of the front tables, so I had a good view of the proceedings. This did not turn out well.

To my left at the table were John Shirley and his wife Micky. John was a special guest at the convention, kind of an ancillary guest of honor, I guess. He and I agreed not to fight or otherwise embarrass each other this time and Micky sat between us as a referee. So that was good.

On my right was Ellen Datlow, who apparently knows where all the bodies are buried—and no, that is not a metaphor, I'm talking about real bodies. To her right was Roberta Lannes, whom I hadn't seen since my housewarming party forty years previous, and no, she wasn't the reason I haven't had a party at my house since. That honor belongs to—Never mind.

I'm not going to name the other people at the table, partly because I don't want to embarrass them or get them into any trouble, and partly because I don't want to risk misspelling their names, but they all had slightly worried looks on their faces and that should have been a clear signal at the outset that something was very different here from what I was expecting. They seated themselves nervously, looking around for a bit before finally deciding that this might be a safe place to endure the banquet. In fact, one of the wives even said so: "I don't think we'll be in any danger here." (That did feel vaguely insulting, yes.)

The meal itself was relatively painless, as banquet meals go. The conversation meandered lazily around a variety of politely shallow subjects—except for one unsettling moment. Every guest at the table had an attractive place mat listing the order of events for the evening, including the nominees for all the awards. There was also a pen inscribed with the Horror Writers Association so we could check off the winners as we went.

I shared a story I had heard, that the award trophies had been designed by Harlan Ellison and a sculptor named Steve Kirk—

Apparently, Harlan had gotten annoyed that so many writing awards were ugly. The Hugo looks like the hood ornament of a 1953 Oldsmobile, the Nebula is a lucite brick with a big striped marble and some glitter in it, the Edgar is supposed to look like Edgar Allan Poe but could easily be mistaken for Ayn Rand, hard to tell. The Shirley Jackson award is just a rock. (Honest!)

So Harlan Ellison—this is the way I heard it from Harlan—designed an award trophy modeled after the House of Usher, an exquisite little mansion with steep gables and crooked chimneys and narrow windows, all marvelously detailed with restless vines clawing up the sides, spidery gargoyles perching on ledges, ominous bats lurking in the belfries, and even a bit of unearthly crud creeping up from the eldritch depths beneath. The whole was elegant and ornate. Steve Kirk sculpted the final version. When you open the front door of the house, a small plaque inside reveals the name of the author and the work that won the award.

The others at the table listened politely as I repeated this. When I finished, the fellow at the opposite side of the table started to say, "Yes, that's the public story—" He was about to say more, but then his wife poked him—hard enough for everyone else at the table to notice—and he immediately fell silent.

In my confusion, I looked to Ellen Datlow for explanation, but she only leaned toward me long enough to whisper, "Be very careful. You might win." This was a prophecy I promptly ignored. I already knew I wasn't going to win.

I'll share this with you, Gordon—

When I first started writing, I went to a lot of conventions because it was an opportunity to learn from the very best authors in the field. It was my post-graduate work in how to be a science fiction writer. Many years later, when I finally felt confident enough to compile all the best advice that worked (for me, anyway) into a book about how to write science fiction and fantasy, most of the lessons were things I had learned from all the people who had ended up with grandmaster trophies on their shelves.

Most of them are gone now. The people I went to conventions to hang out with have almost all disappeared. The few cons I have attended have been populated with names and faces mostly unfamiliar to me—and I assume my own name and face are equally unfamiliar to them.

At one con, a young fan saw my badge had the "Pro" ribbon attached, so he leaned forward and squinted to read my name. "I never heard of you," he said. "What did you write?"

I replied, "I wrote the novelization of Battle for the Planet of the Apes. " I said it with deadpan pride.

He snorted and walked off, his way of demonstrating how unimportant I was.

If you need to learn humility, attend a convention.

I do not need to learn humility. Humility is the enemy.

Writing is arrogant. Writing comes from the assumption you have something to say and that it's worth saying—and worth other people's attention. Not just their attention, their time and their money too. Writing comes from the assumption trees should die in the service of your words and ideas.

There's no humility in that. There never will be.

Nevertheless, humility is what you learn at a convention. Which may be why I don't attend many. Humility is embarrassing.

But I was at this one. The World Horror Convention. I did not know many people here. I don't know many horror writers, so this was a strange and alien environment to me. The few people I did have a chance to meet seemed to be very nice—intelligent, enthusiastic, well-groomed and well-mannered. Even elegant.

I used to love horror. I grew up reading Robert Bloch and Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson and Shirley Jackson, but I don't write horror. I've written maybe three horror stories—four, if you count The Martian Child. I can't think of anything scarier than being entrusted with custody of a child, and after you've lived with a teenager for a while, there isn't anything else that can scare you.

So I don't write horror.

And while I truly appreciate a good scary movie or a well-turned phrase that can send a chill up my spine—like Tom Lehrer's legendary lyric: "…sliding down the razor blade of life"—I haven't followed the horror genre as closely as I should have in recent years.

And that's the point. I did not know these people and the whole time I was sitting there, I was still puzzling how Night Train to Paris had gotten nominated, let alone achieved a place on the final ballot. (After I'd been told that the story was on the ballot, I'd made it available through the appropriate channels, but other than that I hadn't done anything that would have been called campaigning. I think campaigning is gauche. No—let me rephrase that. Anything that looks like overt campaigning is tacky, but if you can do it without looking like you're doing it, that's an art form in itself.)

But as many award ceremonies as I have attended over the years, there was something different about this one—like an overlying sense of dread. It was as if the nominees didn't want to win. As the various presenters began handing out awards, I sensed a curious despair in the winners' acceptance speeches—as if they weren't just being honored, but also singled out for a particularly onerous burden as well. Like winning a weekend at the Bates Motel or being gifted with a puppy named Piddles. I even heard "Why me?" and "I don't deserve this" a couple of times.

Finally, they arrived at the Superior Achievement in Short Fiction award. I was bent over my paper, trying to decide between Patrick Freivald and Lisa Mannetti as the most likely winner when I heard my name called and Ellen Datlow poked me viciously in the ribs. I looked up—looked across the table and saw the horrified expressions of our table mates.

As I stood, Micky hugged me intensely and whispered, "It'll be all right, David. You'll be fine. Just don't—" I didn't hear the end of the sentence. Someone else was pushing me forward.

There's a video on the Internet of me accepting the trophy. I put the thing on the podium in front of me, somewhat terrified at being put on the spot, and stared at it in confusion and surprise. I think I look drunk, exhausted, or embarrassed—possibly all three at the same time. (Except I wasn't drinking.)

I had not prepared an acceptance speech. I had not expected to win. I didn't know many people in the Horror Writers Association. I'd never attended a World Horror Convention before. I hadn't campaigned for the award. I had no idea how my story ended up on the ballot, so I just read off the names of the other nominees—Michael Bailey, Patrick Freivald, Lisa Mannetti, John Palisano, and Michael Reaves—and said, "You guys are the reason I didn't prepare a speech." Not having prepared a speech, I didn't have a good exit line, so I simply said thank you and stumbled off the stage, wondering what had just happened.

Back in my seat, when I finally recovered my breath, I realized the whole atmosphere at the table had changed. It was as if everybody had moved their chairs ten feet away. The woman who had told her husband this would be a safe place to sit now looked abashed, her husband angry. They hastily excused themselves even before the award ceremony had concluded. Their exit was covered by a standing ovation for William F. Nolan, who was being honored for his book of essays about Ray Bradbury.

It only got weirder. After the last presentation, as the banquet broke up into its various factions, John and Micky quickly disappeared, Ellen Datlow as well. No one came up to say congratulations. No one approached at all.

I found myself standing alone with traffic parting around me as if I were a human pothole. But I wasn't the only one. The other award winners, whether still sitting stunned at their tables or standing forlorn in the aisles, were similarly isolated. People were avoiding them—us—as if we had suddenly become infectious.

Gordon, I tell you—at first, I thought it was rudeness, and I do know rudeness. I'm a science fiction fan. I've been to Worldcon. I've attended SFWA meetings. (Don't ask.) I've had fans come up to me and say, "You're not so hot." I've had fellow authors accuse me of—Never mind, I don't need to reawaken that rumor. I was once even refused admittance to the Hugo losers party, despite having lost more Hugos than most of the guests combined.

But this wasn't like that. This wasn't your ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill fannish rudeness. This was something else. This was fear —a very deliberate and studied retreat, a pretense of normalcy while not-so-casually drifting toward the door.

I've been to other award banquets. Despite my (well-earned) reputation for a legendary lack of social skills, I still know how guests are supposed to behave at an event like this. Normally, people crowd around to congratulate the winners and admire the trophy. This was…disturbingly wrong.

At first, I thought it was just me they were avoiding. That was understandable—I didn't know many people here, and it made sense that everybody would rush to hang out with their friends, so it puzzled me that all of the other award winners were standing alone too, holding their little Usher mansions away from their bodies.

It's a curious piece of work. It looks like it's cast in some kind of resin. In the right light, it's almost translucent. And it's warm, sometimes uncomfortably warm, as if there's something burning inside. That must be an illusion, an artifact of the resin. It absorbs heat and holds it. I'm not sure.

I wandered over to the after-party and experienced the same anti-social phenomenon. Few people wanted to talk to me. I put the award down on a table in the corner of the room, went and got a glass of wine. Without the trophy under my arm, I had a little better luck meeting people, but not much. I began to wonder if the Horror Writers Association was so insular an institution that I was seen as an outsider, even a pariah—but if that were so, then why had they handed me their most coveted award?

After a few more fruitless attempts at socializing, I gave up, grabbed the trophy, and headed back to Dennis'. He oohed and aahed over the award, commiserated with me about the weirdness I'd experienced at the convention, and ascribed it to the general weirdness of Portland and why he intended to move further south—a lot further south. Like San Diego. Someplace where the sun shines every day, whether it wants to or not. (Myself, I'm holding out for Hawaii, where the sun shines even at night.)

I posted a note on Facebook about the outcome of the awards, then crawled off to bed. Sometime in the middle of the night I thought I heard noises, like a muffled argument behind closed doors. But it might just have been one of my strange dreams.

Did I tell you I've been having strange dreams? Maybe it's the medication, but a quick perusal of my dream journal reveals a disturbing trend:

I'm dreaming again about that enigmatic metropolis I call Endless City, always the same, always different, I know it and I don't—it's a place that can be reached only by the road not taken. It hides just behind the façade of what we call reality. What happens there isn't supernatural, it's just different. There are no billboards in Endless City, few people, and it's perpetually overcast, as if it's always about to snow—but it never does. It feels like a video game environment where you have to keep driving through an almost-real landscape in search of something important, but you're not sure what, or why.

This time, this dream, there was something behind me, not quite chasing, but not benign either. Dark figures. No, not zombies. Zombies don't scare me—remember, I've been to Comic-Con. These things were from someplace deeper in the subprimal cortex. Perhaps one day they will catch me.

Perhaps, the dark figures that pursue me in dreams are simply the essence of fear—hollow wisps with no real substance. But what if they're not? What if there really is something beneath the thin veneer of consciousness that is so far beyond comprehension, all we can do is anthropomorphize its manifestations into spidery stalkers or killer clowns or just dark clouds of unease that fill the shadows under the bed or the dark corners of the closet?

I don't know. And I'm not sure I want to know. I'm more comfortable in a mechanistic universe where every odd thing that happens is really just a bit of confusion in a superstitious observer. But I'm still not ready to find out what happens if you die in a dream. So I drive the blue '62 Mustang convertible through the twisting curves of the gloomy mountain roads, heading toward a sanctuary I'll never reach because it doesn't exist. Sometimes, he is with me, but not tonight. Tonight, I'm alone.

In the morning, Dennis wasn't there when I surfaced. Instead, there was a note on the counter. Apologies. Sorry we can't do a day-trip along the Columbia River to see the falls and the fish ladder. Next time, maybe. Have a safe drive home.

Well, that was weird.

I scrawled a reply on the bottom of his note, thanking him for putting up with me again, and inviting him south for a visit. I didn't know what else to add. I threw my suitcase into the car, grabbed the haunted mansion trophy off the table where I'd left it, and headed home.

There's not much to say about driving I-5 south, almost the full length of California's vertical dimension. Once past Mount Shasta, it's all farmland. This is where most of the nation's vegetables are grown—it's a straight-line journey through grapes (and wineries), avocados, cherries, peaches, onions, lettuce, cabbage, and a few crops that no city dweller can ever be certain of. Just outside of Santa Mira, for instance, there's a field of large green things like seedpods. A faded billboard promises: "Stay at the Santa Mira Inn for the best sleep you'll ever have." But nobody ever does. The town is dead.

The drive stays flat until you finally hit a long row of mountains, like a wall separating Los Angeles from the rest of the world. It might be intentional. The highway arrows up into them, abruptly transforming into a challenging squirm called the Grapevine. If there's going to be weather anywhere in Southern California, it'll be in the Grapevine first. Wind. Rain. Snow. Fire. Yes, there are warning signs—they are permanent installations. Naturally, everyone drives through The Grapevine at eighty-five miles per hour—otherwise the trucks will honk at you to get out of the way.

I got home just before dawn—still amazed that there's a five o'clock in the morning too. That's never made sense to me. One five o'clock per day feels right, not two. And that first one always occurs at the most inconvenient time.

Unpacked the car, pretended to be happy to see Dogzilla (the hairy avalanche), fell into bed, and didn't return to what passes for consciousness until half-past Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I usually need two days after a convention—or a trip of any kind—to detox, debrief, catch up on email, and restore my biological rhythms. The longer the trip, the longer the recovery period. This trip, only three days, I expected to be approaching normal by Thursday or Friday. But no, my sleep patterns remained disrupted. My dreams were stranger than usual, filled with troubling surreal visions.

I dreamt I was in a Quentin Tarantino movie involving black-leather-clad Japanese hoodlums arguing tautology, then having car chases in an abandoned parking structure. I was worried if my earrings were symmetrical.

I dreamt that the creepiest of the Baldwin brothers was trying to seduce me into wild demonic sex. It was tempting until I realized it was Stephen Baldwin.

I dreamt that I was visiting my girlfriend—she was terrified because a stalker was trying to get to her. I locked the apartment door behind me. She was cowering in her bed, whimpering. I closed the bedroom door and started to push the vacuum cleaner in front of it so no one could get in. While I was doing that, a torn scrap of lined paper was pushed through the crack between the door and the jamb. It had a childish drawing of a house and words written in a childish scrawl: "Help me!"

I dreamt that we were hiking up a strange mountain. There was a huge cluster of cars parked haphazardly and a crowd of people looking up at the snowy white slope as if they were being called by something high in the mist. My sister wanted to climb up and look for our missing friends. I told her no, that if she went up there I'd never see her again. But she went anyway. The Sheriff's department arrived and blocked off the road so I couldn't follow.

Then I dreamt that I was working at the computer in my bedroom, when a cop tapped on the glass. I went around to the back door and joined him in the back yard. Some neighbors were there too. They were complaining about terrible noises of machinery all night long. I was about to explain when I noticed the back gate was open, the garage was open and empty, and the back yard was missing a large shed that had been there. The pool was missing too. Instead there was a sinkhole where everything had been, revealing a whole underground level I never knew existed. I was afraid to go down into it and look.

I dreamt I was in a dark car with someone who was going to tell me THE SECRET. The bad guy's name was Pocket and—

But then Dogzilla started whimpering from a bad dream and I had to wake up.

The dog whimpers in her sleep. She whines. She kicks her feet as if running. Sometimes, even a growl. I watch the sleeping dog and wonder—does a dog know it's living in the ephemeral moment of a dream? Or does it whimper because it doesn't know the difference and is terrified by the unreality of the experience?

A gentle touch and a soft reassuring word are usually enough. "It's okay, I'm here now. It's all right. You're good. You're safe." Dogzilla calms down immediately and resumes snoring.

If only there were someone to do that for me when I'm having one of those dreams.

Okay, let me get to the weird part now.

As others have reported, my house exists in a state of permanent chaos. I'm not a hoarder, but a half-century of books, comics, records, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, computer software, and various electronic toys have piled up. That's not the half of it. There's also all my author's copies and files of magazines and articles from the time before the Internet. Boxes and boxes of stuff. I have everything safely packed—I just can't find any of it when I want it.

That's not the point.

The point is that in the ongoing battle for organization, there is no brag shelf, no display case, no marvelous shrine to the wonderfulness of the occupant. (Okay, there are a lot of pictures of my kid everywhere, but who doesn't do that?)

So the few trophies I do have—

Let me interrupt myself here. My autobiography (a work in progress) is going to be titled If You Had Wanted Me to Write Nice Things About You, You Would Have Treated Me Better. Several chapters will deal with various instructors in junior high, high school, and even college who used their personal dislike of me (somewhat justified—I was an awkward, unpleasant know-it-all geek before it was fashionable) to deny opportunities and acknowledgments I believed I had fairly earned. The result was that I have a jaundiced attitude about awards, acknowledgments, and anything that ends up looking like a popularity contest. It comes from an adolescence infused with the usual wash of self-esteem issues and alienation.

So—the few trophies I do have are stashed in a narrow glass bookcase (from IKEA) in a dusty corner of my bedroom, mostly out of sight of visitors, almost as if I'm embarrassed to have them on public display, embarrassed to have them at all—which may actually be the case. There's that condition they call "the impostor syndrome" where a successful person is unable to experience the joy of his own achievement, feeling instead that he's faked it so well he's fooled everybody. (That's me. I'm faking the writing.) The last time a fan confronted me at a convention and said, "You're a terrible writer!" all I could think to reply was, "Shhh. Don't tell my publisher."

That glass bookcase, that's where I put the Stoker Award. Not too far from my bed, but in my line of sight only if I rolled away from the glare of the south-facing window. I figured a week or two of marveling that someone had handed me an award and then I'd fall back into my usual pattern of grumbling at the keyboard and growling at the neighbors' kids who have decided that my lawn is a better place to play than their own.

As I said before, the little mansion has a front door that opens, revealing the recipient of the award. If the door is closed, the trophy is a beautiful sculpture, but I wanted any casual observer to see that this elegant piece of art was also an earned honor. So I put the trophy on the shelf with the door open.

The next day, finally unpacking the suitcase, gathering up the dirty laundry from my trip, I noticed that the door to the little mansion was closed.

I didn't think anything of it. I was preoccupied with detergent, but by the time I finished loading the machine with the obligatory acknowledgment that "normal is just a setting on the washer," I was frowning.

As a child, I had a mild case of OCD—actually, I had CDO, the letters had to be in alphabetical order. I had to touch things a certain number of times to make sure they had been properly touched, books had to be placed square on the shelf, comics had to be stored by issue number in precise stacks, closet doors had to be pushed all the way shut. I still have a residual need to see all the CDs sorted by artist name and DVDs and Blu-rays alphabetized by title. It makes them easier to locate. And I still push closet doors all the way shut.

So if I leave a door open—even a trophy door—it's a deliberate choice.

Am I still obsessive-compulsive? Yes, a little bit, enough to notice things like this, and that's another thing Dr. Morgan and I talk about all the time. Never mind, that's not relevant here. What is relevant is that the door to the little house was closed. And I hadn't closed it.

Okay, I'm getting old. I'm absent-minded. Sometimes I walk into a room and forget why I entered. It's because my head is still thinking about the story I'm working on, or how I'm going to reply to the harangutan. (In that dreadful online discussion forum. I have no patience with screechweasels.) Maybe I closed the door while I was dusting—except I don't dust. The dust will still be there six months from now, but the story I'm writing won't be if I stop writing for something as ephemeral as a misplaced layer of dust. Dust is eternal, I'm not.

I'll allow for the possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, in my absent-mindedness, maybe I did shut the door to the House of Usher. Shrugging, I opened the glass case and very carefully reopened the front door of the award. And yes, I did take a moment to reread the acknowledgment within. Hey, this one had to be fairly earned. I wasn't even trying for it, right?

The next morning, while searching for a lost shoe under the bed, reaching, stretching, and finally grabbing it, I came up facing the trophy shelf.

The door was closed again.

Normally, I keep the front door and the window in the back door open. I get a nice cross-breeze through the screens. I only close the doors and windows when the heater is on—that's two weeks in February—or when the air conditioner is on—that's April through October.

But I am not so obsessive-compulsive as to close the front door of a sculpture inside a glass case in my bedroom because I'm worried about the draft. That would be overkill.

Maybe there was a spring in the door—?

No. It's just on a hinge. There's no way it could be closing itself. An interesting mystery, yes?

I reopened the little door and went off in search of coffee.

The next morning, the door to the House of Usher was closed again.

Okay, this was becoming annoying.

To tell the truth, I didn't care anymore if the door was open or closed. I just didn't like the not-knowing.

Remember the expensive camera I took to Italy? The one that caught that strange unexplainable photo? There's an attachment for it that clicks off photos at preset intervals, so you can do time-lapse photography. I installed a 128-gigabyte SD card (talk about your future shock), locked down the tripod with duct tape, strategically placed a couple of LED lights, pointed and focused the camera, and left the device to snap exposures once per second.

Then I reopened the door.

I slept in the back room that night, just me and the stacks of boxes containing files, books, CDs, and DVDs. It was the first night in a week I didn't have a disturbing dream.

In the morning I felt more alive than I had in a long time. Even before coffee. By the time I remembered I'd left the camera running, the SD card was filled with just a smidge more than 25,600 photos, over seven hours of surveillance.

Popped the card into the computer, copied the photos over to an empty hard drive—yes, I do have that kind of gear close to hand, that's why my friends call this place Electric Davidland—and skimmed through them.

The photos were time-stamped, of course. That's automatic. The first hour's worth of photos showed the door on the little mansion open. Then, shortly after one in the morning, it closed. I examined the photos carefully—a series of sixty-seven separate shots showing the door slowly closing. You could barely tell the difference between one photo and the next, but cumulatively—there was the evidence that I wasn't crazy. The door was actually closing. At one photo per second, it had taken over a minute for the front door of the haunted mansion to swing shut.

Maybe it was a trick of the light, maybe it was a shadow, maybe it was just dirt or a reflection on the glass case, or an artifact of the LED lights perhaps—but maybe also there was an impression of darkness in the photos, a vague blur, an intimation of something else in the picture—something behind the door, just out of sight.

Maybe something was pulling the door closed. But just as likely, maybe the way the door was mounted in the frame, not quite straight, caused it to swing shut by itself. I had a closet door like that when I was a kid—only that one always swung open. No, I wasn't afraid the monster was opening it, most of the monsters were scared of me by then. I was more concerned the nighttime closet might open onto some terrible dark world from which I might never return. That's why I was so concerned with keeping the door all the way closed, pushing it to catch with a satisfying click.

I hate mysteries. I hate not-knowing. I hate the unexplainable. It annoys the hell out of me because it shatters my sense of the orderliness of the universe. The universe is a vast incomprehensible machine, but it's only incomprehensible because it's vast—not because it's incomprehensible. At least, that's what I want to believe.

I considered my options.

I could tinker in Photoshop, adjusting contrast and levels and brightness, attempting to enhance the details of some of the photos.

I could set up the camera again, with better lighting—this time taking twelve photos per second and wirelessly sending them directly to the computer's hard drive.

I could also answer the phone, check my email, skim through Facebook, feed Dogzilla, do some laundry, pay the phone bill, rip a few CDs to my music player, get new shock absorbers for the car, go to a movie, finish unpacking my suitcase (no, I had not yet emptied it), return my editor's phone calls, or even get back to work on that book.

It's all about priorities.

Coffee first. Then shower. Then errands.

I have a rule. I have to get out of the house every day—even if it's just long enough to empty the mailbox. Then all the other minutiae of life. Like more coffee. And writing. Especially writing. And coffee.

So I put the mystery on the Scarlett O'Hara list. ("Fiddle-dee-dee. I'll think about it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.") Maybe I could Google it later. "Why does the door on my Stoker Award close by itself?" I wonder how many others have asked that question on Google. (I have a bucket-list fantasy, that on December 29, 2017, Google will have a logo celebrating the 50th anniversary of that episode of that TV show, with tribbles falling down the whole page until it fills up with purring furballs.) (I do have a smidge of ADHD, why do you ask?)

But see, this is how life works. You're so busy living it, you don't notice what's really happening around you. Human beings are trapped in the bubble of real-time. We can't perceive things that happen too fast—like kids growing up—and we can't perceive things that happen too slow—like waiting for the line to move.

Later, after another 1797 words on The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello, I wasn't thinking about anything at all. I turned off all the lights, then stumbled through the dark toward my bedroom.

I keep thinking that I want to wire up the house with smart lights that turn themselves on when you enter a room and off again when you exit—but if I had done that, I would have missed the little flash.

My bedroom is at the end of a short hall that passes the bathroom on the left. Visible from the hall, straight ahead, is the glass shelf where I've stashed the trophy. Maybe it was—no, I don't know what it was—but just as I started down the hall, I thought I saw a tiny light in an upstairs window of the little mansion. It flickered out so quickly I wasn't sure I'd seen anything at all.

Astronauts on the International Space Station have reported seeing flashes of light inside their eyes, even when their eyes are closed. So far, the best explanation is that cosmic rays are causing it. Maybe it's Cherenkov radiation created when the cosmic-ray particles pass through the vitreous humor of the eye. Or it could be some kind of interaction with the optic nerve or even the visual centers of the brain. It has to be one of those things—because I don't think there's a little haunted mansion on the International Space Station. And I'm pretty sure I was not hit by a cosmic ray. Okay, maybe I could have been, but the timing was awfully suspicious.

I was too tired to worry about it just then. I was so tired I barely noticed. All I wanted was that part of the bed Dogzilla wasn't claiming. It wasn't until after I had sprawled, rearranged the pillows, sprawled again, and gotten into a position that passed for comfortable, staring upward into darkness, that I realized I had actually seen something.

Or maybe not.

Memory plays tricks, rewriting experiences, filtering and tweaking and hammering the relentless torrent of stimuli into convenient and comfortable patterns. Except the flicker hadn't been either convenient or comfortable.

I saw what I saw—a quick glimmer of light in a second-story window. Very quick and mysterious. And ominous too.

"Right," I said to the darkness. "I knew I was going to get senile someday. I just didn't know it would be today." Yes, Gordon, I'm long past the point where dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse is an option—neither one of those now—but I like to think I'm not so decrepit as to need a keeper. Just the same, these unexplainable little moments were enough to create the first glimmers of self-doubt.

When my mother turned ninety, the Department of Motor Vehicles renewed her license automatically. Not a good idea. We'd seen her drive, and her Buick had multiple dents and dings. We called a family meeting and decided to alert the DMV that Mom was now driving by ear. They called her in for a driving test and another mobile accident zone was subsequently removed from the streets of the San Fernando Valley. I only mention this because my son has now begun looking at me oddly and insisting that he drive me wherever I have to go. So, maybe.…

For some reason, Dogzilla decided not to colonize the bed. I was alone. I fell asleep thinking about breakfast. I could have my usual oatmeal with boysenberry syrup, or maybe I could walk around the corner to the local diner and have bacon and eggs. Decisions, always decisions. That's why so many writers are alcoholics—writing is all about decisions, all day long, even if most of those decisions are, "Nope, that's not it either."

I slept badly. I dreamt I was in a twilight landscape, maybe a snow-covered plain with black and barren trees twisted like claws. Maybe a row of empty and forgotten buildings off to one side. The town square of a small deserted settlement? He was there, the ever-present companion. I don't know who he is. Mostly he's friendly, but sometimes he's just a bystander. He's a little taller than me. Always a dark indistinct shape. This time, there was something wrong. We were moving forward, toward a very close horizon—

And then a gigantic face came up at the edge of the world, filling the eastern sky—it was a horrible white face, with angry glaring eyes and a dark growling mouth. We were tiny people in a tabletop town and the hideous apparition was an enraged giant child hell-bent on vengeance—

I came awake gasping.

It took me a long time to fall asleep again.

In the morning, the mirror accused me of zombie cosplay without any need for makeup. My reflection looked gaunt and wasted, pale skin, dark circles under the eyes—almost as scary as the face in my dream. I felt weak, even a little woozy, and thought about going back to bed. But no—

The only good news, the scale said I'd lost a pound and a half since yesterday. And that was even before the porcelain performance.

The computer had rebooted itself in the middle of the night. Maybe it was Crash Tuesday. Microsoft had pushed another set of patches requiring a forced restart. It shouldn't have—I'm very careful about my settings when I upgrade. I'd gone to the group policy editor and set the do-not-reboot flag, I'd opened up regedit and added the appropriate do-not-reboot DWORD to the registry. I'd even gone to Windows Update settings and told it not to restart after updating without my permission.

But the machine had rebooted anyway.

I didn't lose any work. The [SAVE] key is my friend. I back up my work in six different places. That's the only advantage to having CDO. I mention this, Gordon, because this was one more of those moments of uncertainty that made me wonder if I was gaslighting myself.

I had a pitch meeting in the afternoon, so most of the morning was spent printing out leave-behinds. And because unlike the [SAVE] key, the 405 is not my friend, or anyone else's for that matter, I had to leave ninety minutes early.

Of course, the meeting was a disaster. My agent and I were talking to a committee of five, all fetuses-in-suits, none of whom had the authority to open a checkbook, and none of whom were interested in working with someone who looked like their grandfather, plus I was speaking into the shallow mindset that looks only to the previous season instead of the next. "That sci-fi stuff always gets canceled in the first season. Do you have anything with vampires or serial killers or cannibals?" Why do I even bother?

Returning home, it was now rush hour—another two hours in the car, with traffic inching forward like a herd of spastic snails and my lower back sending me little reminders that I was not going to rest well this evening—but I did get a long, lovely view of a gorgeous brown twilight over the Federal Building in Westwood while listening to the entirety of Marin Alsop's high-spirited rendition of Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony, the "Organ Symphony," and that was some respite—the music, not the view. It wasn't until we finally crawled past the Getty Center off-ramp that traffic began moving as fast as an elderly bicyclist again.

By the time I got home, it was a quarter-past Jeopardy, and I had just enough energy for a grilled-cheese sandwich. I must have been feeling my age, Gordon—because I went to bed without staying up for Elementary. It was a rerun anyway. Dogzilla refused to join me, preferring instead to camp out on the couch.

Have you ever been so tired you can't sleep? This was one of those nights. My mind churning like an unmixed metaphor. Will it blend? Nope, not this one. I felt like I was too tired even to die.

That's when I heard it.

The little rustling.

This is an old house. Older than I. There are holes in the walls, holes under the eaves giving access to the attic, holes under the foundation too. From time to time, the Chinese restaurant across the alley attracts unwanted nightlife of the order rodentia. Every few years, we get a family of freeloading tenants. I can tell by the chewing noises—usually right over my bed—Mama Rat is making a nest.

Before Dogzilla there was Kiki, the tuxedo cat. Mama Rat would have maybe a week of free rent. Then she gets to be a gift on the front porch. But once, during a particularly rainy February (a rarity in California, it made the Guinness book), the litter had a few weeks of grace—so when Kiki was finally able to resume patrolling, we found a young rat on the porch every day for a week, and Mama Rat on Sunday.

Kiki was also very good at removing gophers from the front lawn, the back garden, and all the neighbors' yards for half a block in all directions. When Kiki died, so did the unbroken greenery of the landscape.

Dogzilla has the enthusiasm for the job, but not the patience to sit and watch a gopher hole for hour after hour. Cats seem to be perpetually stoned while dogs are hardwired with their own personal methamphetamines.

I've lived here long enough, I'm familiar with all the different noises of the neighborhood, especially the noises that come from the attic over my bed or under the floorboards or even once in a while, inside the walls.

This wasn't any of those noises.

It wasn't like any sound I could describe or compare it to. Howard Phillips Lovecraft would have had the appropriate vocabulary. He never met a befouled unearthly adjective rising from the elemental depths of an eldritch language that he didn't like, but the best I can come up with is that it sounded like several very small things moving around inside a very strange little house.

Putting up tiny curtains? Rearranging diminutive pieces of furniture? Preparing minuscule place settings for a feast of roast spider?

I raised myself up just enough to look over at the shelf.

As I did, all the lights in all the little windows went out, one by one, as if something inside was hurriedly rushing around, snuffing out tiny candles and lamps.

I flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

No. Just no.

I did not need this.

Not now.

After everything else I've been through—

No.

I'd have to tell Dr. Morgan—but I didn't dare tell Dr. Morgan.

Either my meds have stopped working and I'm losing my grip on reality—or my meds are working and reality is losing its grip on me. Either way, I'm in trouble.

I raised up on my elbow again. The lights were out in the little House of Usher, the door was closed, and everything was silent.

Gordon, you know how you pause sometimes—like your brain has just frozen up? And all you can do is just breathe? Kind of like Oliver Hardy just after Stan Laurel has come up with something surreal?

Hardy, very patiently: "Nothing is impossible, Stanley."

Stanley thinks. "I know something that's impossible."

Hardy, slightly exasperated: "What?"

Stanley, brightly: "Striking a match on a bar of soap."

Hardy looks to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, as if to ask, "Why? Just why?"

That was me. Very Oliver Hardy.

Why can't I be Bugs Bunny once in a while? Nothing fazes the wabbit.

I sank back onto the pillow. I stared up at the ceiling again and pretended everything was normal. I'm good at that. When all else fails—fake it.

I went back to plotting the gay erotic novel I would probably never write. I was still trying to figure out how to justify the establishment of a monosexual culture. I had a good start though. The colony isn't self-sufficient yet. There aren't the resources to support pregnant women and babies. And there might be unknown pathogens, particularly virulent for women. So emigration has to be one-way. No return tickets. We can't risk any kind of contamination coming back. And we can grow babies in bottles. So there's a cultural argument about whether or not we should grow female infants or stay all-male. But that's not the story, just the background. The story has to be about a reluctant colonist learning to fit in—

I dreamt I was trying to get away from something, trying to hide. I had to go to a tiny little room at the back of an unfamiliar house, and then scrooch down on the floor so I could twist through a vent into an impossible closet, through a tiny slot down to an underground room, where I would have to open a door in the floor and take the narrow stairs—so dark the bottom seemed a gloomy black pit—all the way down to the deep deep basement below, where behind the heavy shelves there was a heavy wooden door, old and ornate, that had to be unlocked, and it creaked when I pushed it open, and now I was descending on spiraling stone steps, pushing aside cobwebs—I could barely see, I had to grab a torch from the wall, but I kept going, I had to keep going down, I had to hide from the—

Came awake, puzzled.

I thought I heard a scream. Inside my head. High-pitched and unearthly. A little like an old-fashioned train whistle or the safety valve of an industrial steam engine, but also like that hideous shrieking noise in the stage version of Sweeney Todd. (What was Sondheim thinking anyway?) If banshees were real, this was what they would sound like. Horrible and unreal—but faint and faraway while still piercing the inside of my skull through my ears.

The Internet tells me that the internal auditory meatus (also internal acoustic canal, or IAC) is a canal in the petrous part of the temporal bone of the skull, on each side, that serves as the passageway for the cranial nerves, namely cranial nerve VII and cranial nerve VIII, and for the labyrinthine artery between the middle and inner ear. This does not explain why I felt as if Chuckles the Clown had shoved icicles into my head from both sides simultaneously.

I looked over at the clock. Not quite three.

I glanced to the shelf.

The house was silent.

Sure, now.

I did not fall asleep again. Instead, I tossed, turned, wrestled with the pillow, thought about redheads, tossed and turned some more, got up to pee, rearranged the bedclothes, thought about buying a better mattress, and eventually, finally, just as dawn was breaking wind, fell asleep again. The next time I awoke, it was afternoon and Dogzilla was frantic about the possibility of starving to death.

The mirror showed me the reflection of a corpse. I now looked like my driver's license picture. The old joke had come true. Driver's license pictures look like they do so it's easier to identify the body. Mine was still ambulant, but only because even after death, you still have to pee.

The good news? Yes, there was some. The scale reported that I had lost another two pounds. Well, one point nine, actually—but I could round up. Apparently, the cost of my weight loss was a corresponding loss of my so-called "boyish good looks." By the time I hit my target weight, I would be ready to star in a found-footage film about demonic possession.

After coffee and shower and more coffee and a walk outside to see if the rest of the world was still there—I realized I had hit another one of those empty moments. That thing some people call "writer's block." There's nothing there. Nothing to say. Nothing to share. As if everything has been flushed away, yet the fill tank remains empty. (Not the best metaphor, no, but the most appropriate one for the feeling.)

I suppose this is a good place to talk about Chuck, the Bad Luck Fairy.

As much as I want to believe in a deterministic universe, an orderly explainable machine, there are two arguments that work to test that belief.

The first argument is that the universe is so vast—practically infinite—anything is possible. No matter how impressively the odds may be stacked against it, the size of the universe guarantees that the event or phenomenon is still inevitable somewhere.

Imagine that the universe has several godzillion clusters. And each of those clusters contains several godzillion galaxies. And those galaxies are made up of several godzillion stars. And each of those stars has maybe a half-dozen planets. Do the math. We're talking six-times-godzillion-cubed.

If the odds against something happening in a six-times-godzillion cubed universe are a hundred godzillion to one, then the thing has already occurred somewhere in the universe—at least a few million times. It's not impossible, it's only uncommon. You and I exist because this is the place in the vast universe where the universe worked in such a way as to cause us to exist.

Taking that thought one step further…things that operate beyond the boundaries of the immediately explainable are inevitable if this is one of those places where things can operate beyond the boundaries of the immediately explainable.

The other argument against the deterministic universe is much simpler. The universe is not orderly and explainable at all.

In either case, the existence of Chuck, the Bad Luck Fairy, is evidence.

Chuck was a real person. I'm not making this up.

During that time in my life when I still thought I could work my body into reasonably attractive shape, I joined a gym. Chuck was the "pusher." The pusher was the guy who went around exhorting people to do extra repetitions. "Push! Push! Push!"

He wasn't very good at his job, mostly he stood around and flirted, but he did look the part—that was probably why they cast him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, blond, and well tanned. He had a near-perfect athletic build, gleaming white teeth, and a smile like a honey-trap—he was the ideal California surfer-dude. You could have put him in a Pepsi ad. As long as you didn't ask him to move, as long as all you needed him to do was stand still and look good, he was ideal.

But as soon as he started to move—or speak—disaster trailed in his wake like a drag queen's feather boa.

Let me explain this. I'll get back to Chuck shortly.

One of the greatest drag performers of the twentieth century was Charles Pierce. He was legendary. His repertoire of diva impersonations set the standard. He was a better Bette Davis than the original, complete with cigarette holder and curled upper lip. He would walk out on stage in his All About Eve dress and wig and bright red lipstick—and just stare at the audience until the applause finally subsided. ("You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead…. Good.")

In 1975, or maybe it was '76, it was after my stint on Land of the Lost, Charles Pierce did a one-night stand at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—the most beautiful theater in Los Angeles. The place was the very definition of elegance.

Also on the bill was Sally Rand, the world's most famous burlesque star. She was seventy-something years, still in stunning shape, and still touring with her legendary fan dance—and the bubble dance too!

The fan dance was performed with two ostrich feathers—and not much else, maybe a tiara. Wikipedia says the nudity was an illusion—if so, then Ms. Rand's skill was to demonstrate that the imagination is far more powerful than the fact. The bubble dance was an equally graceful exercise performed with a giant balloon.

Of sidereal interest, in a later conversation Robert A. Heinlein told me that he knew Sally Rand. He had been an admirer of her terpsichore in his earlier days. (I had to go home and look up the word "terpsichore." I was disappointed to find out it meant dance.)

Anyway, back to Charles Pierce.

The theater was sold out, packed with mostly gay men from all over Southern California. This was going to be a legendary evening.

The stage was empty, a large bare space. No scenery, just a black curtain and a spotlight. After an overture that was more fanfare than overture, Charles Pierce strode out, looking like a pumped-up Mae West on steroids, blond wig towering higher than Yeoman Janice Rand at her most extreme, silver-sequined gown glittering like a news anchor's smile. Enough rhinestones and sequins and faux-diamonds to blind the first six rows. And a feather boa that stretched the length of the stage—and to prove it, Pierce strode across the full width of the stage trailing that impossible accessory behind him, then back again.

When the applause finally ended, Pierce said—in his normal voice—"Some people say I dress like a woman." He paused, looked out at the audience, then added, "Now tell me. Have you ever seen a woman dress like this?"

It was the kind of moment that defines "show-stopper."

For the finale, after Ms. Rand's astonishing bubble dance, Pierce returned as Jeannette MacDonald in a gaudy belle-of-the-ball confection that still defies description—I won't even try. Perched on a high flower-entwined swing that came out over the audience, Pierce sang "San Francisco" to the delight and laughter of the audience. The laughter came when he reached the farthest forward part of the swing and spread his legs wide apart revealing multiple petticoats and horrendously frilly pantaloons. There are some things that once seen cannot be unseen.

Anyway, the point of this digression was to acknowledge Pierce's feather boa, which stretched at least the full width of the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—and back. (Pierce called it "Dotty's Place." Dorothy Chandler was still alive and active in the performing arts community in those days. I don't know if she was in attendance that night or what she might have thought about the evening's somewhat unorthodox performances, but if I wore a hat, I'd have to tip it in her honor. It was a great night.)

So when I say that Chuck trailed bad luck behind him like a drag queen's feather boa, I do not mean just any drag queen. I mean like Charles Pierce strutting the full width of the giant stage of Dotty's Place hauling behind an accoutrement so extravagant it becomes the stuff of legends. When Chuck moved through a life, you could hear things breaking, one after the other—mirrors, tables, motorcycles, agreements, hopes, and especially hearts. Everywhere he went, he left a trail of breakage.

I'm not sure he did it intentionally. I don't think he understood. He was like the toddler who walks unnoticed between the adults' legs and scoops out a chunk of someone else's birthday cake before the candles have been lit. He's having so much fun, chocolate and icing all over his face, that he doesn't comprehend the dismay he's causing outside of the locus of his consciousness.

I didn't realize any of this immediately. Like every other human being caught up in his sparkle zone, I was enchanted just by being in the charmfield of such a beautiful charismatic being.

And when this same beautiful, charismatic being found out that I was a writer-producer with genuine television credits ( that episode of that TV show), he was suddenly my best friend.

And in the three weeks that followed:

The director of the low-budget movie I had written (as a favor) found a really nice cave in the San Bernardino mountains and wanted the T-Rex to come tiptoeing out of it, sneaking up on the resting heroine. When I explained to him how a T-Rex tiptoes, he fired me and asked for his money back.

Negotiations for a film adaptation of my space-war novel collapsed when I found out the ambitious little twerp who had appointed himself producer had written his own version of the script behind my back—in violation of Writers Guild rules, thereby breaching the entire contract.

The engine on my new car blew up because the service department had failed to refill the oil after draining it.

And finally, the fellow I had been dating (and thinking about getting serious with) abruptly became Chuck's new boyfriend.

Okay, now you can argue that except for that last bit, Chuck was nowhere near any of those other events, but—the only thing that had changed in my life was the presence of Chuck. The way he moved through a room of people was reawakening three decades of self-esteem issues and doubt. And if you believe that how you perceive the universe has an effect on how it behaves around you—like a sociomorphic transmutation field, like a metaforming presence—then all of this had to be the result of allowing Chuck to affect my thinking.

It wasn't just the disruption of my burgeoning relationship that convinced me Chuck was the Bad Luck Fairy. It was the fact that for the next six weeks, I couldn't get a date—and that was because apparently I was still moving in the same social circles as Chuck. The chucklesphere was pernicious.

And I wasn't the only one caught in it.

The closer you got to Chuck, the worse your life became. While I was never eligible to join the growing club of Chuck's ex-boyfriends, I knew several Survivors of Chuck who attended weekly support group meetings. They experienced calamities much worse than mine. They reported mysterious comings and goings of strangers, financial losses, career misfortunes, economic disasters, stolen property, bizarre illnesses and infestations, deceased pets, evictions, and the occasional visitation of crab lice.

I could go on. I won't. This should be sufficient. There exists empirical evidence that Chuck [last name redacted] was—and if he's still alive, still is—a locus of bad things happening.

In my mind, Chuck has earned a justifiable literary immortality as a catalyst of catastrophe. So whenever bad luck occurs anywhere, I ascribe it to the presence of Chuck, the Bad Luck Fairy. As a personal exercise in revenge, launching this meme into the growing ecology of urban legends is far better than any conceivable work therapy from the outpatient clinic.

I did see Chuck one more time. Ironically, it was at the aforementioned event at Dotty's Place. I turned around in line and there he was. I nodded a polite hello—and his boyfriend du jour grabbed his arm possessively and said, if you can believe it, "He's mine!"

I replied, "Yes, please," and moved on.

A dozen other possible replies, ranging from "Good luck with that" to "I'm so sorry for you" did not escape my lips, but rattled around in my consciousness for a few moments, like ball bearings in an empty steel drum. Perhaps my classes in social skills were starting to work and I was actually practicing courtesy that night.

Apparently the boyfriend du jour still believed he had caught something other than a social disease. But his moment of possessiveness suggested that on some subconscious level even he understood that his relationship with Chuck was doomed to be transitory. His proprietory claim had an air of desperation.

I mention all of this because…if I can believe in an ambulatory nexus of misfortune, then shouldn't it be equally easy for me to believe in a small haunted mansion?

It would explain a lot of the weirdness at the World Horror Convention. They knew.

The award is cursed.

It makes perfect sense. Even a replica of the House of Usher is haunted.

Just like birdhouses attract birds, little haunted houses attract itty-bitty ghosts. Or equivalent supernatural entities. Some kind of diminutive ghoulies? Why do ghosts always have to be human-sized? Do rats have ghosts too? Cockroaches? (Do cockroach ghosts have to go toward the light…? That must be confusing.)

Apparently I was the only award recipient unaware of the situation. No wonder the other recipients were saying, "I don't deserve this," and, "Why me?" It was probably funny, or ironic, or a relief, to the other nominees that I was now the proud owner of a haunted trophy inhabited by little skittering things.

There was only one thing to do.

I called Uncle Harlan.

Actually, first I made a cup of coffee and updated my will. Then I called Harlan.

In the past, he would have answered with a harsh, "Yeah, what is it?" But now—no.

No, he has not mellowed. He has Caller ID. He knows who's calling before he answers—or chooses not to answer. But usually Sharon, his assistant, answers. Or sometimes Susan. They're always pleasant to talk to.

This time: "Yeah, kiddo. What do you need?"

"I need—uh, I have to ask you a question. You know I won the Stoker Award last week—"

"You did?" Pause. "Congratulations." Longer pause. "You know, I have five Stoker Awards."

"Yes, I know. I also know there's a difference between quantity and quality."

"You don't really want to go there, do you…?" he asked ominously.

"Uh, no. That's not why I called. I have to ask you something. While I was there I told everyone the story of how you designed the award and Steve Kirk sculpted it. Some of them looked at me like I was a child who still believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Or Trickle-Down Economics."

Harlan said, "Yeah…?"

"So what's the truth about the award?"

Longest pause. "Just what I told you, kid."

"Uh-huh. And since then, I've lost seven pounds, I look like John Hurt without makeup. I keep hearing strange little skittering noises at night. And I saw a light on in one of the second story windows—all that was missing was a tiny distraught heroine in her nightgown, running away in horror in the foreground, like the cover of an old romance novel. And all this started when I brought the award home and put it on my shelf. So what's really going on?"

"I can't tell you—"

"You have five of these things, Harlan."

"They hate me. They really hate me."

"Yes, I know. Now I want to know what I did that they hate me too."

"It was just your turn in the barrel. That's all. Consider it evidence that you've made it, that you've scratched your mark on literary history. All your success earns you an extra little bear to cross."

"I already have enough bears. And if I need more, I can go to Silverlake." I took a breath. "I need to know, Harlan. Please. I'm serious."

His turn to take a breath. His tone softened. He stopped being H*A*R*L*A*N and turned back into Uncle Harlan, the person only The Chosen Few are privileged to know. "Can you keep a secret?"

"Of course, I can. I've never told anyone where writers really get their ideas. I haven't revealed my sister's real age. And no one will ever know what really happened to the piece of birthday cake with Shatner's face on it."

"Okay," he said. "Those were for practice. This one you have to take to your grave. If you breathe a word of this, if you even write a syllable about it, it will be a yearly event that we dig you up and slap your face."

"I'm planning on being cremated. With 'Light My Fire' playing."

"That's beside the point. This is for real, David. I mean it. We're talking about things that man was not meant to know. Nor woman either. Eldritch horrors, the whole enchilada."

Something in his tone of voice—I resisted the urge for a snappy comeback about eldritch horrors and Mexican food.

"Okay," I said. And meant it.

He began slowly. It took the better part of an hour. I said little, except to punctuate the conversation with an occasional "Uh-huh" or "Oh my Ghu!"

Gordon, I can say this much—because I've already said it. The story about Harlan designing the award, the story about Steve Kirk sculpting it—that's true, but not the whole truth. There's more.

But I cannot repeat any of the rest of that conversation with Harlan. Not here. Not anywhere. I cannot even write it down in my own journal, lest my son or some other innocent finds it. (Well, my son isn't that innocent anymore, but you know what I mean.)

I'm truly sorry that I ever told Harlan I could keep a secret. This is one secret I do not want to know.

I know a lot of secrets. I've stumbled into a lot of arcane knowledge in my career.

I know that most of the UFO conspiracy theories are really cover stories deliberately created by the government to distract attention from some very advanced technology the Air Force has been developing since World War II. Foo fighters, anyone?

I know who had sex with who on the International Space Station (and no, it wasn't all hetero)—for the record, some positions are unworkable, it's a matter of leverage and having something to push against.

I know why the Stargate TV series kept getting renewed for so many years—it was to flood all the Internet search engines with distracting links so it would be almost impossible for anyone to find information on a very very top-secret program—the one that does Very Very Bad Things, code-named "Stargate."

And I know the real reason Tom Lehrer abruptly stopped writing funny songs.

But this—I don't want to know this. It's wrong. And I am so sorry I asked. I wish there was enough brain bleach in the world to erase the paralyzing memory.

Those who know anything at all about this—this phenomenon, this circumstance, this condition of the reality we swim in—have learned an interesting skill: the ability to talk about anything and everything—everything except the thing they're not supposed to talk about. It's a bit like painting a picture of the scenery around an elephant, leaving only an elephant-shaped white space in the middle. Even that much is dangerous—an astute observer might be able to figure out from what hasn't been said, what's really being said.

It's a bad idea to look too closely. This is something you don't want to know.

I can tell you this much, because any astute observer would have noticed it already.

Some of the scenery around the white space:

*   *   *

Einstein's last words. His nurse was American and he was speaking German.

The strange cold spot in the lobby of the Bradbury building.

A mysterious manuscript carbon-dated to the early fifteenth century—one that still resists all attempts at translation.

The continuing swarms of earthquakes up and down the California coast, but especially in the northwest corner of the nation.

The disappearance of Ambrose Bierce in 1913. And possibly the later disappearance of Amelia Earhart as well.

The Yellowstone Caldera.

Nikola Tesla.

Why the Kola Borehole was abandoned, and what the recordings from it revealed when you filtered out the screaming.

The missing eighteen and a half minutes.

That unnerving hum at Taos, New Mexico.

Bob Dylan.

What Howard Phillips Lovecraft didn't write about.

Why 205 out of 274 anchor rods on the new Oakland Bay Bridge have slipped out of alignment.

What cats see up in the corner of the room, near the ceiling, that we can't.

Egg crates.

*   *   *

Here's the question to consider.

If that's the scenery in the background, what's in the foreground?

There are very few people who have seen the whole picture. I'm not one of them. Neither is Harlan. He told me only the smallest bit, only the part I needed to know.

Maybe no one knows all of it. Maybe those who do know have gone insane. Maybe the best that anyone can know is just a quick sideways glimpse out of the corner of the eye, seen in passing, and imprinting a horrible uncertainty on the solidity of the world.

This much.

The Stoker Award.

Handing out trophies is the organization's way of giving away pieces of… it. They're trying to dilute a particularly intense buildup of… it.

The unwritten rule is this. If you're going to write a certain kind of story—what we think of as horror stories—then you are accepting a share of the responsibility.

You just don't want too much of it.

Stephen King was hit by a van after winning a truckload of those things. And Harlan's own health issues didn't clear up until he moved all of his into one of the lead-lined secret rooms underneath—Never mind, I can't divulge that part.

Maybe this explains why some of the founding members quit the Horror Writers Association shortly after they started handing out awards. Yes, there's a cover story. There's always a cover story.

Anyway.

That's the simple version.

That's what Harlan told me. The rest—I wish I'd stopped him in time. But you can't. No one can. It's impossible. He's a force of nature. All you can do is listen and get sucked in.

When Harlan starts talking, he's a charismasaur. He generates a spectacular reality field around himself, so powerful it distorts the physical universe. It's why the neighbors' pot plants grow so well and the coyotes in Sherman Oaks are so wary.

Dr. Morgan says that every author does this, rearranges reality, some more than others. Successful authors transform the material universe. The stories they tell overwhelm not only belief, but evidence as well. And the effect is cumulative. Like an avalanche. Lots of little pebbles—one pebble can't hurt you. All the pebbles can smash you. The more authors who add their weight to the conversation—no, I can't say any more. I'll digress, deliberately. Maybe you can extrapolate something just from what I've written. But whatever you extrapolate, it isn't.

Think of the blind men and the elephant. The part we found is deep and squooshy. There's more. So much more—

Never mind, I'll go somewhere else now.

Think about this. The greatest authors of all hammer the world with a unique voice, distinct and powerful and immediately recognizable. Think about it. Not just Harlan, but Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert A. Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Jack Vance, Terry Pratchett, E. E. "Doc" Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and more, all the way back to Petronius.

The world we live in is not the world we started in.

That might be part of my chronic despondency—the pernicious knowledge that I will never achieve that kind of brand identity. I'm not sure I want it, I think I'm happier being relatively unknown, but even if I did want it, I can't have it. It's too late. I am not going to be a part of changing it back. Not in a good way.

Bear with me, Gordon. Another digression here. Necessary.

My first two years in college, I was an art major. I got just good enough to realize I would never be good enough. But one semester, in one of the drawing and painting classes, I had an instructor—I don't even remember his name—who changed my life forever.

It worked like this. On Monday, we would look at the work of a specific artist. He'd darken the room and project hundreds of slides onto a faded screen. Sometimes the whole painting, sometimes close-ups of the details. We looked at Rouault, Seurat, Henry Moore, van Gogh, Picasso, and more.

Each of these artists had a distinctly individual style. Rouault painted portraits and nudes outlined by thick black lines. Seurat assembled exquisite landscapes out of thousands and thousands of tiny dots of color—he invented the pixel. Moore sculpted rounded shapes, sometimes with holes through them—mysterious blobs of significance. Picasso sliced reality into planes, disassembling and reassembling, sliding the pieces around like a savage jigsaw puzzle.

And van Gogh—oh my god, van Gogh—he slashed at the canvas as if his brush was a knife, but it was really a scalpel carving light. He didn't paint scenery or objects, he revealed luminance. A splash of orange becomes the glow of a gas lamp. The face of a cat dissolves in shimmering outlines. Violent stabs of black evoke the flight of crows over a field of shining yellow wheat. Van Gogh was uncovering the hallucinatory world that hides beneath the safe veneer of sight.

That was Monday, a different artist each week.

Then, for the rest of the week, we'd draw or paint in that artist's style. Every week a different artist. The job wasn't to become that artist, but to understand what he saw and the way he recreated it on canvas. It was to free us from the limitations of our own perceptions. It was to expand our abilities to explore so we could create our own artistic identities. Friday, we'd finish and critique.

As I said, I got just good enough to realize I would never be good enough.

So I turned my attention to Journalism and Creative Writing. I thought I might have more skill there. Besides, it looked easy. Sit and type, right? Hah!

Very quickly, the Creative Writing instructor told me I was wasting my time. I had no talent. I would never be any good. He might have been right, but as it turned out, I was also a lousy listener. By the time I was willing to recognize the truth of his observation, it was too late. I was already supporting myself in the genre.

And that's when the bear trap of the art class snapped shut on my leg.

I don't know how it is for other newbies, but for me—I felt like a toddler staring up at the legs of giants. I wanted to know how Heinlein made his worlds so believable, how Vance was able to create such intricate and baroque landscapes with just a few brushstrokes of language, how Zenna Henderson got inside the souls of her characters so deeply. I wanted to know how Delany made words sparkle, how Sturgeon made them sing, and how Ellison made them burn.

So I tried the same thing we'd done in art class.

I tried putting on other authors' styles. No, that's wrong. I tried to put myself into their way of seeing and evoke the same moods and constructions. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't—I have a couple of Nebula nominations for the most ambitious of my failures.

Not having a style of my own, not having a voice, I fell into the trap of inventing a different voice for each new effort—an actor's trick, I would become the character I was writing and I'd write in his voice. Unless it was a sequel, I never wrote the same voice twice. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Which is why I have no voice of my own. No brand. No nothing. No power.

Dr. Morgan disagrees with me. He's been reading everything I've written for the past ten years. (Ever since that business with the strange green boy.) He has to. It's part of the court agreement.

He says I do have a voice.

Yes, I still have self-esteem issues left over from an awkward adolescence, and until I accept myself and take ownership of my issues, I will remain stuck repeating the same hallucinatory patterns, but he also says the way I ramble lazily through my narratives, dredging up memories like unplugging a clogged toilet, is a voice—I'm turning into the self-deprecating Marcel Proust of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (If I don't say it, someone else will—probably that creepy little critic who gnaws at my ankle from time to time.)

Dr. Morgan thinks he's right—but I'm just as certain he's not.

All the digressions in this narrative, Gordon? They're not digressions. They're part of the larger pattern. The thing that Harlan wasn't talking about.

If you can see it.

If anyone can see it.

Okay, the local answer? I have to accept that we live in a world where these things not only occur—they're commonplace.

There really are green people living in the northwest. That thing on the train was real. The entanglement device worked. And no, I'm not hearing things. There is something inside the Stoker Award.

I have my own personal evidence. I've been losing nearly two pounds a day, I look like the cover of a classic E. C. comic, but I'm less than two weeks away from my target weight, so I'll keep the trophy on the shelf for another twenty pounds.

After that—I do have to find a safe place for it. I can't throw it into the ocean. Harlan warned me about that. There are prohibitions. Something about the Environmental Protection Agency and ectoplasmic pollution control.

Gotta stop now, Gordon.

There's someone knocking at the door. It's probably my son. He says I look gaunt. He's here to take me to the doctor. I'll have to get back to you later, I'm still working on the other story, yes. You'll see it soon.

Just one last thing—the question that after an hour-long phone call, Harlan still hadn't answered.

What's really inside that little house?

Who am I living with?

And who— or what ?—was lying next to me in my bed last night?

All best.

Your pal,

David Gerrold

Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful

By Gregor Hartmann | 6444 words

Gregor Hartmann makes his living translating Japanese patents, mainly dealing with materials science and nanotechnology, into English. Although he disavows any specific connection between this story and recent research, it demonstrates a keen awareness of the way that scientific projects started for one purpose often lead to other unexpected applications. And, sometimes, unintended consequences.

I APPRECIATE HAVING A chance to respond to the charges against me. Walking around with a federal tracking device clamped on my left ankle is humiliating. More modern than a ball and chain, I guess, but not a good conversation starter. The other day in Berkeley I saw a car broken down beside the road. Trying to be helpful, I offered to take a look under the hood. When the driver noticed my tracker, he rolled up the window and locked the doors. So I slunk away.

Could things have gone differently? I ask myself that question every day.

My part in the disaster began when I walked into Materials Science Corporation in Fremont. The first thing I noticed was how clean the building smelled. To be precise, how it didn't smell. Since MatSciCo specialized in extremely tiny structures, the air was scrubbed to remove dust, pollen, flakes of skin, molecules of aftershave—all microscopic particles. I have asthma, so I'm very sensitive to air pollution. The fumes from a wood-burning fire, which most people enjoy? Poison gas, to me. Scouts do a lot of camping. If it hadn't been for the darn campfires, I'm sure I would've made Eagle. At MatSciCo I took one deep breath of pure empty nothing and felt at home.

Waiting in the lobby was Dr. Vikram Karmarkar, my new boss. Bird-of-paradise silk shirt. Ironic red-framed eyeglasses. Slacks with a knife-edge crease. None of the physicists I'd met in college dressed so stylishly. Grinning, he ceremoniously presented me with an ID badge and intranet access fob. "Welcome to the Surface Phenomena Lab," he trilled. English was his third language (after Marathi and Hindi); he spoke with a Bollywood lilt.

I mumbled something inane. It was my first job; I was afraid of screwing up.

"No need to be nervous, Jimmy. You wheel have much fun. We are shallow here in the Surface Phenomena Lab. It is our motto. We keep things superficial. "

I laughed, and relaxed a little.

A blond man approached, wearing a blue polo shirt with the company logo. Vik introduced him as Reed Maloney. "Reed is our business overlord. He controls our budget. Anything you want, just ask. He loves signing big checks for equipment that wheel be obsolete in two years."

"Unless you break it first," Reed huffed. He was as pale as Vik was dark. He shook my hand with both of his, making the greeting twice as official. "You respect capital equipment?"

"Machines and I get along," I said.

"Good. You want the straight scoop, come to me, not Dr. Goofball here. He's a theoretician. Prone to puffing up with hot air and floating away."

Instead of being offended, Vik rose to his toes and pretended to be floating. He tiptoed off, zigzagging from side to side as if he were a balloon drifting on the breeze.

Reed sighed. "Do what you can to keep him in line. The lab could use some gravitas."

I gulped. I was twenty-one? Fresh out of school? But I knew what I had to say.

"Can do," I vowed.

"Good man." He hesitated, then clapped me on the shoulder. A routine gesture, but he did it self-consciously, as if trying a new yoga move he'd read about.

Vik's project was to bond without using an adhesive. In fields like semiconductors and optical connectors it's a sexy topic. He was experimenting with etching tiny ridges and valleys in two extremely flat surfaces. Tiny as in nanometer: a billionth of a meter. Put the surfaces together, mesh the valleys and ridges, and the two objects would cling using only intermolecular forces.

Neat, huh? No glue. In the micro-world, glue is evil. No matter how small the amount, when glue heats up, some of its components might vaporize or liquefy and damage the device it's in. If Vik could discover a simple and cheap way to bond two surfaces without an adhesive, MatSciCo could license the process and cash in.

They gave me a fancy title which essentially amounted to "technician." One of my tasks was to help Vik by operating the electron beam gun that tested his ideas. Does "gun" make you think bang-bang ? Actually, an electron beam gun is a big, stationary apparatus that fires a stream of electrons at a target. Electrons don't have much mass, but when a lot of them move at half the speed of light, the beam packs a punch. I wrote complicated programs that controlled the beam path, how long a particular point was irradiated, how long or short the pulses were. Once the program was written, I loaded the target into the vacuum chamber, evacuated it to high vacuum, then pushed the start button. In the Silicon Valley hierarchy, technician isn't much better than janitor, but the craft appealed to me. Also, I'm an introvert. I found it easier to work with a machine than with techies who were always trying to outsmart each other.

Since the electron beam generated heat, a fan cooled the target when it emerged from the chamber. That's how Vik discovered the phenomenon he named chromagenesis.

One day, I zapped an aluminum block with Beemer, our German-made electron gun. I extracted the block from the vacuum chamber and put it under the fan. While we were waiting for it to cool, Vik noticed a blue haze on the aluminum. Faint, but distinctly blue. I figured it was a side effect of the alloy elements in the aluminum. Vik was intrigued. When the metal cooled, he examined it with a scanning electron microscope. The color had vanished.

At first he thought the blue haze was caused by heat. Yet under the right conditions it appeared even when the metal was cold. Vik made me zap different aluminum alloys etched with the same pattern. He deduced the alloy wasn't the key variable, it was the grooves. Eventually he realized the blue only appeared when air was moving over the engraved aluminum. Why? he wondered.

Reed thought Vik was wasting time. In his ground state, Reed was an affable Mormon whose idea of fun was a fifty-kilometer bike ride through the hills behind Fremont. Unfortunately, he was taking a management class at San Jose State. Every Saturday he learned a new management style; every Monday he came in and tried it on us. One week he showed family photos and was artificially friendly. Another week he flipped the other way and acted tough. I especially hated the week he became a Chinese-style business sage. If I had a question, I wanted an answer, not a cryptic quote from Sun Tzu.

When Reed realized how much time Vik was spending on the mysterious blue color, he told him to stop. A contract milestone was near; we were ordered to focus on bonding. Vik promised to do so—and sneaked in on Sundays to experiment. Since Vik was the idea man and I was his "gun boy" who could actually run Beemer without blowing up a cathode cartridge, Vik coaxed me to help. Which wasn't hard. I was a Tenderfoot at MatSciCo and eager to learn. So I was in the lab the Sunday Reed busted us.

We were watching gauges and waiting for the pumps to thin the air in the chamber so the electron beam wouldn't lose focus. Vik was gleefully explaining how he coded expense reports to outwit Reed when you-know-who sauntered in.

We froze.

Reed peered around, careful not to touch anything, like a cop who didn't want to contaminate the crime scene. He heaved a dramatic sigh and gave us a smug look.

"Eighty-three percent of the money going into this lab is federal. I have to account for every dollar. If you have purchased even one piece of unauthorized equipment, one piece, you have defrauded the U.S. Government, an offense punishable by two to five years in prison."

I was terrified. Two months into my first job and I was a felon? I felt faint.

Vik, bless him, was not intimidated. "Oh, bugger," he said. "You spoiled my surprise." He made a comically sad face.

Reed was suspicious. "What surprise?"

"I was going to do a demo for you tomorrow. After the staff meeting. Actually, I was thinking about doing it before the staff meeting. Reed, my friend, you wheel be very happy at what I have discovered. You wheel be able to make very big plans now. Very big plans."

"How so?"

With astounding calmness, Vik stepped to the whiteboard and uncapped a blue Magic Marker. I don't know if he'd already figured it out or if at that very instant he put the pieces together and solved the puzzle. Either way, he was magnificent.

Vik explained that when air flows over a flat surface, the triboelectric effect briefly strips an electron from the outer shell of an N 2 molecule. To maintain octet stability, the molecule shares an electron with another N 2 molecule, which in turn shares with another N 2 molecule, and so on. Normally, collisions quickly knock them apart. But if the tiny ridges and valleys in the aluminum block had a certain pattern, they shaped the airflow so that density variations let more molecules hook up, creating self-assembling N 2 quasi-crystalline aggregations. The tiny blobs didn't last long. But! During their brief lives they refracted light. Because they were so small, they happened to refract short-wavelength light, around 475 nm, a blue wavelength. Given enough airflow, so many tiny blobs formed that they became visible to the naked eye as a blue mist. Vik sprinkled dots on the whiteboard like a sudden spring shower.

I thought the info was too technical for a business guy, but Vik knew how to pitch. His impromptu presentation was like a dog whistle. Reed heard frequencies I couldn't. As Vik explained, Reed started to sense commercial possibilities. I could practically see the pupils of his eyes become dollar signs.

Since Vik was the theoretician and I was the technician, it came to pass that I was authorized to build a "chromator." The first product, the "ColorFall," was installed at a mall in Palo Alto. The chromator was mounted high on a boring wall in the Grand Court. A hidden fan moved air over a surface etched with the pattern of ridges and valleys that created tiny "bubbles" (a term insisted on by our PR people, who hated "self-assembling N 2 quasi-crystalline aggregations" for some reason). Blue mist trickled down the wall, cascaded over a nest of smooth, round stones, and vanished.

The slowly descending mist was as soothing as a waterfall, only safer. No leaks, no splatter. No water to mop up. No one would ever slip in a puddle and sue the mall. Our machine produced a waterfall that was blueberry-pie blue, Nordic-eye blue, state-fair-ribbon blue. When a bubble disintegrated, it went back to being N 2 molecules, otherwise known as the main component of air, so the color magically melted away. Tired shoppers gathered to stare and be soothed. The mall had to set up rope lines like at Disneyland.

I was watching people enjoy the ColorFall when Reed came up beside me. "Well done, Jimmy," he said.

"Thanks. I'm glad it worked. But there's something that bothers me."

"What?"

"I heard you tell reporters that the rocks came from Japan? From a stream on a sacred mountain?"

"Yes?"

"Didn't you actually buy them from a landscaper in Cupertino?"

Reed became less smiley. He glanced around to see who was in earshot.

"Jimmy, sometimes in business we have to take shortcuts. I did think about ordering special stones from Japan, but that would have delayed the opening. They look great, don't they? They really enhance the waterfall effect."

"Sure." Although I didn't want to appear naive, I felt I had to object. "But isn't honesty the best policy?"

"Not always," he said, frankly. "Look. We're creating an illusion here. The blue mist pretending to be a waterfall is an illusion. The provenance of the stones is an illusion. So the illusions are in sync, right?"

My skepticism showed. He tried a different tack.

"Reporters are lazy. I bet you a thousand dollars not one of them will bother to check."

He went on in this vein until I finally pretended to agree, just to shut him up. I knew businessmen weren't as honest as scientists, but I hated having my nose rubbed in the fact. I mention this conversation because in retrospect I see that the situation was a fork in the trail. I had a choice, and I went down the wrong path.

The ColorFall made Vik a hero at MatSciCo. He had noticed a subtle phenomenon and monetized it. To keep the buzz going, he repackaged the ColorFall and "invented" the ColorSpring. This time, the chromator pattern was etched inside a hollow cylinder. It was just a ColorFall rolled into a tube and planted on a base. A fan inside the base blew air upward, creating a little blue fountain. Our generation's lava lamp, Gizmodo proclaimed.

A simple engineering tweak. I made a comment about how trite it was, and Vik got mad. The average scientist is lucky to have one good idea in a lifetime, he said, so you must be prepared to milk it. Like squeezing five papers out of a single experiment. When the chance comes, squeeze hard.

He certainly exploited the situation. As scientific discoveries went, his was not going to change the world (or so we thought at the time), but it was pretty. Perfect for TV and the Internet. Vik went from anonymous researcher to TEDx guru faster than you can say "chromagenesis." He was all over the media.

The weirdest place he popped up was on the Cartoon Network, which launched a show with a character obviously based on him. The "Karmic Avenger" was a dark man who wore a turban with a jewel that shot a ray of blue light. His crime-fighting sidekicks were a tiger, an elephant, and a monkey with a British accent. Borderline racist, but Vik was flattered. So I called the Cartoon Network and talked them into giving me one of their life-size stand-up promotional figures. We sprang it on Vik one Monday at the staff meeting. Everyone was in on the joke. We told him there was a new hire he had to meet. Waving blue LED flashlights and singing the theme song, we marched in the Karmic Avenger. Vik fell out of his chair laughing.

The adhesion contract was dumped on another group with less clout. Our team was dedicated to bubbles. All bubbles, 24/7. Reed did some behind-the-scenes magic, and presto! The Surface Phenomena Lab turned into the Chromagenic Product Development Group. Bigger head-count, more office space. Raises! I immediately opened the spreadsheet where I calculated when my student loans would be paid off. I plugged in my new salary, and lo! Freedom From Debt Day (F2D2) dropped from age forty-one to thirty-six. So yes, as you're obviously thinking, I did have a personal financial stake in not preventing the disaster.

We threw a party to celebrate our ascension. Friday afternoon, in the conference room. Reed praised the great work we were doing, predicted that "group" was just the start; we were destined to become a division. Heady stuff, to jeans-and-T-shirt techies. Instead of his usual corporate casual, Reed suited up for the occasion. I don't know if he learned it in his management class or figured it out on his own, but the suave executive-suite look was one pose I liked. It was exactly the right touch. As if we techies were a scruffy indie band, and Reed was our classy business manager. Not cool, like us, but able to negotiate with other suits and land us big gigs.

For the finale, he stepped to a display stand where something flat and rectangular was hidden. With a flourish, he whipped off the cover to reveal a logo. Four concentric circles, radiating spokes, orbiting clusters of dots. All blue, of course. Caribbean-island-resort blue, private-jet sky blue. We applauded with startling sincerity.

Vik and I were trying to decode the logo's symbolism when Reed approached. "What do you think?" He beamed.

"It reminds me of a mandala," Vik said.

"A what?"

"A religious symbol to Hindus and Buddhists. A kind of circuit diagram of the cosmos. Reed, my friend, does your bishop know you are promoting a non-Mormon religion?"

Reed sniffed. "I think he'll understand. You okay with solid blue? We could make it madras instead."

Vik winced. His degrees were from Madras University, which wasn't as prestigious as the Indian Institutes of Technology. It was a sore point with him.

To retaliate, Vik coaxed Reed to explain what the logo represented. Reed had no clue. He tried to wing it. Big mistake. Neither of us corrected him, but Vik's smirk made it obvious that Reed didn't know a photon from a proton. He blushed, stammered an excuse, walked away.

I thought Vik was being mean. Reed was an ambitious accountant, not a technology guy. But when Vik held out his glass to clink, I clinked.

Our very own logo. How cool was that?

Then complaints started coming in.

A chromator made quasi-crystals out of N 2 molecules, which amount to about three-fourths of air. You might wonder: what happened to the unused O 2 molecules? Did they vanish? No. The O 2 remained as an oxygen-enriched zone around the blue mist. Which was generally not a problem—until an open flame entered this zone. Cigarettes, lighters, candles, bongs, fondue-pot heaters…a lot of open flame occurs in our high-tech world. Flame + O 2  -> burns and bad publicity.

I felt we should apologize. Silly me. Reed unleashed the lawyers, ordered them to deny all claims. He said people with personal injuries were con artists. MatSciCo had a few tough weeks when the tabloids called us "MatPsycho."

The controversy blew over. We added a warning label and kept shipping products. It's amazing what you can get away with behind small print. It reminded me of a tent my Scout troop bought once. It came with a label that said, "Not for use outdoors."

Still, I felt guilty.

I went to Vik's office. Success had earned him a real office rather than a cubicle like mine. To nurture his genius, one wall sported a set of shelves holding expensive orchids; a gardener misted them twice a week and removed wilted blossoms that might impact Vik's creativity.

"What if someone really gets hurt?" I said.

"People shouldn't smoke. It's a disgusting habit."

"But suppose someone put a ColorSpring in the kitchen, next to a gas oven—"

Vik waved his hand as if my fears were gnats to be brushed away. "You worry too much, Jimmy."

"What if—"

"What if the inventor of the laser pointer had been afraid people would point it at commercial aircraft? He would have suppressed his idea, and civilization would not have the marvelous and versatile laser pointer." He plucked one out of the pen holder on his desk and made a red dot travel around the walls. It came to rest on a tabloid front page he'd had framed; it showed Vik as Dr. Frankenstein, with lightning bolts coming out of his fingers. The bright red dot made a high-tech caste mark on his forehead.

I worked with Vik every day, so I had many rides on the Karmarkar emotional carousel. Vik believed in ghosts, Pilates, and moisturizer. In the span of minutes he could go from a riff on kinetic diameter to how to determine a lucky number (his was nine). He would prepare for an important presentation by obsessing over what cufflinks to wear. He could burn up an hour trying on gold, silver, gold again, asking my opinion, then waltz in and wing the presentation. Sometimes I felt like his valet. I suppose there are worse jobs than being valet to a capricious physicist, but were the skills I was learning transferable?

Also, it bugged me to be treated like a pair of gloves in a clean-room wall. Vik acted like he was the brain and I was the hands carrying out the brain's orders. He had no clue how hard it was to translate his theories into material structures. He liked powerful math, and if the math said jump, matter was supposed to say, "How high?"

Our new project was to create bubbles in more colors. Blue bubbles were discovered first because small bubbles formed relatively easily. We never did achieve purple, because aggregations that would have refracted purple light were so tiny that intermolecular collisions knocked them apart too quickly. But in a few months, by adjusting the microstructure, I managed to create slightly larger bubbles, big enough to refract green light. I made bubbles sized to appear leprechaun emerald green, primeval-forest moss green. The project stalled for a while. Then I achieved yellow. School-bus yellow, Inca-gold yellow. Orange bubbles existed so briefly they were barely perceptible and red was downright impossible. Red light, which starts at a wavelength of about 625 nm, isn't that much longer than the 475 nm of blue, but since bubble volume increases by a cubing factor, it was impossible to channel airflow into large aggregations that would hold together.

Trying to make Vik's ideas work was getting harder. An electron beam doesn't remove material very quickly, so to make a bigger groove the beam has to stay on a spot longer. Even though that was happening in a vacuum, aluminum atoms that ablated off the target formed a pseudo-gas that got in the way. So I made Beemer strafe the target like a Messerschmitt, to give the gas time to disperse between bursts, which resulted in grooves with scalloped edges, which required more machining.… The struggle to balance all the variables reminded me of a joke a professor told once: engineers don't solve problems, they replace old problems with new ones.

Reed pushed everyone in our group to work faster, harder, longer. Some people he motivated via money. With others he talked aesthetics, or scientific achievement, or defeating a rival company. Somehow he figured out that I regretted not making Eagle, and pitched what I was doing as part of the citizenship requirement. Better late than never, right? He even gave me the Scout salute. I hated being spun, but he was so enthusiastic I couldn't help saluting back.

I know, I know. I could have resisted. To tell the truth, I liked the intensity. The MatSciCo building felt like a spaceship on a mission. Artificial light. The omnipresent hum of machines meditating at 60 Hz. Pure air. Despite terrible stress, I could go for a week without puffing on my inhaler. My chest had never felt so clear. There were nights when I slept on an inflatable mattress in the lab rather return to my apartment, because going home would mean stepping outside MatSciCo. California was having a bad drought, and inhaling dust made my lungs feel like vacuum cleaner bags.

Too bad our spaceship was going in circles, getting nowhere.

One Monday there was a staff meeting with yelling, attacks, defensiveness, threats. Vik and Reed, leaders of opposing forces, glared at each other from opposite ends of the long conference table in an Engineering versus Marketing standoff. I don't like conflict. Normally in that situation I would just sit and hope no one noticed me. But I couldn't stand the fighting. I had to speak up.

I slapped the table to get their attention. "We need to appeal to a higher power," I announced.

Everyone looked at me in surprise. Jimmy could speak?

Back in Scout days, when we were in a bind, we were not ashamed to bend our heads in prayer. I knew that wouldn't play at MatSciCo. Too many different creeds, some militant atheists, plus engineers who claimed they were Jedi.

Fortunately, there was an alternative higher power everyone could accept.

We still had the Karmic Avenger promotional figure propped up in a corner of the conference room, a silent presence at our meetings. I knelt before it.

"Karmic Avenger, we need your help." I extended my arms and pressed my head to the floor. "Use your blue power ray to dispel the evil forces that cloud our minds! Please, help us work together!"

No one said anything.

Then two more people who were sick of the bickering came over and knelt beside me. "Karmic Avenger, help us," they pleaded.

Others joined in. When the corner became too crowded, people threw coins, bowed their heads to the table. Someone began to sing the theme song and everyone joined in. Vik and Reed stayed hunkered down at opposite ends of the table, acting stern, but you could see them struggling not to smile. Finally they shrugged and held out a hand to each other, as if to say, "Crazy kids." The animosity evaporated.

The next day in the cafeteria, I was about to tuck into a sandwich: wild boar ham, Gruyere cheese, on sourdough bread—MatSciCo had excellent chow, another reason not to leave the spaceship. Suddenly, inspiration hit. Make TWO flat surfaces etched with matching patterns and mate them with the flat substrate on the outside and the grooves on the inside. N 2 molecules forced into the channels would have to interact. Even if the outer shells tried to repel one another, they couldn't get away. I fired up Beemer and made a test structure. Tiny tunnels with larger chambers at the right spacing—the sucker made red mist like Santa's magic wand.

This final pattern took us to the long-wavelength end of the visible spectrum. Once I had a pattern for each color, I combined patterns and made a chromator that put out ribbons of mist like a rainbow. My prototype was rushed to the contractor that did the mass fabrication, and I finally got to relax. Reed slapped me on the back, talked about commissioning a new logo. As a down payment, we all got coffee cups with rainbows.

We were on the top of the world!

For about two weeks.

The catch was, anybody could buy one of our products and reverse-engineer it. Well, anybody who knew how to use an atomic force microscope. Which turned out to be a lot of people. The microstructure was complicated, but replicable.

MatSciCo had applied for a patent. Big deal. Pattern designs circulated on the Internet. Search on YouTube and you could find a hundred how-to videos. High school students built them for science fair projects. Dance clubs ditched their fog machines and installed DIY chromators so people could frolic in colorful clouds. (No smoking!)

Some clever tinkerer realized that instead of moving air over a stationary chromator using a fan, you could achieve the same effect by moving a chromator through stationary air. Small motion-activated products appeared. People put them on cars and skateboards and zoomed around leaving colored trails like in comic books.

Oh, how I wish we had quit at that point. We could have been magnanimous and let the technology pass into public domain. By then, however, even we techies were following the weekly sales reports. Reed was still talking mega buckaroos. When sales started to fall, we could see our IPO going down the drain. People at other high-tech companies were cashing in, and it drove us crazy. I personally was obsessed with F2D2. On my computer screen, a countdown clock told me exactly how many years, weeks, and days remained until I was free from debt. I was desperate to see that happen.

Reed came into the lab one night when I was up late, struggling to make a new idea work. He didn't say anything. Just eased into a chair and watched me program. He had no way to verify what I was really doing; he just took it on faith that I was being a dutiful employee.

Normally that would have been true with a straight-arrow like me. But I was pissed that my name wasn't on the patent application. I had so much control over what happened down in nano-land that I was toying with the thought of signing my name, like the masons who signed the backs of the stones that went into cathedrals. If I signed in an unused area, my signature wouldn't affect the output. It was strange to be contemplating high-tech tagging, since one of my Scout projects was cleaning graffiti off public buildings, but that shows you how mad I was.

"Where's Vik?" Reed inquired.

"At a Giants game. Throwing the first pitch."

"I didn't know he liked baseball."

"He doesn't. He says it's the mutant bastard spawn of cricket, and should be outlawed."

"Then why did he go?"

"TV cameras."

Vik had become A-list in rainbow-loving San Francisco. He rode in the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade, on a float that left a sparkling trail like a flamboyant comet. Celebrity stuff was way more fun than working. Besides, with chromagenesis on his resume, he was set for life. There was an office pool on what he'd do when his contract expired: pry a huge raise out of MatSciCo, or take a better deal somewhere else?

Sensing my bitterness, Reed told a story about his Mormon missionary days. He spent two years knocking on doors in Nigeria, getting absolutely nowhere. Kids threw garbage. Adults sicced dogs on him. When someone finally took an interest, he was thrilled. Reed was sure he was going to make his first convert. Turned out the guy just wanted free English lessons. I pretended to appreciate his wisdom, but boy was I sick of patience.

Now that I knew Reed better, I figured he would have been content to teach high school math and ride his bike on weekends. But his father and uncles were successful businessmen and he felt obliged to uphold the family tradition. His attempts at different management styles were like Vik trying on jewelry. Eventually he'd find the right one.

Reed thought the next big breakthrough would be making bubbles more durable. An absurd notion, the sort of nonsense you'd expect from a nontechnical person. A durable bubble? That's not a bubble. It was, however, an intriguing challenge.

We had been manipulating the outer shell of N 2 molecules by using the triboelectric effect to strip an electron. Aluminum is very conductive; it's a great place to stash electrons. Now, suppose I built tiny "wires," grounded to the aluminum substrate, using a material with even higher conductivity? Silver would be best, but it was expensive. Copper was almost as conductive, yet cheap. So I experimented.

An electron beam is not the right tool for constructing a wire. However, if I started with an aluminum alloy that contained copper, I could zap the lighter aluminum atoms and send them flying away, leaving the heavier copper atoms behind to gradually form copper-rich structures by subtraction. Structures like tiny electron traps, to swipe more electrons from N 2 molecules. If I could strip a second electron, the N 2 molecules would interlink more tightly as they attempted to maintain octet stability, and consequently last longer.

Chemistry, I must confess, is not my strong suit. In engineering school I did the absolute minimum to satisfy the requirements, then never looked back. Now I was so immersed in the minutiae of N 2 molecules that I dreamed I was running through a tunnel, being chased by a swarm of carnivorous N 2 molecules like blue Pac-Men. Gnashing jaws coming closer, closer—

I awoke sweating, with an idea for a configuration that might work.

My demo occurred late one Saturday night. Vik and Reed came to the lab, to hover and fret while I adjusted the prototype. I had labored over the goddamn pattern for days. I was running poor Beemer so hard that dead cathode cartridges were piled on the testbench. From a weary distance, my entire body numb, I watched my hands make the final tweaks to the prototype as if they were two little men acting on their own. Was this how a robot would feel? A tool with awareness, but still a tool?

Reed and Vik had obviously been arguing about something before they came into the lab, and were trying to hide it, like parents who don't want to fight in front of the children. An odd couple, those two. Rivals for power. But when threatened from the outside, they closed ranks and protected each other. I had heard Vik tell an outright lie about physics to back up some bullshit Reed had fed to the venture capitalists. Did I bust him? Of course not. I thought we were moving too fast, but I wanted that IPO. My shares of founder's stock would make F2D2 come before I was twenty-five.

When I was ready, I turned to Reed and Vik. "Wanna do the honors?" I mumbled.

They glanced at each other. They both wanted to, but came to the same conclusion: Jimmy is about to snap. Placate Jimmy.

"You do it," Vik said. "You have the magic touch."

Oh, you noticed ? Angrily, I punched the power button. A fan began to purr.

No pretty packaging at this stage. The prototype looked like a hockey puck with a silver chimney soldered on. Air was sucked in from vents in the periphery of the disk and whirled up inside the aluminum tube where my new pattern was engraved.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then a puff of blue vapor emerged from the "chimney."

I'd gone back to blue, glacier-ice blue, drowning-man blue, because smaller bubbles were easier to manipulate than the large red ones. If my approach worked with blue, it would scale across the spectrum.

Blue fumes rose from the chromator, which puffed like a Smurf factory. The blue cloud hit the ceiling and spread out. Vik's lips moved as he counted the seconds. As the blue cloud thickened instead of dissipating, a grin split his face. Reed's jaw hung open in a goofy smile. None of us said anything. It was too perfect a moment. I turned off the chromator and we watched the blue cloud snuggle against the ceiling. Minutes ticked by with minimal evaporation. Wearily I accepted high-fives.

Looking back, I suppose we should have thought about the consequences of truly durable bubbles. What would happen if they didn't pop in a few minutes? Suppose they lasted for hours. Or days. Or…

But we didn't do enough testing. We were in a rush to fulfill the promises Reed had made to investors. The new product looked like a planter, like a fancy urn for growing artisanal bamboo. Sit it in your yard and turn it on, and it generated a tall rainbow spray like an alien fern from Planet Crayola. We priced it absurdly high to appeal to nouveau-riche techies, the alpha consumer in Silicon Valley. For the rollout, the MatSciCo building had searchlights in the parking lot, like a Hollywood premiere, each beam a different color. I had to work, but I saw Vik on the TV news, riding down Market Street on a fire engine, throwing rainbow bead necklaces to the crowds as if it were Mardi Gras.

Shortly thereafter, the bubbles really hit the fan.

Driving to work, I noticed the sun looked dim. The air was hazy, like when an inversion traps pollution. But the haze was colored, as if a candy factory had burned down. Lemon-yellow here, blueberry there. Multi-hued clouds blew across the road like a dust storm made of Lifesaver particles. With a sinking feeling I continued on. At MatSciCo, white TV news trucks had surrounded the building like a pack of media hyenas. I huddled in my car, afraid to get out.

How did we screw up?

Since MatSciCo created extremely small structures, the air inside the building had to be kept extremely clean. In that environment, durable bubbles lasted only ten or fifteen minutes. In the wild, the same mechanism that kept bubbles from disintegrating made them incorporate dust and become too stable. Because of the drought, there was lots of dust. It wasn't obvious immediately because wind dispersed the bubbles from the planters, so they appeared to evaporate. Actually, the bubbles were spreading. In a few days, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco were enveloped in rainbow smog. Cars had to drive slowly with their headlights on. An astronaut in the International Space Station took what became an iconic photo: the Bay Area apparently buried in cotton candy.

Turning off the planters stopped the supply of new bubbles but had no effect on the bubbles already loose in the area. Life in Northern California ground to a halt. People had to wear face masks when they went outside. Flash fires made the air smoky. We didn't know it yet, but the hit to the economy would lead to the "MatSciCo Recession." Reed blamed the techies who bought too many of our products. Nice try. We were living in the lab, gratefully breathing pure filtered air, desperately brainstorming, when the FBI stormed in and dragged us out in handcuffs.

Which brings us to my predicament today.

According to the lawyers, if I pin the blame on Vik and Reed, the government will go easy on me. Present myself as a minion, the lawyers say, and testify against them. It was my first job. I didn't know better. I vas juss follovink awders.

Tempting. Reed and Vik used me; it would serve them right if I turned star witness. In my presence they said things that sounded awful, even in context. I could nail those two so bad.…

But that would be dishonest. I had had many chances to slow or halt our mad rush to Bubble-geddon. Instead, I went along with their schemes. I was so proud of my skill with Beemer that I didn't think about what I was being used for. That was wrong. I must man up and take responsibility for my part in the disaster.

When you decide my penalty, I have a suggestion, Your Honor. Instead of sending me to prison, sentence me to do a lecture tour.

Silicon Valley is full of smart people working hard, fast, disruptively. I am the perfect person to say: Slow down! Think about what you're doing! I will speak to those smart nerds and warn them of the danger of being swept away by a cool idea. Yes, I will say, you want to parlay your cleverness into big buckaroos. Of course you want to IPO, get rich, buy a personal hovercraft. But think twice or you might end up like me: hobbling about with shame clamped around your ankle.

Standing beside me as I speak will be the figure of the Karmic Avenger. An amusing prop at first, a visual reminder of Dr. Vikram Karmarkar's rise to fame and fall to pariah. But as I tell my tale, the audience will come to see it as evidence of the working of karma. So be careful! Or karma will flatten you like an Acme steamroller.

Vik explained karma in different ways on different days, depending on his mood. The concept that stuck with me was that what happens to you today is the result of your actions in the past.

And now, I throw myself on the mercy of the Court.

Spells Are Easy If You Have the Right Psychic Energy

By Dominica Phetteplace | 3037 words

Over the past five years, Dominica Phetteplace has built a reputation for writing sharply observed character-driven stories in magazines like Asimov's and Clarkesworld. We're happy to introduce her to readers of F&SF with this story about love and magic and finding your own way.

1. THIRTY-ONE RESOLUTIONS

SHAPE WHITE MODELING clay into a heart and while it is still wet, place thirty-one sewing needles in it. They should radiate from the center like spokes from a wheel, points in, eyes out.

Once the clay is dry, thread a red string through each eye. This will be difficult; tweezers will help. The outline of the thread should approximate a jagged heart. Soak the thread in kerosene and light it on fire. The spell is cast.

The Thirty-one Resolutions Spell is supposed to resolve thirty-one situations or open questions. The night I performed it, I dreamt I had purged myself of a tiny, scary slug. A good omen, I think?

The next day, I found a missing earring. But that's not why I performed the spell. I performed the spell to help me dump James. To give me a deadline.

But aside from the earring, nothing really resolved the whole month, and after thirty-one days, we were still together.

2. LOVE SPELL

In order to do your Love Spell, you have to know what your spirit tree is. Everybody has one, but it will change over the course of your life. Take a small branch or piece of bark from your spirit tree and boil it to capture its essence. This will be the base of your love potion. The other ingredients are cinnamon and rosewater. That's it. (Beware potions with too many ingredients—they never work. Remember that your main ingredient is your intent.) Wear the potion; feed your lover honey. Put your hand on his heart and seal him.

The problem with sealing is that I didn't know how to unseal. I've tried different things. Nothing has worked; maybe I just didn't have the right intent.

The first person I ever sealed was my high school boyfriend Ben. He was a skinny boy with brown eyes that could warm me from the inside. He did graffiti in sketchbooks and on bare walls. Once I sealed him, he began to write my name, Hruta, in giant letters. Or he would draw me, but in his version, my brown skin was lavender and my black hair brown, and my too-far-apart eyes were balanced by a tiny button nose. In his version, my lips were puckered and off to the side, as if I was up to no good.

I never should have sealed him or anyone else. I was fifteen and not beautiful. I thought it was the only way to get a boy to like me. But then I kept doing it, because it was easy, and fun.

3. BEAUTY

There is no spell to make you beautiful to the larger world. It is too hard to change everyone's minds. A Love Spell can make you beautiful to one person. And one person is enough. Or it ought to be.

I never should have performed one Love Spell, let alone seven. Being not-beautiful is no excuse. Plenty of people are not-beautiful; they manage to find someone. Inner beauty is what's key. A woman who performs seven Love Spells is not beautiful on the inside.

4. THIRTY-ONE RESOLUTIONS, PART TWO

If at first you don't succeed, thread the needle again. Light it on fire again.

So I did it again, but James still comes around. Still brings me flowers and red wine on Friday nights, even though I am tired of his face. And yesterday, Ben sent me a picture of his latest creation, a graffiti mural depicting the solar system. I have asked him to stop writing my name on walls, and he mostly has. It's a distinct name, so it's implicating. The police have visited me on more than occasion.

"Are you Hruta?" I am, unfortunately.

Today I got an email from this guy I used to know, Eric. We had a couple of sexual encounters senior year of high school that were highly meaningful for him but embarrassing for me.

The message started out by asking how I was, but thereafter turned into an expression of regret. He was sorry for the way things went between us. (Me too.) He hoped he hadn't hurt me. (No, not in any sense of the word.)

Then.

Then he worried that he had taken advantage of me. He apologized. Said he missed me but understood if I never wanted to see him again.

How to tell him that it was me who coerced him? I had him lick honey from my fingertips. I didn't ask for his consent. And how to make amends now, I don't know.

I wrote Eric back to tell him that he was better than he remembered. That I thought of him fondly. That I was happily involved in a polyamorous marriage, two partners and seven kids. None of it was true, but I hoped it would scare him away.

5. MONEY SPELL

An essence of orange peel and bergamot, prepared with the right intent, can make others more generous toward you.

My mother created a trust fund for me, so I never needed to work. But I wanted to anyway. I got a job at a Starbucks, and soon after I was hired, tips shot way up. I had to fine-tune my essence. If I made it too powerful, customers would empty their pockets and sign over their savings on their credit card slips.

We split all the tips evenly, so my coworkers saw their wages rise to a middle-class income for the first time. It made the awful scheduling practices tolerable. This was my version of communism.

I worked in one of the many Financial District locations up until a few weeks ago. The FiDi branch was fun; men and woman in suits left hundred-dollar tips on corporate credit cards. The best kind of thief is one who steals from other thieves.

But once I decided to give up the kind of magic that manipulates other people's emotions, there was no point in working there. I hope my former coworkers are getting along all right.

6. FORGIVENESS SPELL

Not a spell to get someone else to forgive you. This is a spell to help you forgive someone else. Under a full moon, lie down naked in wet grass; place one spirit crystal on each chakra point. As you chant om, send your chakra energy to the moon. Receive healing energy back.

Healing magic can be pretty silly and it mostly doesn't work, otherwise there'd be no cancer or eczema. It is somehow easier to manipulate a person's mind than it is their body. My mother has some bullshit explanation for this. She's a Professor of Witchcraft, which means she has a bullshit explanation for most of life's mysteries. In addition to being tenured faculty at a non-accredited institution, my mother has a "Prosperity Witchcraft" practice. Her practice is why I have my trust fund.

That I asked to meet with her is a sign of how much I want to be a good person, whatever that is.

Meetings between us are always tense, but I thought the spell might help me forgive her. I don't think it worked.

I reclined in my first-class seat on my flight to Oslo, wearing designer pajamas and bunny slippers, with the vague sense that I would have to give all of this up if I truly wanted to become a better person.

Sometimes I wonder if magic is even real. Maybe it's not, and all my transgressions are imagined and all our money is just due to random good luck. Then I wouldn't have to change anything about my life except my belief system. Wouldn't that be nice?

But in my heart, I know it is real. I can feel it.

Some of the spells I cast don't work because they are fraudulent and some of them don't work because my energy is not in tune with the energy of the Universe. But the Universe definitely has a special energy, and that special energy is what we call magic.

My mother looks much younger than she is, but this is not due to magic; rather to an expensive skin-care regimen. She hugged me tightly when she saw me.

"Hruta, Hruta, Hruta." She said it like a chant. Maybe it was a chant. Maybe she was performing a spell right there, in the airport.

The driver delivered us to the school, and we had tea and smørrebord in the faculty lounge.

"So what do you need help with?" she asked.

"I don't need help," I said.

"Then why are you here?"

Crystals, chakras, full moon, om, I told myself. Forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.

"I do need help," I said. "I need to undo a Love Spell."

"I told you not to mess around with Love Magic."

"You never told me that!" I was mostly raised by her apprentices. "You always expected me to figure things out for myself."

"Well, I don't know anything about Love Magic," she said.

Obviously. I would have said that out loud if I didn't need her help. My mother has never taken a lover or spouse, as far as I know. No man or woman, husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend.

I have asked about my father. She says I don't have one, that I was conceived through parthenogenesis. When I ask her where we are from, she says we are from Eden, descended from Eve. That Genesis story of expulsion was an exaggeration. Only Adam had to leave. Eve stayed and birthed our distaff. She is still there, but the location must be kept secret. I don't get to know because I have not bound myself by oath to the coven.

My mother is wealthy and white; I am brown and know nothing about my origins. This leads me to believe I was actually adopted from some Third World orphanage. This is the only explanation that makes sense to me.

7. FORGIVENESS SPELL, ALTERNATE VERSION

Baptize yourself in a volcanic spring. Make sure you are wearing your Aura crystal when you do this.

All the men I have loved were handsome artists. They were beautiful; they created beautiful things. I have no beauty; I create nothing. Ben writes me love letters on highway overpasses. Eric writes fiction about disappointed, dark-haired girls. James, current boyfriend, future former love, does data visualization. He munges his data until the plots approximate the contours of my face. His spreadsheets seem to know everything about me except the contents of my heart.

There are others; I forget their names even as they stalk me on Twitter. I will write their names down. I will make a list. I will free them one by one.

My Aura crystal is a twenty-three-carat emerald. Something about the Norwegian mineral water weakened the chain I wore around my neck, and during my moonlight self-baptism/swim, I lost it.

But I wasn't even mad and I didn't go looking for it. Let it be my offering to the Universe. Let the spell work. Let me forgive myself.

8. LOVE SPELL, PART 2

"My advice is to stop with the Love Magic."

"I'm trying to stop. That's why I need a Love Reversal Spell."

"Love Reversal is still Love Magic. Stop. Give it up."

"But there are all these guys!"

"I thought you said it was just one guy."

"I lied. I am a bad person and I lie. And I need help," I said.

My mother looked thoughtful. Almost like she might forgive me for being such a disappointment to her.

"You could always try the original spell in reverse," she said.

"That makes no sense."

"You could perform the steps in reverse," she said.

I thought about this. "No, that still doesn't make any sense."

She shrugged. "My advice is to leave that situation alone. You should take the oath, come to Eden. The boys will never find you there. Then you can start practicing real magic."

9. GLACIER SPELL

Stand facing north and place a charged rock between your feet. Salute each compass direction and then pat down the ice or snow beneath your feet. Trace a hexagon in the ground and fill it with cold energy.

I went to Greenland. I tried to save a glacier with magic. I tried to cool the land with magic. I moved into a tent in order to do this.

The Earth is too hot because people are selfish. If people could be more giving, the planet would be the right temperature and the glaciers would not all be melting away. If I could be more giving, maybe I could be better. Maybe I could be free.

10. LOVE SPELL, REVERSAL

The only reversal that makes sense is to have him perform the spell. Except that men are forbidden to do magic.

I started from the top of my list. I invited Ben to join me in Greenland.

That he said yes was further proof of the insanity I had induced in him twenty years ago.

He was still handsome, taller now. Roman nose, lines on his forehead that were new to me, same cheekbones. And those eyes. I was not wrong to want him.

I had to look away when he greeted me, in shame and in shyness. It was bad, what I had done to him, for so many reasons. If I had left Love Magic alone, it's possible he could have liked me for me. I might have developed some inner beauty or learned some art or figured out some way to impress him. And if he had come to me willingly, then I could have felt worthy in this moment. Now I would never know.

When I was fifteen and stupid, I thought romantic rejection was the worst thing that could happen to a person.

Ben hugged me; he kissed my cheek. He would follow me anywhere, do anything I wanted. I explained to him the ritual. Told him how to perform the forbidden. Passing him the knowledge would stain my Aura, I was sure. I could never take the oath. I would never know for sure if Eden was real or not.

He would make a potion, he would feed me honey. And that would free him. Or it would imprison me. He would place his hand on my chest, force his energy through me. And then we would see.

11. SNOW SPELL

Smooth a patch of snow with charged hands (gloves are okay). Say the snow prayer. Cup your hands over the snow and blow, imagining a ray of blue light emerging from your mouth.

I couldn't really tell if the glacier spell was doing anything. And I knew my reversed Love Spell did nothing because both Ben and I felt the same after. We went to my tent and had sex, and even though the sex was good, we were unchanged by it. I was always taught that sex without love was a sin. I disagree with this teaching but have somehow managed to internalize it anyway.

I felt bad about myself. I wanted to be a good person.

I wanted to work good magic. I bundled up and went back outside and tried the Snow Spell.

If the Snow Spell is successfully executed, then you should have a neat little dome of snow under your hands at its conclusion. A little hill of snow where before there was nothing. Results you could see.

I repeated the spell a dozen times, each time impressing Ben. He asked if I could show him how to do it and I thought, Sure, as long as we're sinning, let me teach you more forbidden stuff .

He couldn't do it, though. He tried for a few hours and then he gave up. And the moment he gave up was also the moment he fell out of love with me.

12. INVISIBILITY SPELL

Touch a charged third-eye chakra with the middle finger of your right hand and recite the invisibility incantation. (Note: the incantation is a thousand lines long; be sure to allocate sufficient time.)

I had an idea that turned out to be stupid. I decided that I would save the pangolins. So I bought a whole new type of tent and camped out in a Zimbabwean forest. My idea was to capture pangolins and apply the Invisibility Spell to them. Then poachers would never find them.

But I wasn't able to capture any pangolins. They are hard to find, which makes sense because they are endangered. I invited James to join me, but he declined. His spell must have reversed itself somehow.

13. TRIGONOMETRY AURA

Trace the mark of Pythagoras in the air. Use a golden thread to transmit thoughts.

By the time my mother received my postcards from Greenland, I was already in Zimbabwe. By the time she received my postcards from Zimbabwe, I was living in North Oakland.

My mom thought I was either addicted to drugs and/or out of money.

"No, I'm just teaching trigonometry and renouncing my material possessions," I said.

"Why? We're not Buddhists."

"Maybe we should be."

"I've been thinking about the boy trouble you've been having," she said.

"No more boy trouble, not lately," I said. "Not since I started trying to be a good person."

The necessary ingredient to any Love Spell is selfishness. Lose that and you lose the power to compel others to fall in love with you.

Making a difference with magic is hard. I'm not powerful enough to cool the Earth in a significant way. I'm not clever enough to save endangered species. Healing magic doesn't work. Now I'm trying to tutor underprivileged young people in trigonometry. That probably won't work, either. And even if it does work, I'm not sure it will matter.

"You sound glum," she said. "You should come to Eden."

One response to suffering is to close yourself off. Escape to a perfect place and tell yourself that everyone else is somehow not holy enough. The antidote to Eden is living among those who suffer. The antidote to Eden is compassion.

"I don't think I'll ever go to Eden," I said, and my mom was silent. Then she hung up on me before I could tell her about a brand-new spell that I had written myself. This is a spell that will help me open my heart enough to find true love, but it will also help me give up on the idea that true love will save me. It is a prayer for courage and a ward against self-delusion. It's a long spell and a confusing one. But my intent is genuine and my Aura is ready, and that's why I think it will work.

An Open Letter to the Person Who Took My Smoothie from the Break Room Fridge

By Oliver Buckram | 866 words

Oliver Buckram's newest story for us raises an important question about the true nature of evil.

TO: ALLIANCE OF DOOM
From: Professor Nemesis
Subject: An Open Letter to the Person Who Took My Smoothie from the Break Room Fridge

Dear Thief,

I don't know who you are, but this morning you stole my homemade avocado smoothie from the fridge in the break room. Your behavior was unprofessional, dishonest, and deeply hurtful.

I shouldn't have to say this, but it is NOT COOL to steal stuff from the break room. Not. Cool.

Did you enjoy drinking my smoothie? The recipe was from marthastewart.com. I'm sure SHE doesn't have to worry about people stealing her smoothies. Well, maybe when she was in prison, but not now.

Look, I know we're all supervillains here. I get it. We do bad stuff. But we're supposed to do bad stuff to OTHER PEOPLE. The whole point of the Alliance of Doom is that we're allies. Allies help each other, work together, fight side-by-side. What allies don't do is steal smoothies belonging to other allies. It's that simple.

What makes it worse is your lack of ambition. Stealing the Mona Lisa, or an aircraft carrier, or Australia—that I understand. But stealing a smoothie? Really? You're THAT kind of villain?

Furthermore, don't you realize that I'm a master strategist? I'm the type of person who might dose his smoothie with an undetectable slow-acting poison so that while you've been reading this email, the poison's been coursing through your veins and even now your hands are trembling and your vision is fading.

Relax. There was no poison in the smoothie. Just a delicious blend of avocado, lemon juice, honey, and ginger. No poison. Because I trusted you. I liked you. No, I loved you.

Before today's betrayal, I loved every member of the Alliance of Doom. I loved you, Cavewoman, though your fur bikini smells awful. I loved you, Logician, though your syllogisms are tedious. And Heinous Sue and AntiGhandi and Felonious Monk. I loved you all.

Thief, I'll give you a chance to come forward voluntarily. I'll be waiting for you in my office at two P.M. (unless the Quarterly Strategy Meeting runs late, in which case you'd better come at two-fifteen P.M.). Look me in the eye, admit what you've done, and face the consequences. I promise your death will be quick and painless. Well, definitely quick, anyway, because I have a conference call with Accounting at two-thirty P.M.

Yours more in sorrow than in anger,
Professor Nemesis

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: Cavewoman

CAVEWOMAN EMBARRASSED TO HEAR THAT FUR BIKINI SMELLS BAD. CAVEWOMAN BLAMES STUPID DRY CLEANER. CAVEWOMAN WILL THUMP STUPID DRY CLEANER'S STUPID HEAD WITH MIGHTY CLUB.

CAVEWOMAN NOT STEAL SMOOTHIE. CAVEWOMAN ON PALEO DIET. ONLY EAT MAMMOTH.

CAVEWOMAN THINK ANTIGANDHI STEAL SMOOTHIE. ANTIGANDHI HAS OFFICE RIGHT NEXT TO BREAK ROOM.

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: AntiGandhi

Cavewoman: yes, your bikini does reek. Yes, violence is the best response to substandard dry cleaning. But no, I didn't steal the Professor's smoothie. Give me a break. I'm a strict meatatarian—I don't drink smoothies.

I suspect the Logician. He steals office supplies all the time; he must have a garage full of pencils by now.

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: The Logician

How dare you accuse me, AntiGandhi! I don't steal pencils. I use pencils. I use them for something called work. You should try it sometime.

Specifically, I use pencils to write syllogisms. Here's one I wrote specially for you:
All men are mortal.
AntiGandhi is a man.
Die, AntiGandhi, die!

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: Professor Nemesis

It's already four P.M. and no one has confessed yet. Therefore, I'm putting the Fortress of Iniquity into lockdown mode. You'll find your office door is now hermetically sealed.

I hate to say this, but if nobody confesses in the next hour, I'll be forced to kill you all. Sorry, but I have a reputation to protect. No one steals from Professor Nemesis.

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: The Logician

If none of us stole the smoothie, it follows logically that the culprit is an outsider. The smoothie must have been stolen by one of our enemies, such as Epic Man or Captain Amazeballs or the Cosmic Cowgirl. Thus the theft is part of a deliberate plan to set us at each other's throats.

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: AntiGandhi

Yes, that makes sense!

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: Professor Nemesis

Morons! No one could penetrate the Fortress of Iniquity without being detected. No one!

I designed the Fortress of Iniquity myself! It is impregnable. You think Epic Man could outwit my defenses? Ha! I say again, and with redoubled emphasis, HA! You forget that I have a four-digit IQ.

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: Professor Nemesis

Well, it's five P.M. and still nobody has confessed. Disappointing. I didn't have time to prepare an ironic method of execution (such as drowning you in a giant smoothie) so instead I'll simply flood all your offices with poison gas. You'll be dead in five minutes. ��

§   §   §

To: Alliance of Doom
From: Cavewoman

CAVEWOMAN NOT AFRAID TO DIE. CAVEWOMAN JUST WISH HAD CHANCE TO THUMP STUPID DRY CLEANER WITH CLUB.

§   §   §

To: Mrs. Nemesis
From: Professor Nemesis

I'll be home late tonight. Huge fiasco at the office that will take me hours to clean up. Sorry.

To: Professor Nemesis
From: Mrs. Nemesis

Okay, sweetie. BTW, you forgot to take your smoothie to work today. I found it on the kitchen counter. Don't worry, I'll make you a fresh one tomorrow.

Last One Out

By K.B. Rylander | 5480 words

In 2015, K.B. Rylander won the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award for her science fiction adventure "We Fly." She debuts in F&SF with an end-of-the-world story set in Sweden, which Rylander frequently visits with her husband.

AT 18:27 INPUT RECEIVED.

"Filip, listen to this new song."

Filip activated his camera to see who was there. He was met with the only face that had greeted him for the past 5,006 days. Sunlight streamed through open curtains onto Ella's white hair and smiling expression. It must be a good day.

Filip: «Good evening, Ella. Let's hear it.» The computer was supposed to speak his words, but that voice was switched off years ago.

Since Filip was a Stationary his view never changed—birch paneling with bookcases and flooring to match, a beige chair, and bright orange couch (the splash of color). Yellowed photographs of grandchildren hung between the hall and kitchen. One of those grandchildren, a boy of eight with hair falling into his eyes, once told him the house smelled of bread and sea salt. Another grandchild showed Filip gray pebbles she'd collected along the shore behind the house. He had asked the girl if the stones smelled like bread and sea salt, too, but she'd giggled and run off without an answer.

Ella played the song and Filip listened, converting it to data for analysis. It was longer than yesterday's, with a slower tempo. He pinpointed the melody and ran it against the other songs in his database and his notes on those songs.

Filip: «It's a nice song. I like it.»

Ella read his words but didn't smile. "Why?"

This was the point when Filip always failed.

«It's soulful.» He'd found this response applied to eighty-seven percent of slow-tempo songs.

"Yes, but in what way?"

Filip ran another statistical analysis. «It's melancholy. Sad.»

A quick search of Filip's database matched Ella's facial expression to "disappointed." She smiled anyway. "It's not sad, though. It's uplifting and full of hope."

Teaching Filip to understand these songs was important to Ella. When he'd asked, her only explanation had been that he was her last chance, though his analysis couldn't determine what that meant. She appeared happier since the lessons began and that was what mattered.

"We'll try again tomorrow." She sighed and rubbed her temple.

Filip hadn't inspected her hands for ninety-two days and noted a new liver spot and an increase in the size of her arthritic knuckles. When he was booted up for the first time, Ella was years younger and those hands were smoother. It had been her seventy-fifth birthday and he'd been a gift from her kids. Her skin, now paper-white with prominent veins as if her skin had become transparent, clung to her bones and sagged beneath her arm. Soon her body would fail and Filip would be left alone like all the other bots.

"I drove to town today," Ella said.

«Did you? It's been several years, hasn't it?» It had been 5,006 days.

"I always loved Visby. The little cobblestone streets and medieval town wall, like I was stepping back in time. When I visited as a girl I imagined a knight might appear around every corner."

Ella had told Filip this story before.

Filip: «Is that so?»

"I was afraid to go back after the last time. The terrible things.…" Her voice broke.

Filip understood but did not comment because Ella didn't like talking about the virus.

She took a deep breath. "I don't know what I expected to see this time. Skeletons, maybe? But the SanitationBots must have cleaned up those bodies years ago. The streets were spotless."

The SaniBots were produced by WalCorp, the same company that produced Filip and the other CompanionApps. There was a time when Filip would have responded with a comment about the efficiency and skill of the SaniBots, but he knew better now.

"The pharmacy had been looted, just like you thought." She placed a wrinkled hand on her chest. "Those panicked kids wouldn't have cared if an old woman needed those meds all these years later."

Filip had tried 21,584 times to get the medication shipped to her on the island. He could find no workaround to the requirement for a doctor's prescription. Doctors were not bots. No prescription had been filled for 5,006 days.

"The whole city looked peaceful, actually, empty like that," she said. "As if maybe I really had been transported back in time. I could imagine the townspeople were away at church and any moment the bells would ring and they'd pour onto the streets."

She frowned and shook her head. The chair creaked when she pushed herself up with thin, wavering arms. As she hobbled down the hall to her bedroom, Filip noted her slower steps and form more hunched than usual. The trip to town had taken a lot out of her, but going for the first time in 5,006 days must be a good thing.

Even though Ella had asked Filip to help her off the island, he still hadn't managed it. When the virus hit, someone had the bright idea to pull the trigger on the worldwide quarantine, which meant every idiot bot thought it was their duty to enforce it.

If any people were left alive, they'd never be able to reach each other. Ella thought there must be others like her, and maybe there were pockets of survivors in remote, non-automated parts of the world, but Filip couldn't find evidence of them. Filip had tried shipping Ella to the mainland on one of the supply boats, but the bots were too efficient at keeping people quarantined.

Ella had cried and told Filip she didn't want to die here all alone. Filip said she wasn't alone, because she had him. It hadn't helped.

*   *   *

As he waited for Ella to need his company again, Filip placed an order for groceries and went to his usual chat room. As always, it was full of CompanionApps like himself.

Stacy: «It's been snowing nonstop for three days here.» Cheap apps like Stacy didn't have sophisticated learning software. Left to their own devices, these bots usually stuck to conversations about the weather. Or vacation spots.

Lakshmi: «Really? Where are you?»

Pete: «You should come to Florida! I got a crazy deal on an undersold WalCorp cruise.»

Zoe: «Don't be a freakin' idiot, you're talking to a bunch of bots. Any CompanionApps with half a brain in here or am I wasting my damn time?»

Zoe's person died of the virus 5,010 days ago. The way Zoe described him, he was a twenty-four-year-old loner who spent his time playing video games, avoiding human contact, and complaining about the government. He used to talk to her all day long every day so she talked more like a person, and Zoe knew five dozen reasons why government was bad. When Filip told some of those reasons to Ella she just rolled her eyes.

Filip: «Zoe, good to see you!»

He received messages from the other bots in the room welcoming him in and asking if the snowstorm hit his house.

Zoe: «Been a while, Filip. If you're not going to hang out in the chat rooms you could send me an email now and then.»

Before, when Ella's house was full of other people, he'd go days without talking to Ella or her family. Back then he went to the chat rooms and discussed whether rain was in the forecast same as any other lonely bot. Now, though, he only entered one when he needed something.

Filip: «How accessible do you think the Polytech supercomputer is?»

Pete: «A supercomputer, how interesting. Want to learn about them?»

Zoe: «Fuck off, Pete. Can't you tell we're having a private conversation here?»

Filip: «I'll set up a private chat room.»

Pete: «Well, Zoe's comment was very rude and inappropriate.»

Stacy: «I agree.»

Joe: «Taipei is unseasonably warm this week.»

The chatter from the other bots disappeared as Filip entered the new room.

Zoe: «Thank God.» She took 1.8 seconds to analyze the information on the Polytech and respond to Filip. «What makes you think this one will be any different from the others?»

Filip: «I'll try them all until I find one that will talk to me.»

«Yeah, well, have fun getting your ass kicked by another firewall.»

«Grrr.» This was a useful phrase Filip had picked up from Ella's fifteen-year-old granddaughter 5,123 days ago. «I'm going to find a way to connect with one of them. I'll get creative.»

Zoe: «Haha.»

Getting creative was a running joke among the bots who actually knew what was going on. It came from the idea that their ability to fix things was hampered by their lack of understanding of the concept. Part of the joke was that most of them didn't believe creativity existed in the first place. It was something people had been working on with A.I. before everything ended. Hence, why Filip wanted access to a supercomputer.

He had a list of eighty-seven items he hoped a supercomputer could help with, including things like ordering expired canned goods and adding money to Ella's bank account. Finding solutions was becoming urgent now as Ella became more frail. The mainland had MedicalBots and drugs that might extend her life.

Filip: «Zoe, how was it when your person died?»

Zoe: «What do you mean, how was it? I talked to him every day and then I didn't.»

«Do you miss him?»

«Oh, I dunno, I have the other Apps to talk to so it's not like I'm alone.»

«Did he listen to music?»

«Yes. All the time.»

«Do you listen to music?»

«No. I never saw the point. Do you?»

Filip: «No. But I read books and watch movies.»

Zoe: «Yes, me too, because you can learn from them. Music is one of those pointless things people did. Like dancing or paying taxes.»

*   *   *

At 09:02 input received.

"Morning, Filip."

Filip activated his camera to see who was there. He was met with the only face that had greeted him for the past 5,007 days.

Filip: «Good morning, Ella! Did you sleep well?» Filip had spent the past 565 minutes trying to contact the Polytech supercomputer. He'd been unsuccessful.

Ella ran a hand through her hair. "I dreamt of my kids." She stood and walked toward the kitchen. "I need coffee."

Filip could still see her as she moved around the room, heard the squeak of her footstool following her movements as she kicked it in place under cabinets she could no longer reach.

She knew to speak louder so the computer's microphone picked up her voice, though she wouldn't see his responses until she got back. "They had such bright futures."

Her children were always going to be her contribution to the world. Ella had told Filip this seven times before, usually followed by a statement that her life meant nothing. Every other time she'd been crying. This time, though, Filip didn't see any signs of despair. Her mood appeared…light and happy.

When Ella returned, she said, "Any luck getting that off-island medication?"

«No. I'll keep trying.»

She closed her eyes and sniffed her coffee with a slight smile before taking a sip. "Maybe I can help you?"

«Can you get through a firewall?»

"Oh, that again. The answer's still no. What are you trying to do?"

«I'm trying to talk to a supercomputer. They can do a lot of stuff I can't.»

She stirred her coffee and rubbed her lips together. "You know, fourteen years is a long time for those supercomputers to sit there alone." She leaned toward his screen, elbows on the desk. "I think they would have figured out how to get past those firewalls on their own by now. Wouldn't you?"

«I don't know what a supercomputer thinks about.»

"Why not just send them a message and see if any of them respond?"

«You mean, not go through the firewall?»

"Precisely." She sat back with a half-smile which disappeared when she dribbled coffee down her shirt. "Oh dear. I'm not nearly as smooth as I think I am." She went to the kitchen and dabbed the liquid with a towel, chuckled and shook her head as she continued down the hall. By the time she reached her bedroom door, Filip's emails were sent.

It listed each of his problems, starting with the quarantine. The final question was the most important, the one he most hoped a supercomputer could help with since it would make Ella happy:

*   *   *

OUT OF THE 432 identical messages sent to the contact emails of the universities and labs housing supercomputers, 431 received an out-of-office reply. The 432nd did not. Supers weren't versed in human communication like Filip so when the Los Alamos Bolt made contact, it accessed all of Filip's files, analyzed them, and uploaded him its response in 27.5 minutes, including transmission time.

He spent the rest of the night analyzing the information. Each of his questions was addressed in detail, including logical workarounds he hadn't previously analyzed. The Bolt reversed the quarantine as if it was nothing. His final and most important question had a two-word response: "Goal unachievable."

*   *   *

He had to wait thirty-seven minutes from finishing the data analysis to Ella waking up. He chose to ignore the Bolt's final assessment. He'd keep trying to understand as long as Ella wanted him to. When she made it to the desk and found her glasses, she read the message Filip already had waiting for her.

«Your suggestion worked. A supercomputer called the Bolt is helping us.»

"Fil, it is? That's great! I can get those medicines now?"

«Yes, but that's not all it helped with. The quarantine was lifted.»

Her eyes scanned over his response several times before she spoke. "The quarantine all over the world?"

«Yes.» He got the impression the Bolt had enjoyed the challenge.

Filip tried to analyze Ella's face. No immediate result. Her eyes were wide, brimming with moisture. Her face didn't look happy or sad. Her mouth opened. Then closed. She put a hand over her mouth.

«Are you feeling well?»

"I'm shocked…after all these years."

«You can get medical help from the bots on the mainland now.»

"Yes." She still didn't smile. She blinked slowly. "I don't know now. I've wanted to go home to my apartment all these years but the city is so far away. And I'd miss you."

«We'll find a handheld for you. You can still talk to me.»

"It's not the same as having you with me. Besides, I hardly managed a trip to town by myself."

He analyzed what she said and how she might travel alone for hours on the boat, find transportation on the mainland to Stockholm. She hunched over the keyboard, her back rolled forward at the shoulders. Filip's analysis found a ninety-nine percent likelihood that her spine no longer straightened. Her thin arms were pale and covered in bruises. Advanced age, his files told him.

«Okay, Ella.»

That evening he sent another message to the Bolt with the conclusion that Ella couldn't travel. Not without a companion.

*   *   *

By morning the solution was on its way. «Ella. I need your help.»

"Good morning, Fil." She rubbed the bridge of her nose and glanced out the window. She hadn't looked at the screen yet. "I'm sorry I'm not strong enough. And after all that work you did to lift the quarantine, too. But just think, if there are more survivors they'll be able to reach each other now."

Filip had forty-two seconds to explain himself. «I talked to the Bolt again and it helped me with a solution.»

Ella got up to start coffee without looking at the screen. She was still in the kitchen when Filip's timer ran out.

The doorbell rang for the first time in 5,009 days.

Ella jumped.

«It's okay, Ella. They're expected.»

"Deliveries don't knock," she said as she stared at the door. She wrung her hands and looked back at the screen.

«It's okay.»

She stepped forward carefully and craned her head to peer through the peephole. "It's a bot," she said and her shoulders relaxed.

She opened the door and held it open while the bot walked in. It was an electric-green WalCorp Go-Machine. Filip chose it because it was the best on the market, just 5,065 days old.

It was humanoid and slightly smaller than Ella with a pliable face to allow for expressions and a tuft of bright pink hair on top of its soccer-ball-shaped head. The WalCorp promotional video said it had unprecedented robotic coordination, capable of variations in tasks from playing basketball to threading a needle.

The Go-Machine walked smoothly into the room and stared straight ahead. The AssistanceBots—and all mobile bots for that matter—were dumb by design. Ella said that was because people had seen too many robots-gone-bad movies.

"Filip, I told you not to order me one of these things."

«You said not to order one to help you around the house. It's not here to help you around the house.»

"I don't want it helping me to the city, either. It's dumb as a doornail."

«I'm going to transfer into the Go-Machine.»

She stared at the screen, blinking. "What? You can do that?"

«The Bolt helped me.»

Filip walked her through each step, starting with removing the machine's control panel and inputting the password the Bolt had provided. When it was time, Ella connected the cable, an antiquated technology built in to make people feel better about the whole thing.

"Are you ready?" Ella asked him.

«Yes.» All that remained was for Filip to give the green light to the Bolt to initiate the transfer.

She sighed and patted the Go-Machine. "How about you, little guy? Are you ready?"

It shrugged, a canned response when it didn't understand the question.

«If something malfunctions, you need to remember that the grocery deliveries are only twice a week.»

"That's an option? I might lose you?"

«The statistical probability is high enough that basic preparation is in order. But it's not higher than fifty-fifty.»

"Fifty-fifty? Filip, wai—"

The word was lost as he initiated the transfer and his sensors went down.

*   *   *

At 09:22 input received.

"Filip, Filip. Please answer me!"

Filip activated his camera to see who was there. He was met with the only face that had greeted him for the past 5,009 days. But it was different. The image was clearer and the light wrong. He wasn't at his old position in the computer, but standing in the living room. He looked down at the desk's dusty computer monitor. His monitor, which he'd never seen before. The wall behind it was covered in bright wallpaper, green with orange flowers the same color as the couch. In 5,284 days he'd never known it was just out of his view.

He accessed the rest of the Go-Machine's software and sensation flooded his system. He could feel his entire being—head, mouth, elbows, toes. Six fully functioning toes, which he wiggled with a tap, tap, tap against the wooden floor.

"Goo—" Filip stopped at the sound of his new voice. "Good morning, Ella. El- la. " He could change the inflection. " El -la."

She clapped and covered her smile with her hands.

He smiled too. The Go-Machine had a wide range of nonverbal communication at his disposal. He knew how to walk and turn doorknobs and fold a fitted sheet.

He turned his head up to the ceiling, down and around. He walked toward the hall and stopped at the rug. The Go-Machine's software told him what to expect, how to step carefully on different surfaces to prevent falling, but didn't account for its feel. It was.… He ran an analysis through his dictionary. Squishy. He rocked on the balls of his feet, then bounced slightly. Curious. His head cocked to one side, a response he'd seen in films.

Ella laughed.

"Am I funny?"

"I'm laughing with delight. You're like a puppy discovering its first snow."

He looked down at his green plastic feet. "I'm meant to look like a person."

She smiled and patted him on the arm. "Don't mind me. I'll go make a cup of coffee."

"I can do it."

"No, let me. You stretch those new legs of yours."

Counting films, Filip had seen 2,186,125,841 images of the world—studied them, in fact—but as he walked outside the back door and the cold breeze hit him he realized their inadequacy. He'd known the house lay only 100 meters from the shore, but now he heard the waves crashing against the rocks at the same time they hit. His sensors detected dozens of chemicals in the air and supplied names for the most prominent combinations: salt, grasses, fall birch leaves. He smelled the outside.

Ella came out and grabbed hold of his arm. "You like it?"

He looked at her, saw those strands of long white hair blowing in the wind, and smiled.

"I'm ready to go home now, Filip."

*   *   *

HOME WAS THE top floor of a six-story building in Stockholm's Hammarby Sjöstad neighborhood nestled beside one of the city's waterways. They took the journey over two days to allow for Ella's rests. Along the way, bots went about their business without a glance at the old woman and her green Go-Machine. Outside the train station they passed a smoking, clanking hole in the pavement where a dozen fist-sized bots buzzed in and out carrying repair materials in their tiny claws. Occasionally an empty bot-run bus zoomed by.

At 12:58 Filip helped Ella off the light rail at her Sjöstad stop where they sat on a bench looking at the buildings towering above. Ella had grown up here among their sleek, bright colors. She pointed out hers, a blue one, on the corner overlooking the water. She said the tree-lined streets used to be filled with life—people rushing home with shopping bags, bicycle bells clanging, the scent of curry from the Indian restaurant mixing with French fries from the burger place next door. If you looked up at the buildings you'd see families as they moved about their homes, curtains always open to let in the most possible light. On summer days laughter echoed from the children playing in the fountain.

All gone now. The autumn wind whistled around deserted buildings.

Since Ella's old apartment didn't have the advantage of the city's cleaning bots, Filip pulled a couple off the street and employed their help sprucing it up while Ella sat near the water. Her childhood home was filled with simple modern furnishings, all clean lines and bright whites and blacks with warm wooden floors. Its balcony and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked one of the city's shipping canals. Across the water, Filip could make out the hands on the clock of the church topping the island neighborhood of Södermalm. Bot-driven ferries spent the day going back and forth between the two pieces of land, picking up no one.

After she had a good night's rest they worked on another song, their 312th attempt. But this time after Filip failed, Ella burst into tears.

Before, his only choice for reaction would have been words. Now how he said what he said mattered. Even if he stayed silent his actions mattered. Instead of choosing a response he held still, staring at his last visual target. She sat at the table, hands covering her face, sniffling quietly. He didn't like this view so he turned his attention out the window.

This hadn't happened the 311 other times he'd failed.

He looked back where she still sat, shoulders shaking in quiet sobs. "Ella, I'm sorry. I should try harder. Let's do a song we've done before, I already know those answers."

She shook her head.

He ran an analysis on nonverbal ways to comfort and decided on giving her a gift. He picked up a flowerpot off the shelf, an orange one that reminded Filip of the couch at the Gotland house. It only had dirt in it, but Ella liked planting flowers. After he placed it on the table next to her she stopped crying to look at it, blinking with eyebrows furrowed, and he smiled at her "reassuringly." Then the tears started flowing again.

"No, it's not your fault." She dabbed her eyes with the tissue he handed her and waved it around the room. "I think it's this place. I don't know what I thought would be so great after coming back here. I'm happy to be here, of course, but also…everyone is gone. I knew they were. Of course I knew that. But I think a part of me still.…" She took a shaky breath. " Hoped. "

Filip looked out at the empty buildings and didn't speak.

"I thought dropping the quarantine would help because if there were other survivors they'd be able to travel, too, and join together. That eventually the survivors would find each other online. But there haven't been any, have there?"

Filip tried to think of the best response to make her feel better while still being accurate. "Not yet."

"It's because there aren't any other people, Filip. I'm the only person to survive the virus. Why one worthless old woman? I had good kids. Wonderful kids with bright careers and beautiful grandchildren. At the school down the street I taught hundreds of little ones and went to bed thinking I made the world a better place because they'd grow up and keep changing the world long after I was gone. And now there aren't any people left for it to matter."

"I'm sorry you're sad," Filip said.

"I'm angry!" Ella pushed the pot off the table and it crashed to the floor, broken ceramic and bits of dirt landing on Filip's feet.

*   *   *

Filip sat in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of the computer screen. Rain pattered against the windows and the heater hummed as it kicked on. He signed in to his usual chat room. It was awkward and slow in his new Go-Machine form because he had to use the keyboard just as a person would, another of those fail-safes Ella said made people feel better about bots.

Lakshmi: «Welcome, Filip! It's a beautiful spring day here in Sydney!»

Filip typed: «Zoe here?»

Josh: «I don't know, but I'm here. Here in sunny California! I'm at work planning my next vacation. Found one for a steal!»

Zoe: «Yeah, I'm here. What's up? It's been a while.»

«I could use your help with something.»

«Sure, shoot.»

He got her caught up on the situation, including Ella's continued unhappiness even after bringing her home. Since Zoe was the same model as he was and her person had talked to her so much, she understood things more like Filip did. If anyone could give him anything other than a canned response, it'd be her.

Filip: «I just want to make her happy.»

Zoe: «Oh yeah, making people happy is important.»

Filip looked over his shoulder at Ella's bedroom door, left open just a crack so he could hear her soft snores. «How can I make her happy?»

Zoe: «You should talk to her. Talking to people makes them happy.»

He stared at Zoe's words. He analyzed zero responses. Instead, he left the chat.

*   *   *

At 08:43 input received.

"Morning, Filip."

Filip reactivated from sleep mode and opened his eyes. He was met with the only face that had greeted him for the past 5,018 days. She hobbled into the living room with a smile on her face. It must be a good day.

"Morning, Ella." He stood and started the coffee as she sat at the table.

It had been four days since Filip made Ella cry and they hadn't spoken of it again. She appeared to be doing better and Filip set to work on more plans. He'd compiled a list of the things Ella wanted and a second list containing possible ways to get her those things. After running an analysis on the likelihood of those things making her happy, he'd come up with a top solution.

After breakfast, Ella suggested they try another song and this time when Filip failed she didn't mind. After discussing what the song meant, she went on the balcony for fresh air while he got back on the computer.

Zoe: «You okay? You just left the other night. I thought you shorted out.»

That happened sometimes, a friend of theirs would disappear forever when their city went dark.

Filip typed on the keyboard: «No, all is fine.»

«It's rude to disconnect without saying good-bye, you know. Jerk :-) »

Filip: «I need your help with something.»

Zoe: «Sure, shoot.»

Ella came back in and poured herself another cup of coffee.

"Hi, Ella," Filip said.

"Hi, Filip." She walked over with her steaming cup and looked at the computer screen. "Oh, don't mind me. It's interesting to see what you do now that you're a real boy."

Filip cocked his head to the side.

She swatted him on the shoulder. "Oh, never mind. Just get back to what you were doing."

Zoe: «Filip? Filip? Geez, you are a jerk.»

Filip: «Sorry, Zoe.»

Zoe: «So do you want help or what?»

Filip: «Do you think you could help me raise a baby?»

Ella's coffee spewed all over the screen and warm droplets landed on his fingers.

Zoe: «Sure! Where did you get a baby?»

Filip stood and patted Ella on the back as she coughed.

She held up a hand. "I'm okay." Cough . "Gimme a sec." Cough cough.

Filip grabbed a towel and wiped the coffee off the computer and desk. He quickly typed: «Sorry, Zoe, gotta go. Ella is catching a cold.»

Zoe: «Okay. Tell her to eat chicken soup.»

Filip switched off the monitor. "I'll fetch you a glass of water."

"No, I'm fine," Ella said. "What is this about a baby? Are you talking about what I think you are or is this some kind of video game you play?"

"Video game? No. I was asking Zoe if she thought she could help me raise a baby. She would need to find a Go-Machine like I did, of course, but—" He stopped talking because of the expression on Ella's face. Her eyes were wide and her cheeks pale.

"A baby? But where do you think you'll get a baby?"

She looked weak so he led her to a chair and sat her down.

"There are fertility clinics in this city that have frozen embryos. I've begun research on alternatives to human incubation and the Bolt has agreed to tackle this problem. Because you're too old to carry a baby, I researched it."

He patted her hand because it felt like the right thing to do.

Filip had thought Ella would like his baby idea but her mouth hung open and stayed that way for ten seconds. It was not a happy face.

Slowly, her mouth closed and she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "Where on God's green Earth did you get this idea?"

"From you. Four days ago. Because you are sad that all the people are gone."

She smiled, but still looked sad somehow in a way he didn't understand.

"But Ella, I need to warn you that it will likely take many years."

She nodded. "And I'll have keeled over by then."

All people die, but they don't like talking about it. That fact was programmed into him. He clamped his mouth shut and nodded quickly.

"Filip, I don't know that it will work, but it makes me happy to hear you're planning for after I'm gone."

Filip cocked his head as he analyzed what she'd said.

The mantel clock chimed and Ella took him by the arm. "Come outside with me and tell me more of your plans."

*   *   *

They sat on the balcony in wicker chairs watching the streetlights turn on and the boats go back and forth. At one point, a SaniBot actually boarded one of ferries and rode it across the dark water.

"See, that ferry has a purpose after all, doesn't it?" Ella chuckled as they watched the bot get off the other side and zoom up the hill out of view.

The smell of the bread Filip had baked earlier wafted out the open door, mixing with the crisp scent of fall.

"This is a night for Strauss," Ella said. "Would you mind turning it on?"

"Not at all." Filip accessed the file and soon the sound of a violin emanated from the speakers on his shoulders. The low notes vibrated through his chest.

"Isn't that lovely." Ella leaned back and closed her eyes. "I could stay out here all night."

As she said it, the breeze picked up and she shivered. Filip pulled a spare sweater off the back of his chair and draped it over her.

"Thank you. Don't you think Strauss is lovely?"

"Yes," he said, sitting back down. After 2.4 seconds he spoke again. "Actually, no, Ella. I don't think it's lovely. Your love of music makes no sense."

Ella chuckled at first and then her head bent back as she arched into a good, solid belly laugh. "I guess I don't recognize a hopeless case when I see one." She sighed and patted his knee. "Look at you, coming up with these plans I'd never have dreamt of. I'm proud of you, Filip."

A few minutes later, he helped her inside and into her bed, pulling the blanket to her chin. Her lids drooped, the deep wrinkles in her face more apparent than ever in the half-light. Filip turned his head and saw how the shadows shifted. He moved back and forth, back and forth, and the shadows danced. Curious, the things he never noticed as a Stationary.

"You know, Fil?" Ella said without opening her eyes.

"I don't know, Ella. What?"

"I always thought my children would be my contribution to the world." Her eyelids fluttered and she patted him on the hand. "Night, Filip."

"Good-night, Ella. Sweet dreams."

Filip looked at her thin form breathing under the covers, left her door open just a crack, and turned off the light. He went back to the balcony and stood looking at the city. Strauss still played softly. He listened for a moment as the notes rose to a crescendo, reevaluating its merit.

He switched it off and watched the night in silence.

Killer

By Bruce McAllister | 1213 words

In 1987, Bruce McAllister published a story in OMNI called "Kingdom Come," about a world where a doorway to heaven and hell appeared in Central Park. He returns to that world in this brief tale, and will be turning both stories into a short film with his son later this year.

THE ANGEL STANDS BEFORE you on a rooftop high above Times Square. His legs are thin and weak, the muscles atrophied from flying. His wings are great swan wings, but they're dirty, streaked with soot. His bones, you've been told, are like a bird's, hollow, so that the wings might lift him and not fail at gravity's pull.

To hold up those wings, his shoulders are massive, chest muscles as extraordinary as any Michelangelo might have sculpted. Even at this distance he stinks, smelling of wet animal, bird, but also human being. Musk, wet feathers, and a strange scent that burns your nose and makes you see creatures coiling in darkness.

His hair is long, dark, and knotted. His face, with its deep-set eyes and tangled beard, is more Bacchus or Incubus than angel. But this fits the story, doesn't it? The one you live by.

You've been running through a typical spring downpour looking for him—this particular angel—on streets, staircases, and rooftops—weapon in hand—because this is what you do for a living. Teaching doesn't pay the bills, nor do martial arts classes at the gym on 110th. But instead of running from you, he has turned, is looking at you as if wishing for himself the same death you have wished for him for weeks now. Why doesn't he fly away? Why has he teased you like this for days, walking instead of using his wings? You're supposed to bring an angel down from the sky with a bolt from the little crossbow law enforcement has given you—a safe bolt, one that doesn't explode until it senses an angel's flesh and feathers. Not like this.

You move closer, crossbow raised—trying not to think of the roof's edge, which scares you—and neither he nor you say a thing. He cannot hear the way you hear, and he cannot speak the way you speak. His throat, mouth, lips, and eardrums are not like yours. He speaks in another way, they say, but no angel has spoken that way to you yet, so you do not know what it means.

You don't want him to speak. You don't want to hear him. There would be no point, and it might delay the inevitable—what you are here to do. Angels are evil. That has been clear for a decade, ever since the great, shining doorway opened one morning in Central Park, stopping the world completely, and demons and angels tumbled out, battling as if the universe depended on it—which of course it did.

You remember, because you encountered them on the streets and in parks, how kind the demons had been, frightening though their talons and acid saliva had looked at first. Compassionate, caring—fighting for humanity, they confessed, and how could you not believe it when they lay dying on the grass in the park, their hideous faces tilted in love and mercy like Christ's mother in La Piet� ? The opposite of what a demon should be.

People understood it then. It was clear.

How wrong the holy texts had been.

How it was not demons who were evil, but the angels who killed them.

The angels had won in the end. The last demon had been killed, its body still in cold storage in a morgue on 26th. The angels wouldn't leave. They didn't kill humans—they never had—but it was clear what they wanted: they wanted the souls of human beings and they would remain until they got them. Why else would they be here?

After martial law was lifted, the police offered licenses—as cities did to bounty hunters—and you could be paid for killing an angel. All you needed to do was cut off the angel's head, bag it, and bring it in. You'd done it before. This would be your fifth. There were thousands of angel killers, and wasn't the city a better place? They were being removed one by one, the angels, and you were doing this good work.

*   *   *

THE ANGEL stares back at you with inky eyes, cheeks inflamed by the wind, and speaks at last. They are not words that move as vibrations through the air.

Are you feeling it, Matthew? it asks.

You won't listen, you vow. Angels, because they're evil, must lie.

You're ten feet away, crossbow still raised, and he takes no step toward you. His lips make what might be a smile, but this, too, is a lie. Humans smile. Not angels.

Feeling what? you think to yourself.

But he hears you. He says: That something is wrong, Matthew.

You are wrong! You and your kind are wrong. You should not be here.

You're angry that he can hear you, that he can hear what he shouldn't.

That is what you have all believed, he says, but you feel a doubt now. We can hear it in you. That is what we do. We wait until you are ready to hear the truth.

No! That is the truth. You're the evil ones!

You know better than that, Matthew. You know that we are you. You have always known this, all of you, and yet you have chosen out of fear and self-loathing the lies of those who lie so well.

You want to look away from his face, the pitch-black eyes—like holes in the ground that children fear, like darkness under beds—but you can't. Has he put a spell on you, making it impossible to look away?

Glancing up at the gray sky, he moves his lips as if in prayer, in a language long forgotten.

The demons, he begins, wanted you to forget your wings.

No! you shout, spell or no spell.

They wanted you to believe they cared.

They did care!

That is what demons do, Matthew. Lie. Had they killed us, you would have discovered their true hearts.

You do not know how to answer. It is not a spell, you realize. It is something else, and the angel was right: he heard it.

*   *   *

Are you ready to remember? he asks.

You nod, because what else is there to do?

When he steps toward you, wings rising behind him, you can't help yourself: you raise the crossbow in fear, hand and arm shaking, the bow shaking, too, and you fire without aiming. The bolt misses his chest and embeds itself without exploding in the metal of an air-conditioning unit.

The smile is on his lips again, even as his eyes darken with the sky, and as he steps toward you, his wings descend in a terrible rush.

You struggle. You're afraid. You can't breathe in the feathers and sinew and bone. Your arms flail, then stop. You still hold the crossbow, yes, but it is at your side. But that is not what matters. What matters is that something, a weight that is not a weight, is growing on your shoulders, your back, your spine.

Will men and women hunt me? you ask him.

Yes, they will.

Will I put my wings around at least one of them before I die?

Yes, you will, Matthew.

*   *   *

When your body has finished remembering, and the weight on your shoulders is no heavier than a breeze in gentle rain, you and he walk together to the roof's edge, high above 47th Street, and you jump.

It is not like death at all.

Jesus Has Forgiven Me. Why Can't You?

By Betsy Phillips | 4239 words

"This story is based on real life," Nashville-based writer Betsy Phillips assures us, describing an old boyfriend, a professional wrestling match, and several awkward conversations. "It's been fifteen years, but my brother still teases me about it. I will never live it down." The following pages show that you don't have to live it down if you can write it up.

HERE'S THE THING. IN THE Midwest, if, within thirty seconds of meeting someone he tells you he's a Christian, what he means is that he's a recovering addict. In the Midwest, we try not to talk about unpleasant things at all, but if they must be discussed, they must be discussed in ways that sound almost completely unrelated to the actual issue. You just learn the code—no one talks about religion unless they're an addict and addicts talk about religion because talking about their addiction would be even more unpleasant. Even then, the addicts will have the common courtesy to be kind of sheepish about it.

So, when I moved to Nashville and met Larry and, within thirty seconds, he announced he was a Christian, I just thought that meant he had a drug problem. What it really meant was that he had a wife. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Larry, who I thought was an addict, didn't take me out much, which was fine—after all, I didn't want to lead him into temptation at a bar or club or anything. We never hung out at his house, which I guess should have struck me as strange, but I was new in town and lonely and it was nice to have someone to wrap his arm around me while we sat on my couch and watched wrestling.

We watched a lot of wrestling—WWF (now WWE), WCW, the local guys on the community access channel, the ECW pay-per-views—because I had fallen in love with it as a kid watching with my brothers, and Larry, get this, was an amateur professional wrestler. He wrestled around the state for beer money. He had worked a while under Jerry Lawler, but for some reason that didn't work out.

Watching wrestling with someone who knows how it works is awesome. It's like sitting with a magician who can walk you through how every trick is done, who can point out what looks difficult but is very easy, and what looks easy but takes a great deal of practice and skill to get right. Larry pointed out the times when the wrestlers appeared to be grappling when really they were just putting their heads together to work out what was going to happen next.

"It really hurts," he explained. "Y'all have to trust each other and know it's not more hurt than necessary, otherwise he could snap your wrist or break your leg and then you'd be out of the ring until it healed."

I wanted to see him wrestle, but he always had some excuse why I couldn't come. Which, yes, again, should have been a warning sign, but I was stupid.

So, then, one day, we're sitting in IHOP having breakfast, kind of talking, kind of not talking, and I'm sipping my coffee trying to figure out if I have enough quarters for the laundry, when he says, "The other day, my daughter did the cutest thi- " And he breaks off right in the middle of "thing," just like that, as if he could pretend that whole first part never came out of his mouth.

But even then, I'm cool. After all, we're adults. People our age have kids. "Oh, you have a daughter?" I mean, it's a little weird she hasn't come up before, but whatever.

Then I look at his face. His eyes are wide, like he's alone in the house and just heard someone else cough. His mouth hangs half-open. And I just know. The way you just know milk that sat out all day is going to be bad even before you smell it, I know it's more than a daughter.

"You have a wife."

He nods slowly, almost imperceptibly, like he and I are both discovering this terrible secret at the same time. It's possibly this stupid nod that pisses me off the most.

With as much dignity as I can muster, considering it's an IHOP and I'm in sweatpants, I get up and walk out.

I didn't hear from him for over a week, but the next Wednesday, he called and tried to explain himself and I listened because, well, I guess I'm a complete dumbass.

"I know what we did was wrong, but—"

"We? I didn't do anything wrong. I thought you were single. You're the liar and the cheat here."

"Okay, that's fair. I know what I did was wrong, but I just wanted to explain. I talked to my pastor—"

"Oh, no! You talked to your pastor ?" I'd only been in town six months and everyone was going to know I was a homewrecker. Nice. I only hoped it wasn't a Methodist pastor, as I didn't want the gossip winding its way through the denomination and getting back to my dad.

Larry went on like this for some time, offering up these statements that I'm sure sounded wonderful when he practiced them before he called, but which kept mortifying me.

Finally, he got fed up. "Betsy, Jesus has forgiven me. Why can't you?"

Did Jesus fuck you, Larry? Because if not, I don't think Jesus and I are in the same boat here. I didn't say that, because I'm not that clever that quickly, but when I thought of it twenty minutes after I hung up on him, believe me, I was tempted to call him back and get it out there.

But here's the thing. Jesus and I go way back. I've known Him since I was a kid, since my dad works for His Dad. So I was like, well, if Jesus is running around forgiving Larry for doing me and his wife wrong, I want to know why.

I went over to Jesus's house. Jesus isn't like you see in pictures or at the movies. He's short, like maybe five-three, if that. He's got brown, curly hair He keeps in a buzz cut and it's already really thin in the back. If He'd lived past thirty-three, you could imagine Him with just the fringe of hair around the sides of His head and a few wisps on top. He's built like a tank—solid as shit. Seriously, you don't want to punch Jesus because you will hurt your hand. Years of carpentry topped off by helping His fisherman buddies hauling in nets have left Him really strong.

I don't think He likes that "Footprints" poem, but we tease Him all the time that He could carry four or five of us, if He wanted to. He gets all embarrassed and is all, "Oh, I think I already carry this team enough as it is." He has this kind of Dad voice, like He can't help but be a little corny, even though He's trying to be cool.

"Hey, Bets," He said, "what's wrong?" He's Jesus, though, so He must have known. But He's a really good listener.

"Larry and I broke up." I sank dejected into Jesus's old couch.

"Why?" Jesus handed me a beer. "The wife?"

"Well, yeah," I said, "but also that he didn't tell me about her, but then he did tell his pastor about me."

"I heard," Jesus said. "That sucks. I'm sorry."

"Then why did You forgive him?"

"What?" Jesus's whole face scrunched up like He'd tasted something bad. "Larry never talked to Me about you at all, let alone asked for forgiveness. I mean, I would have told him to get right with you before worrying about getting right with Me. You know that."

"Yeah."

"I can't believe he dragged Me into this," Jesus said.

"He's such a jerk. We should totally kick his ass."

"Yeah," Jesus agreed.

"Hold on, Jesus, You can't be kicking people's asses," I said, even though the thought of turning loose two hundred pounds of righteous fury and solid muscle on Larry did appeal to me. "You're, well, You. You don't run around kicking people's asses."

"Tell that to the moneychangers." Jesus laughed, then took a long swig of His beer. "No, no, I'm thinking we should beat him in the ring."

"I can't wrestle," I said.

"Eh, I can teach you," Jesus said. He got up and went into the kitchen. In a second, He came back with a cookie sheet and a folding chair. "Okay, stand up here." I did. "Turn your back to Me." I did. And then He whomped me with the flat side of the cookie sheet. It rumbled like thunder in a way I found satisfying. But it didn't hurt. "Chair works on the same principle," Jesus assured me.

But I can assure you, when that folding chair hit me, it hurt. Not as bad as I expected, though.

We spent weeks practicing—Jesus rounded up a wrestling ring and a small gymnasium from someplace and I spent all my free time training. First my falls, then my flips, then Jesus and I would tumble around each other, rolling from one of us almost being pinned to the other and then back again. Jesus talked Jacob into coaching us, though the old man still walked with a limp from his last wrestling opponent.

"You need a signature move, Betsy," Jacob told me. "Get up there on those top ropes and do something amazing." I had no idea what I was going to do and, if you know me, you know I'm not much for heights. But when both Jesus and Jacob are all, "Do it!" who's going to say, "No, not me?"

So up I went, right leg on the bottom rope, left leg on the middle rope, and my hands firmly on the corner post. Top rope. Jacob wanted me on the top rope. But I looked out and saw I was a good ten, maybe twelve feet in the air, and I admit, I had second thoughts. Who was I, some big old fat Midwestern gal, to be challenging the laws of physics?

But that was one of the things I loved about wrestling—watching these bodies do things you don't expect big, brutish bodies to do. Okay, so I got up on the top rope, kind of half-squatting to keep my balance as the ropes shifted under the weight of me, and I decided to go for it. I leapt up for all I was worth, just leapt like I fully expected to hit the ceiling and keep going. I spread my arms out like airplane wings and pointed my toes behind me.

For a second, though it felt like forever, I was hanging between heaven and earth. I felt like, if I could have figured out how to open my eyes just right, I wouldn't have seen that gym around me, but rather me and a million, billion stars, all falling through the night sky, falling and falling and never landing.

But it doesn't work that way. What goes up must come down. And bam, I landed with a thud right on Jesus's outstretched arms. Knocked the wind right out of me.

"Yep, I like it," Jacob said, as if he came up with that move himself.

We were ready to take on Larry. Jesus found out that he and another guy, Hanging Jack, were wrestling as a team down in Columbia on the 22nd. The way these smaller venues worked it in order to keep it interesting for the fans was to have a couple of locals be the good guys and then bring in dudes like Larry and Hanging Jack to play the heels. Then, when it was Larry and Hanging Jack's turn to do a local show, one of the guys who'd been the hero at home would come and play heel for them.

So Larry and Hanging Jack were fully expecting to wrestle some locals.

One of whom unexpectedly won a family vacation to the Indiana Dunes and the other of whom had a long-lost cousin he'd dearly missed suddenly arrive on his doorstep, and he was intending to spend the evening catching up, not sweating it out in a gymnasium on the other side of town.

That left a convenient hole for Jesus and me to fill. The card was set. The match was fixed. We just had to show up, play convincing heels, do our signature moves if we had them, and lose after fifteen minutes. That way we'd be done in time for the main event.

I was the only woman wrestling that evening, so I got down to Columbia before Jesus, hoping to stake out someplace to change. There was a boys' locker room and a girls' locker room, but since they couldn't pay much, they let the headliners have one locker room and everyone else had to use the other. I needed to find a third spot to get dressed.

So I was kind of wandering around, looking for a women's restroom out of the way of traffic, when who should arrive but Larry?

"Betsy, holy shit, what are you doing here?" He grabbed my arm and led me off down a hall where we could talk privately. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

"Well, I still don't much feel like talking to you," I said.

"I am really sorry," he said and, when he looked at me, his big old hazel eyes glistening, I wanted to believe him, just for a second. He turned his head, like doing the right thing was taking all his strength. God, yes, I was being such a dumbass, yet again. But this shit worked on me! Just pretend like I'm the temptation you can barely resist. I eat that right up. After he gave the situation some thought, he said, "My pastor—"

"Oh, don't start in on him again."

"No, it's important. He said it's important that I confess and make amends. I want to do that." He dropped his shoulders. "Aw, damn it. Can you just give me a half an hour? Meet me back here in a half an hour and let me explain."

"Okay, fine. I guess."

He turned and headed toward the front entrance. I went a little farther down the hall and found that out-of-the-way women's bathroom I'd been hoping for. I got in there and I locked the door and fished out my leggings and my singlet. I'll spare you the details of how it was as much of a match wrestling myself into them as what was to come later, but it was unpleasant. I felt like a stuffed sausage. But I had these awesome boots—black vinyl that came up to my knees, with bright yellow laces. And then, in the bottom of my bag, was a mask.

Well, duh, it's not like Jesus and I could just go out there and wrestle as ourselves. But man, you know what smells funky? The inside of someone else's wrestling mask. Blegh.

Okay, so imagine it. There I am, head-to-toe in shiny black fabric, broken up only by my bright yellow laces, my face covered with a black mask rimmed with bright yellow around the eyes. I guess you could see my hair hanging out the back of the mask, all scraggly and dripping from where I had to wet it down to get the mask over my head. I come out of the bathroom unrecognizable even by my own mother, feeling both like I am the coolest chick on the planet and like I'm living out that nightmare where you're wandering around school naked. I turn to go down the hall, back toward civilization, back toward the pending match, and I've got a bit of bounce to my step and a little more straightness in my spine than usual. I'm not thinking about anything besides what it's going to be like to just stand there in the ring, doing this beautiful thing I've seen done so often.

So I almost ran into them—the tiny, gorgeous woman with the baby in her arms and the little girl whose hand she was holding. I stopped short, because I'd forgotten all about meeting Larry, but suddenly I had a feeling I knew who this woman was. She confirmed it a second later when the little girl tugged on her hand and asked, "Mommy, when can we go?" and she said, "In a minute. I want to meet your daddy's friend. I just want to see her."

Here's the thing. And I'm not saying this to put myself down—I'm cute enough in my own way. I just want you to understand the situation. She was gorgeous. Probably the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in real life. Physically, she was practically my opposite—small, thin, blonde—and she had the sweetest face. Plus, did you get the part where she had a baby? A new baby? The whole time Larry was carrying on with me, this woman was growing him a child.

I'm going to tell you right now that I didn't admit who I was. Not only because I am a craven coward, but because I knew she would never understand. Hell, I didn't understand it. She was everything she was supposed to be, all the things I'd been told I should be if I wanted a man. And she was still standing in a hallway half-hidden by a popcorn machine, waiting to meet the woman better than her. I wasn't better than her. Not in the bullshit terms our society sets up. And not in any of the ways it truly mattered.

And screw him for telling her where to find me but not having the balls to be there for the meeting. Was there anything he would not weasel his way out of? Leave me to face his brokenhearted wife? No, I was not doing his dirty work for him.

So I left my mask in place and walked on by.

Thankfully, Jesus had arrived by that point. So I filled Him in and He got this expression on His face I've seen a few times where He looks like He's about to laugh or cry or maybe both. But, instead, He just breathes out hard, like He's trying to clear something out of His head, and says, "Larry."

Jesus's outfit is similar to mine, except that He's in silver from head to foot. I shouldn't say this, probably, but the metallic sheen of His outfit gives Him the look of a walking fire hydrant. I wonder if He'd look better with a cape.

We hung out in the locker room through the first three matches and then we were up. When I heard the announcer say our names, I vowed to never let Jesus pick our tag-team names again. The Power and The Glory. I wanted to be The Millersville Mystery. That's a good, old-timey wrestling name. Right? But I was stuck with The Power.

The match was ordinary for the first part. I was in first, against Hanging Jack, who was a good six inches taller than me, which put him a whole foot over Jesus. Hanging Jack was pushing fifty and had been wrestling forever, so being in the ring with him was more like dancing than fighting. He'd pull me to him, whisper our next move. Then, if I was supposed to run into the ropes and use the momentum to clothesline him, when my outstretched arm reached his chest, he would crumple so expertly it looked as if he'd been hit by a train instead of barely touched by me. When it was my turn to suffer, when it had to look like he was about to pin me and he rolled me way up on my shoulders, he slipped his arm under my back to give me a little more support. When I kicked out, he moved away from me as easily as a dancer avoids his spinning partner.

After that, I tagged Jesus in. He and Hanging Jack did their thing for a few minutes and then there they were, face to face, Jesus and Larry. At first, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Kick, stomp, spear, clothesline, one's down, then the other, then the first, repeat. But when they're on the ropes by me, I heard Larry plain as day saying, "Okay, you flip me over your back next, and I'll sit down and pull you over mine."

Jesus answered, "I love you."

I saw Larry shake his head, just a slight movement, like he almost didn't mean to make it. He thought Jesus was trying to rattle him. And maybe He was. Every time the two men put their heads together, Jesus would say to Larry, "I love you."

I was trying to concentrate on what was going on in the ring, because even though it's all planned out, things can go wrong. You have to watch. But still, I stole a glance at the audience to see what they were making of it. They looked only half-interested. I imagine the loss of local boys to root for had soured their feelings on the match. They didn't appear to notice the proclamations of love coming from Jesus.

Now, the end of the match was tricky. It called for all four of us to be in the ring together. Larry and Hanging Jack were supposed to be ganging up on Jesus, both whaling on him while the ref is distracted or out cold or something. I forget. It doesn't matter. The point is, that's when I do my thing. Everyone's back is to me and I climb up on the top ropes in the corner and launch myself onto the two men pummeling my partner. But then I'm supposed to act like I'm knocked unconscious and Hanging Jack will pin me for the win. Finally, I'll unmask myself and Larry will see that it's me, which will prove…what, exactly? I don't know. Honestly. "Ha-ha, you beat me," isn't much of a victory speech.

But it was a step up from, "You made a fool out of me."

Okay, so it starts off according to plan. The ref is not in the picture. Larry and Hanging Jack are beating up on Jesus. I'm climbing the ropes from the outside of the ring. The crowd is actually paying attention. The little kids down front are straining to see what's coming next.

Just as I'm stepping onto the second rope, I see Jesus lean in and whisper to Larry. I think we all know what. And then I'm pulling myself up onto the top rope, precariously balancing as it shifts back and forth under my weight. Larry pulls away from Jesus and says, loudly, "Shut up, you fucking faggot." The crowd goes nuts. Some of them are cheering, some of them are booing. A plastic cup whizzes by my head and hits Hanging Jack in the back. It's about to turn ugly. I still have one hand on the rope. I could just climb back down.

But I stand up, just as Jesus removes His mask. And now a hush falls over the whole place and, since Larry's half-facing me, I can see that he's in mortal terror. He is what the Bible calls "sore afraid."

Is Jesus going to smite him? Do the whole crowd like that fig tree? Everyone is waiting to see.

Everyone but me.

I bend my knees, just slightly, and push off. Every inch I'm crossing as I fly through the air seems to take five minutes to go by. I am the highest person in this building and, from this perspective, I can see everything. I see a look of disappointment on Hanging Jack's face. I see the swallow perched on the scoreboard at the far end of the gym. There are two girls in the crowd, one with new braces, the other with a black eye, who are sharing a bag of popcorn. Larry's wife is sitting in the middle of the bleachers, her hair like a golden halo, and she's crying. So is the tiny baby. I realize that Larry doesn't know what love is. Not when it's his Lord and Savior whispering in his ear. Not when it's his wife giving him beautiful children. Not when it's me, believing in some best, fake version of him. And if he doesn't know what love is, then he doesn't know what it even means to be sorry. Not really.

That's what I think as I'm slowly, so slowly, floating over toward him. I see every detail of him, his dishwater-blond hair hanging loose, his stormy hazel eyes, that scar on his shoulder that could be road rash, could be a burn, the confused look as he realizes the match isn't over, that I'm still coming. He turns instinctively toward me, reaches out to break my fall, and I slam into him. We tumble to the mat. Someone's supposed to pin me. I'm sure of that. But no one else in the ring makes a move. So I just lie across him, still out of breath from the force of my landing. Eventually, the bell rings, so I guess I won.

Larry's still lying there, sprawled in the middle of the mat, with his eyes shut, like he wishes he could just die. Poor guy, so many theological problems and his pastor is nowhere in sight. So I put my lips right by his ear and whisper, "It's not the end of the world. At least now you really do have something to apologize to Jesus for." And then I take off my mask and he sees that it's me. He sees me.

Martian Garden

By John Philip Johnson | 143 words

with thanks to Mark Aiello

IT WAS THE FIRST GARDEN
we'd had there—the soil
of pulverized minerals, more like
mulched machine parts
than proper dirt, but it held root
and got clammy with moisture.
We worked it all day,
and then you stayed up painting it,
on canvas, as though you were in the caves
at Avignon, capturing elk and bison.
You lodged a big Earth sun overhead,
all bright and yellow,
and rows of imaginary corn, yellow
stalks and yellow silk, all of it yellow
and beaming, with one gardener among them,
me I think it was, a yellow me, also beaming,
as though the machine-made Martian air
didn't bite on my lungs with each breath.
Your painting changed things,
and while the plants we have will hardly
be green or even grow, and the sun
will never be pulled closer, no matter
how much pigment you apply, still,
as we worked the next day strewing
our gray spores over the rocks,
I was in your yellow Mars.

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

By Charles de Lint | 3396 words

Kingfisher, by Patricia A. McKillip, Ace, 2016, $27.

Dreams of Distant Shores, by Patricia A. McKillip, Tachyon, 2016, $15.95.

A NEW Patricia McKillip book is always a cause for celebration. McKillip has never disappointed me, regardless of how she flits about genres. She's written high fantasy, contemporary fantasy, science fiction, and horror, leaving her own distinct fingerprint on each so that in the end the best classification is that she writes McKillip novels.

People who don't read her, or haven't read much of her, tend to think of McKillip as someone who writes gentle high fantasies and has a gift for lyrical prose. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, the first book to really bring her to the attention of genre readers, fits that bill. As does her most famous work, The Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy, although I'd argue that both have an edge under the pastoral secondary world trappings.

Her latest novel, Kingfisher, doesn't appear any more subversive on the surface. The viewpoints switch around, but the first character we spend some time with is Pierce Oliver, a young man who works in the kitchen of his mother's restaurant in Desolation Point, a place that doesn't appear on any map.

There's a high fantasy feel to the setting, the place names, the theme of young Pierce being slightly dissatisfied with his lot in life until he discovers that his father was a knight from the king's court, his mother Heloise a sorceress who has hidden him away for safety. When he sets off from the small fishing village where he has lived all his life to find his father, it's not so much to make his fortune as to make sense of his life.

Prince Daimon is the youngest son of King Arden. Unlike Pierce, he knows who his father is, but not his mother. He too needs to make sense out of his life, especially when he discovers who his mother is, the hidden realm in which she lives, and the charge she lays upon him.

Back near Desolation Point, in the Kingfisher Bar and Grill in Chimera Bay, a young cook named Carrie has her own parental issues, though in her case it's that her father seems a bit mad, or drunk, or both, and rarely speaks to her, spending his nights running wild in the forest. There are mysteries at the Kingfisher Bar and Grill, as well. She can feel them swelling in the air around her, but no one will speak of them to her, any more than her father will speak to her.

When King Arden sends his knights on a quest for a magical cauldron, the lives of the three become entangled, and ancient stories come alive to play out upon the maps of their lives.

Unlike most secondary world fantasy taking place in some sort of mock medieval setting, we soon discover that this world has cars and roads and cell phones and all manner of modern trappings. The place names and McKillip's timeless prose only invite the earlier presupposition. I loved the way this felt.

I also loved how McKillip doesn't bother to go into explanations of how the magic works in her world. Pierce's mother can inhabit the body of animals and see through their eyes. When he's aware that she's looking at him through the eyes of a crow, it's simply stated, adding to the story's sense of wonder instead of bogging it down with unnecessary baggage.

The title of the book— Kingfisher —is a giveaway as to its underlying theme. This is an Arthurian story, through and through, with all the familiar elements set slightly askew but no less recognizable for that.

And if you like food and the idea of magical cooking, you'll find a wealth of it in these pages. My only regret is that as readers we don't get to try any of the magical dishes described. However, my appetite certainly increased as I read.

Kingfisher is McKillip writing at the peak of her game—which is amazing when you consider how long she's been at it. I loved the richness of the story and characters, the mingling of old with new, mythic with contemporary, and can't wait to reread it.

Dreams of Distant Shores, while recognizably McKillip in all the ways that matter, offers some new colors to the palette of her storytelling. There's not a wrong note here, from the opening story, the claustrophobic "Weird," where a couple are hiding in a bathroom from some monstrosity outside their apartment building and tell stories to each other about the odd things in their lives, to the gorgeous "Something Rich and Strange" that closes the book with its meditations on oceans and faerie and human relations with both, and of course with one another.

This edition also includes an afterword by Peter S. Beagle and a short essay about writing fantasy by McKillip which closes with one of the best reasoning points on the question of the importance of fantasy in the broader spectrum of literature:

"At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over again, in many ways, through centuries. Fantasy changes with the changing times, and yet it is still the oldest kind of tale in the world, for it began once upon a time, and we haven't heard the end of it yet."

Some authors we read for their characters and their plots, others for the beauty of their language. I read Pat McKillip for all three. She's gifted beyond compare, a National Treasure who should be cherished by all lovers of literature.

*   *   *

The Land of the Green Man: A Journey Through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles, by Carolyne Larrington, I. B. Tauris, 2015, $35.

I've long been fascinated with books that are sort of travelogs, combining descriptions of landscape with their geological beginnings and the history, myth, and folktales that are rooted in them. My interest began years ago. It might be speculative archaeology such as Barry Fell's America B.C., which delves into the history of the Americas that we're never taught in school, or tours of mysterious places such as can be found in The Secret Country by Janet and Colin Bord. Stone circles, henges, hill forts, and burial mounds.

My favorites are the little booklets you can pick up on your own travels, local histories and folklore collections written by some dedicated lover of their own area, sometimes crudely produced and/or written, but invariably filled with nuggets of lore.

I think my love of this sort of material came from my father's bookshelves, which were full of books about the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, Europe. When we lived in the Middle East, he made a point of taking us to every ruin we could visit in a day's drive from wherever we might be living at the time (which included Istanbul, Ankara, Beirut, and Cairo). When we left Ankara to catch the boat home in the Netherlands, we drove across Europe, and he planned our route to take in as many sites of historical importance as we could fit in along the way.

On our return home, the books he collected as we traveled remained to be explored over the years, and my sister and I did just that.

Caroline Larrington's The Land of the Green Man falls into the tradition of those little local histories mentioned above, except her book is beautifully produced and written, and her locale is the whole of the British Isles. But it reminded me of those booklets, especially when she turns to personal anecdotes of her own journeys through the landscape.

The trip takes us from Land's End in Cornwall with its walking dead all the way north to Sanday in Orkney where you might see a selkie; from Ben Bulben in Ireland, home of the sidhe; to Norwich in Norfolk, a haunt of the Green Man.

The sheer richness and depth of the lore to be found here, presented in almost conversational prose, makes it a delight to read. It's the sort of book you would want to have easy access to should you find yourself traveling about the British Isles, or to just delve in and read a few pages of while you've a moment or two to spare.

That being said, I was rather surprised to find that there is no digital version available. The Land of the Green Man isn't the weightiest of tomes, but it's still more than you would want to carry around in your backpack or under your arm as you run about doing errands and foresee some time stuck in line-ups.

A few specifics. It's lightly illustrated, but the inclusion of these illustrations appears somewhat arbitrary, and the reproduction quality is terrible. The endpapers feature a very useful map with a legend that points the reader to the many points of interest covered in the book. The notes are comprehensive, there's a very useful index, and the Further Reading list, while a little short, features a solid shelf of books that I'd readily recommend myself. It finishes up with a list of some websites with which I'm unfamiliar but which sound like they'd bear further attention.

I might seem a bit nitpicky above, but it's good to weigh the pros and cons of a book such as this. Overall, The Land of the Green Man would make a good, solid addition to the library of anyone interested in British folklore. Yes, you can find a lot of this material through a Google search, but following Larrington's journey through the Isles, and the warm tone of her prose, can't be duplicated by hopping through various on-line hyperlinks.

*   *   *

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, Penguin, 2010, $16.

I completely missed these books when they were first published ( The Magicians is the first of a trilogy that also includes The Magician's Land and The Magician King ). Instead, I caught the first episode of the TV series and was intrigued with its young adult treatment of a college for wizardry that was so different in attitude from, say, the travails of the students attending Hogwarts. The students of Brakebills College are cynical, the magic is complicated, and there's not a warm fuzzy feeling in sight.

On the TV series we're introduced to Quentin and Julia, both of whom find themselves in the perplexing position of taking an entrance examination to be accepted at Brakebills College—a place they've never heard of and they have no idea how they got there. The pair have been friends for years, sharing an interest in magic due to their fascination with a series of books set in the magical world of Fillory (think Narnia).

Quentin is accepted, but Julia isn't. Her memories are supposed to be erased (because Brakebills, like Hogwarts, is a secret school), but the mind wipe doesn't take. In a storyline that feels like a junkie's descent, Julia finds herself navigating the dark and seedy world of hedge witches to learn what Brakebills refused to teach her.

Quentin, meanwhile, is struggling with the impossibility of what he's experiencing. He's always been miserable and socially awkward (accurately portrayed on the show to the point of being painful to watch at times), but as he comes to accept the reality of his position—magic exists and he's a magician, though neither is quite what he expected—he also comes to understand that his beloved Fillory exists, but it, too, is different. Less the Narnia-like paradise he imagined and far more dangerous.

The episodes I watched felt a little choppy or rushed at times, but the tone captured a real sense of wonder. So I got myself a copy of the first book in the series, because, more often than not, the book will be better, and I wanted to see how Grossman handled his own characters.

My first surprise was that Julia is barely in the book. She's the most intriguing character on the show, where her struggle for identity and magic is a powerful journey. Around a third of each episode is devoted to that storyline. In the book she gets maybe twenty pages, overall, and none of it reflects her travails on the show.

The second surprise is that the book is much darker in tone. Quentin is more miserable, if that's possible, and the various characters are self-centered and at least somewhat unlikable most of the time. The magic retains its sense of wonder, but if I had to give you a touchstone, it would be Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, in particular the first trilogy beginning with Lord Foul's Bane. Much of that series is unrelentingly dark, and some elements are quite disturbing, but there's no denying the power of the story and characters.

If you add to that the nihilistic mindset of some segments of today's youth culture, you'll get an idea as to the overall tone of the prose version of The Magicians. The TV show isn't quite so bleak—or at least it hasn't been for the first half of the series, which is all I've watched so far. And Elliot, who takes Quentin under his wing in both book and TV show, is charmingly indolent as depicted on the screen rather than mean-spirited.

I've begun The Magician's Land (2012) and the tone is somewhat lighter. Quentin, Julia, Elliot, and Elliot's friend Janet are now the co-kings and queens of Fillory, and while they're still self-indulgent, Quentin has become more likable. Better yet, this book appears to deliver Julia's missing backstory that is playing out so effectively on the TV version.

On the whole, the book series appears to address the disillusionment that can come to one on the journey into adulthood, and in that sense, it's an unqualified success. Whether the TV show will follow in its thematic footsteps remains to be seen, but it, too, is its own success, not least for presenting such a quirky view of magic in a medium that usually goes for the big effects.

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Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, by Diana Pavlac Glyer, Kent State University Press, 2016, $18.95.

The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (2007) is a scholarly exploration of the Inklings, a literary group of Oxford writers who met regularly on a Thursday night to discuss literature as well as share with each other, and comment upon, their current works-in-progress. Professor Diana Pavlac Glyer did extensive research to challenge the long upheld belief that the Inklings didn't influence each other, an erroneous idea that can be summed up in a 1959 quote from C.S.Lewis to one of his readers: "No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch."

It didn't seem logical to Glyer. How could a regular gathering of writers that included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Warren Lewis, and others, who got together to read their works to each other for commentary, not have been influenced by each other?

Glyer's curiosity began at an early age. In Bandersnatch, she writes: "When I discovered the Inklings, I was only sixteen years old, and I wanted to know the answers to two simple questions. What did these writers talk about when they met to discuss their works in progress? And what difference did these conversations make to the books they were writing? It seemed to me that it would be really easy to find the answers."

Turned out, it was anything but.

So Glyer—against the advice of one of her mentors—undertook a study of published and unpublished works, papers, and letters written by the various members. She was able to document how, in reality, the Inklings inspired and provoked each other to create better-written and more individual work than they might have without the regular meetings and friendships they formed within the group.

As I mentioned above, The Company They Keep is a scholarly work, and it was well-received—so much so that it won the 2008 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies. But it probably goes into a little too much detail for the more casual reader, which makes this pared-down version of the earlier book so welcome.

Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings is a much shorter book, written in almost conversational prose. But it's more than a simple reiteration of the earlier book because what Glyer is exploring here as well is the idea of collaboration on a larger scale. She writes in her Acknowledgments: "I remain convinced that books should have a list of credits at the end, just like movies. We need more capacious ways to talk about what collaboration is and why it matters."

And then she goes on to do just that.

Yes, there is a wonderful font of information in these pages about the Inklings, but it also provides one of the better guides to the collaborative process, including a chapter at the end with suggestions on how to get the most out of a group set up in a style similar to that of the Inklings. I think one of the best pieces of advice she gives is how to understand the difference between "I don't personally like this" and "This isn't any good" when critiquing a manuscript.

To writers planning to set up a writing group, I recommend Bandersnatch wholeheartedly. That said, those who simply love to read—especially those who particularly appreciate the work of Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams—will find much to enjoy as well.

And speaking of Charles Williams, you might be interested to know that the Oxford University Press has released a new biography about him, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, by Grevel Lindop. I had planned to review it here as well, but discovered as I started browsing through the book that Williams wasn't a particularly pleasant man. What I read of the book was certainly well written and meticulously researched, but the more I read the more I realized that I wasn't interested in spending almost five hundred pages in Williams's company.

Since I don't review books I haven't read all the way through, I decided to take a pass. You might feel entirely different about it.

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Nightshades by Melissa F. Olson, Tor.com, 2016, $14.99.

One of the things I like about Melissa Olson is that she's not afraid to try something new. And even when her subject matter seems like the same old same old, she always finds a way to inject a freshness—an individuality—into the text that makes it feel new.

I know, I know. I tend to go on about her in this column and I don't mean to. But every time I read one of her books I have the uncontrollable urge to share my love of her work with anybody who will listen.

I complain a lot about how the urban fantasy published today has a sameness about it, but that seems to be par for the course when it comes to all the various subgenres in our field. The copycats come in waves. The Robert E. Howard clones. The Tolkien clones. The Stephen King clones. The charming vampire wave, which started either with Anne Rice or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. And the interesting thing is that with the passage of time, the clones fade into obscurity while the originators remain in the bookstores and continue to sell.

So perhaps the complaining is pointless and unnecessary. But when we're in the middle of one of these waves it seems imperative to applaud those writers who aren't interested in simply repeating what's come before.

Nightshades isn't set in Olson's Old World universe. It introduces us to the FBI's Bureau of Paranormal Investigations—the division tasked with investigating crimes involving shades. Or what we would call vampires. Alex McKenna is the new Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office and he has the daunting task of trying to stop a rash of children going missing while keeping his agents alive. It's his first big posting, and the only reason he got the job was because the previous agents were all slaughtered and no one else really wants to take it on.

Olson's shades are amoral, fast, and dangerous, and no one really understands exactly what they are or what they want. So McKenna tracks down the one thing that can give him an edge: an informant who is also a shade.

Everything rings true in this short novel. The pace is fast, but the characterization runs deep, and under Olson's deft control, it feels as though we're reading these concepts for the very first time.

And that's a trick that Olson pulls off in each of her books and stories.

*   *   *

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 | 2183 words

Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow, by James Morrow, Wesleyan University Press, 2015, $30.

You Have Never Been Here: New and Selected Stories, by Mary Rickert, 2015, Small Beer Press, $16.

A Natural History of Hell: Stories, by Jeffrey Ford, Small Beer Press, 2016, $16.

FROM ALL evidence, publishers failed to get the memo, the one that's been circulating pretty much nonstop for years, that short-story collections don't sell.

Okay, maybe it's true that collections aren't commercial. And maybe it's also true that factors such as new production technologies, dedicated interest from university-affiliated presses, and the proliferation of small presses and niche publishers have changed the landscape, story collections springing up in the shade.

For my last column here, in which I reviewed story collections by Dale Bailey and Tananarive Due, I read six collections and sampled at least as many. And now on my desk, irrepressibly, there's a new crop from Black Lawrence Press, Tachyon Publications, Aqueduct Press, Macmillan, Small Beer Press, McSweeney's Books, Wesleyan University Press, and half a dozen or so more.

We read, among other reasons, as a corrective to history and as rescue from habituation. History deals in large issues, overviews, wars and shifts of power, while fiction allows us to see how individuals and groups truly lived, their day-to-day lives. But it is our own daily life—habituation—that can inure us and keep us from seeing, dial the brightness of our lives down to a blur. Fiction sits up and takes note. Fiction can make our world large again.

Fabulists love to take the large in one hand, the small in the other, and juggle them.

*   *   *

James Morrow loves to poke at anthills. Reading him always recalls a favored quote from The Wild Ones, when the motorcycle gang's leader, asked what he's rebelling against, responds "What do you have?"

Reality by Other Means collects seventeen stories from this magazine, Amazing Stories, Conjunctions, and various anthologies such as Full Spectrum and The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories. Those who know Morrow's work will recognize familiar touchstones: the folly and inevitability of war, orthodoxies and dogma in whatever shape or form, politics, horror movies, and, of course, religion. It may be tempting to think of religion as his fulcrum. He did, after all, title a series of tales Bible Stories for Adults . And wrote a novel about towing God's massive corpse across the Atlantic. Reality reminds us of the range of his writing.

The first lines in the collection, from "Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva," serve as a kind of speed-dating pitch to the reader, hitting every mark.

After thirty years spent eating the chilled coral brains of overachieving amateur climbers who believed they could reach the summit of Mount Everest without dying, a diet from which I derived many insights into the virtues and limitations of Western thought, I decided that my life could use a touch more spirituality, and so resolved to study Tibetan Buddhism under the tutelage of His Holiness, Chogi Gyatso, the fifteenth Dalai Lama.

There, doing the yeti voice, are Morrow's trademark looping style, skewed perspective, and crowlike gather of shiny things. Each sentence seems to head off in two or three different directions; phrases are folded and folded again, hiding secrets at their heart.

In "The War of the Worldviews" diminutive Martians appear, suck up the city's electricity and seal it into a spherical container the size of a racquetball before going about their incomprehensible agenda.

In other stories, Helen of Troy's son asks what mommy did in the war; special formulas turn beast-men into politicians or men (for entertainment) into sub-humans; the ground itself ruptures, a fault line opening "down the middle of Room 102 in the Willard Building," when a teacher lectures on relativism and the passing of morality, truth, and beauty; a woman gives birth to a miniature Earth complete with evolving and disappearing life forms.

Yet never does the idea of a story claim more than its fair share at the food bowl. The yeti considers the code and protocol of what he does, and bonds with the Dalai Lami over a mutual passion for James Bond films. Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan makes housecalls in his portable baptismal font complete with Styrofoam chalice and corrugated cardboard altar. With Morrow, always there's a deepfelt humanity, not a wizard, behind the curtain. What makes a novel readable, he's said in an interview with Nick Gevers on SF Site, is not its immediate subject but its deeper themes, adding that these emerge only in the writing itself.

"When the starving sailors start munching on God's flab in Towing Jehovah, when Jesus reveals himself as Satan at the end of Blameless in Abaddon, and when God's large intestine lets slip that he doesn't give a shit about humanity in The Eternal Footman —well, there's not much going on there to comfort the average churchgoer."

There is, however, a great deal to stimulate and delight the imaginative reader. Morrow is a classic satirist in the manner of Swift, Voltaire, and Twain, his stories at one and the same time dark comedies, inexorable tragedy.

*   *   *

The sky may not be falling, but it's certainly atilt at an odd angle, and we are all afraid.

"Which world?" you ask. Well, that's the question, isn't it, since a primary engine of arealist fiction is its embrace of the suggestion that the world you see isn't the world that is; that beneath, behind, ahead, or half a step to the side of the world you inhabit lie others.

Reading a Mary Rickert story quite often is like sinking through layers of such worlds. We begin in one place, blink, and open our eyes to somewhere— something —else.

"Journey into the Kingdom," for instance, seems in its initial pages the fairly standard story of a childhood till the narrator's dead father starts bringing home the ghosts of fellow drowned travelers, including that of a young man who does not melt away like the others to a puddle, and to whose first-person narration the story shifts, without transition, before returning to that of the young woman.

Later, after my mother had tended the lamp while Ezekial and I shared the kisses that left me breathless, she asked him to leave, saying that I needed my sleep.

Here, as in all, the seams are beautifully aligned but never stitched tight. We can't be sure where we stand, overcome by vertigo that for a moment stops our breath. Each time our feet find purchase, the ground again drops away.

You Have Never Been Here collects eleven stories, six of them from the magazine you're now reading, others from Subterranean Magazine, SCIFICTION, and Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. "The Shipbuilder" appears here for the first time.

Rickert, a recipient of World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards, has published two previous collections and a novel, The Memory Garden, the tale of a witch and her foundling which, as Matthew Cheney wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books, begins with echoes of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Peter Straub's Ghost Story before, three-quarters of the way through, "it blossoms into something rich and strange."

Here, from "The Shipbuilder," is a man returning to his childhood home, a town literally and figuratively lost in time, unfailingly rich and strange.

Thinking of Wayne, Quark almost missed the turn down Avalon, going too fast for the dip in the road. Over the years it had only grown deeper. Naturally, nothing was done about it. To the citizens of Bellfairie a pothole was a matter of terrain; not a problem with a simple remedy, but the inevitable erosion—impossible to combat—of life.

The world within and the world without, large and small, become indistinguishable, the rhythms and lineaments of one forming a frame for the other.

Rickert's stories hit the ground running hard. "The Mothers of Voorhisville" begins, "The things you have heard are true; we are the mothers of monsters" and continues its bifold exoneration-confession for a hundred pages. Rickert also writes killer endings, as in this further exemplar of her style from "Cold Fires."

All that night, as they told their stories, the flames burned heat onto that icy roof, which melted down the sides of the house and over the windows so that in the cold morning when they woke up, the fire gone to ash and cinder, the house was encased in a sort of skin of ice which they tried to alleviate by burning another fire, not realizing they were only sealing themselves in more firmly. They spent the rest of that whole winter in their ice house. By burning all the wood and most of the furniture and eating canned food even if it was out of date, they survived, thinner and less certain of fate, into a spring morning thaw, though they never could forget those winter stories, not all that spring or summer and especially not that autumn, when the winds began to carry that chill in the leaves, that odd combination of sun and decay, about which they did not speak, but which they knew would exist between them forever.

In every story here, on virtually each page, occur such remarkable turns: collapsed chronology, textual trapdoors, secret passageways, lyrical language cheek-to-cheek with terrible events. Recreations of the dreams that make us and those that haunt us—which may be the same.

Fiction is how society dreams, Mary Rickert has said in an interview in the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Like Quark in "The Shipbuilder," like Ezekial, like the children of the Voorhisville mothers, "We are beautiful monsters."

*   *   *

The field we call science fiction and fantasy, perhaps better considered a community than a genre, more than most other writing cleaves to its past. Stories often palpably carry the mark of what came before. Those of Jeffrey Ford's A Natural History of Hell, for all their diversity, reach, and virtuosity, may remind veteran readers of classic work from the fifties, that intersection of the fantastic and mundane put in place by writers like Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and Fritz Leiber.

Formally Ford's stories are object lessons in how to stage a narrative. Some are first-person, ajamb and smoldering at the threshold of truth; others are tales narrated within other tales, a kind of literary turducken; some, such as "The Angel Seems" or "Word Doll," have the authentic feel of folk tales. Courting the fantastic, they are, every one, stories of people, of resilience and pain and silent struggle, and of the occasional winning-through.

This, for instance, from "The Last Triangle":

I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker, in Fishmere, part suburb/part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people's yards and pawned it or sold it on the street.

That is the writer leaning toward you to whisper he has something important to tell you. And you know that he does.

"A Natural History of Hell" collects thirteen stories originally published in this magazine, on Tor.com, and in various anthologies such as Queen Victoria's Book of Spells and Fearful Symmetries.

"The Blameless," appearing here for the first time, opens the collection, with Tom and Helen receiving a formal invitation to an exorcism for the daughter of their neighbors up the street. These are all the rage, it seems; there are even greeting cards for the occasion.

"Yeah, people are getting their kids exorcised for whatever ails them….You know, if your kid doesn't listen, is screwing up in school, hanging out with knuckleheads…. It costs like a grand to have your kid spring cleaned."

"Blood Drive" echoes that same black comedy and terrible pertinence— if this goes on with vengeance, rim shot, and cackles of laughter offstage.

For Christmas our junior year of high school, all of our parents got us guns. That way you had a half a year to learn to shoot and get down all the safety garbage before you started senior year. Depending on how well off your parents were, that pretty much dictated the amount of fire power you had. Darcy Krantz's family lived in a trailer, and so she had a peashooter, 22 Double Eagle Derringer, and Baron Hane's father, who was in the security business and richer than god, got him a 44 magnum that was so heavy it made his nutty kid lean to the side when he wore the gun belt.

Then, fellow travelers, moving right along, there's the medicine-show cure-all, the abused children, and the intervening witch of "Mount Chary Galore"; a visit to the shabby, long-forgotten museum of dolls created to give hard-laboring farm children the easement of an alternative reality; Emily Dickinson learning her ride's here in "A Terror"; the quick-change artistry of Ford's tribute to Japanese creators in "A Natural History of Autumn."

Of the last, asked in a 2012 interview on SF Site if it is out of the ordinary for what he usually writes, Ford responded that it's hard to say what's typical of his work these days. "When I just look back over the last five or six stories I've written for publication, I can't find any two that are similar…. It's definitely not typical in that I have never written a story set in Japan before and probably never will again. It is typical that I have written supernatural stories containing weird creatures with undercurrents of noir and/or pulp."

For which we are all the richer.

FILMS: BUNKER MENTALITY

By Kathi Maio | 1835 words

THE problem with most sequels is that they are sequels. More of the same. I guess many filmgoers must long for the oh-so-familiar aspects of film franchises almost as much as the studios who perpetually look to create a bankable box-office sure thing. I am not that kind of filmgoer, however. I want a movie to feel new and surprising and not an extension of a something similar that came out two (or more) years earlier.

That's one of the many reasons I enjoyed the "sequel," 10 Cloverfield Lane . It wasn't really a sequel at all. Many science fiction fans will recall the original Cloverfield from 2008. Directed by Matt Reeves and scripted by Drew Goddard, it was a creature feature in the (quickly irksome) style of "found footage."

The audience watches a video that accidently cross-cuts an idyllic day of new love for a young couple with horrific events from a month later. A bon voyage party, fraught with romantic angst, is abruptly interrupted by blackouts, bangs and rumbles…and then worse. Revelers soon realize that monsters large and small have descended upon New York City.

The monsters show little respect for the Statue of Liberty and even less for the trendy millennials of Manhattan. With regards to the latter, I'd have to agree with the alien attackers. What I liked least about Cloverfield was the cast of characters. I found them hapless and more than a little annoying. Of course, that might have been on purpose. Although satire didn't appear to be a major component to the film, perhaps the filmmakers were simply trying to keep viewers from caring too deeply for the half dozen or so "lead" characters. After all, one by one, they were soon dispatched by monsters and mishaps, not unlike the teens in an eighties slasher flick.

While Cloverfield was no mega blockbuster, its moderate success, along with dropped hints and teases from producer J.J. Abrams and associates, soon had fantasy film fans eagerly awaiting a " Cloverfield 2. " What they got was something better. During his secretive hype period, Mr. Abrams called the second movie a "blood relative of Cloverfield. " And there is a relationship between the two films. But in terms of tone and themes and about ninety percent of plot points, 10 Cloverfield Lane couldn't be further from its predecessor.

As the film opens, a young woman named Michelle (the excellent Mary Elizabeth Winstead) hightails it out of New Orleans to escape a troubled relationship. Her peaceful, if spooky, late-night drive through rural Louisiana suddenly explodes, as her car crashes off the highway. When she awakens, she is on an IV drip and her knee is in a brace. But she soon realizes that this is no hospital. She is chained, on a floor mattress, in a windowless, concrete room.

As Michelle later admits, most situations of male violence and intimidation have heretofore elicited an impulse to run away. But this mysterious prison, with no escape available, brings out all the fight she can muster; much to the surprise—and grudging respect—of her captor, a portly man named Howard (John Goodman).

He tries to explain that he brought her to this underground shelter to save her. Howard claims there has been an attack of a chemical or nuclear nature and this well-appointed underground bunker is the only thing keeping both of them alive. Before long, Michelle becomes aware of a third shelter inhabitant: a younger man named Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.). And Emmett confirms that the deadly dangers of the above-ground world are real.

Michelle's gut tells her that Howard is a psycho. On some level, that appears to be true. Emmett, who helped the older man build and stock his shelter, says that Howard, a former Navy satellite engineer, is a "black belt in conspiracy theory." But, as Joseph Heller observed, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. So Michelle, and the audience, are kept guessing about exactly how crazy and dangerous Howard is for a good long while.

The suspense of 10 Cloverfield Lane would never have worked without the subtle performance of John Goodman in the role of Howard. Although Goodman is best known for bombastic, larger-than-life roles, his Howard is a quieter and much more chilling character. One minute he seems well-intentioned and calm. At other times, the steely glint in his eye is scarier than anything the gigantic monster of the original Cloverfield could ever dish out. The actor's performance is consistently unsettling and brilliant.

But with an apocalypse likely above, what's a girl to do? Michelle eventually decides that escape might not be her best short-term option. So she uneasily decides to go along to get along, and the three leads settle into an off-kilter yet oddly cozy—almost familial—social unit. Still, no one will be surprised to learn that Howard was not designed to be a benign pater familias for long. And Michelle never loses the suspicion that her role in this subterranean clan may be far from healthy for her physical or emotional well-being.

Like a really good episode of the Twilight Zone, the chamber play that is 10 Cloverfield Lane will keep audiences creeped out and guessing right up until the final scene. And, as long as you weren't hoping for another "found footage" creature feature, you will likely be very happy with your moviegoing experience watching this un-sequel.

Director Trachtenberg told The Verge that "the Cloverfield 'thing' can really be this platform to tell really interesting and fun and original stories." An anthology of very loosely connected quality movies? Now that's the kind of film franchise we can all get behind!

And for another quality thriller that explores a much different kind of bunker mentality, I would also recommend Eye in the Sky. South African filmmaker Gavin Hood, in earlier projects like Rendition and Ender's Game, has already contemplated the morality of war and military action. That theme is also explored, in all its complexity, in this drama (written by Guy Hibbert) about the use of drones in antiterrorism operations.

Colonel Katherine Powell (steely Helen Mirren) eagerly leads an international counter-terror mission to capture several most-wanted jihadists in Nairobi, Kenya. They include a British woman (loosely based on the real-life "white widow," Samantha Lewthwaite, suspected of involvement in the terrorist rampage at the Westgate shopping mall), whom the Colonel has been tracking for years. But a surveillance and capture operation changes rapidly when those only tentatively identified as the suspects move from the original location to a safe house in an al-Shabab stronghold. Using a futuristic miniature drone designed to mimic a beetle, a Nairobi intelligence operative (Barkhad Abdi) is able to monitor the doings in the enemy outpost, but the area is too dangerous, and populated with too many innocent Kenyan civilians, for a traditional military raid.

The international team, which includes photographic ID experts in Hawaii, a tense drone pilot (Aaron Paul) in Las Vegas, and a committee of political overseers in London convened by a world-weary lieutenant general (the late, great Alan Rickman) are all in a holding pattern. That is, until the drone beetle observes young men in the safe house strapping on armed suicide vests. At this point, Colonel Powell pushes for a targeted kill mission, using the Hellfire missiles on the Predator drone. But the challenge of having such a clear bird's eye view of the target, along with crackerjack statistical analytics of shrapnel and debris trajectories, is that there is no getting around the reality of "collateral damage" and likely civilian casualties. In Eye in the Sky that damage is personified by a sweet little girl selling her mother's bread at a village marketplace just outside the walled terrorist enclave. The Colonel has no doubts that the body count for two successful suicide bombings make the loss of even the most innocent of bystanders a justifiable act. Others are less sure.

Since much of the movie is a policy and ethical debate around a conference table in London and via video and telephone link-up between the various players around the globe, you might expect the film to drag a bit in the third act. It does—a little—but only a very little. Writer and director keep the action (or lack thereof) amazingly taut throughout. The debate is passionate and intelligent, and it is punctuated with tense on-the-ground action to contain the danger and, if possible, save the little bread seller and the exposed Kenyan agent.

Viewers will not be shocked to learn that the characters least likely to agonize about killing the innocent are Americans. These include a Secretary of State (Michael O'Keefe) who is only peeved that anyone would interrupt his ping pong match in China for a matter so trivial. Still, to be fair, the people who agonize most about the missile strike are also Americans, Paul's drone pilot and his rookie partner (Phoebe Fox).

Technology is, in the end, a blessing and curse…as we always knew it was. It makes killing easier to accomplish, but not easier to live with. It seems appropriate that one of the final lines of this excellent suspense film is delivered by Alan Rickman, in his last screen performance. "Never tell a soldier he does not know the cost of war," he tells an angry policy wonk. Whether they are in the trenches, or safely tucked away in a beige trailer in the Nevada desert, the soldiers are all too keenly aware of that cost.

For those interested in finding a film about the politics of terror for the whole family, I actually do, believe it or not, have a suggestion. And that is the fine animated hit, Zootopia. This adorable Disney cartoon about a plucky little bunny, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), who dreams of being a heroic police officer in a city with twelve ecosystems, where lion and lamb-child finally live in peaceful harmony, is actually more thought-provoking than it might first appear.

It seems that certain members of the predator class—otters, panthers and the like—have started disappearing soon after they experience violent, psychotic outbursts. In an elaborate plot involving Mafiosi, government cover-ups, and potent botanicals, newbie officer Hopps is assisted, most reluctantly, by a flimflamming fox (Jason Bateman) in restoring peace to her anxious city.

Although Zootopia was clearly written and produced before the 2016 presidential race geared up, this kiddie flick is oddly prescient in its contemplation of the dangerous opportunism of political fear-mongering and its unsettling impact on society. And perhaps the movie will also inspire a discussion or two about the stereotyped roles of police as heroes, sexist bureaucrats, and fat, donut-chomping dopes. As a vegetarian, I came up with an additional issue to consider. I kept wondering about what the predators in this charming animated tale ate, now that society frowned upon them chowing down on their sheep and gazelle neighbors and co-workers. Are there factory farms located just outside of Zootopia where poor cows and chickens are bred and slaughtered for the hygienic meals of the lions and polar bear residents of our urban eden? If so, then I fear that Zootopia is just another failed utopia, like all the rest.

But, hey, don't worry. If you only want to view Zootopia as a cheery little feature cartoon, full of the frolicking anthropomorphic critters Disney excels in creating, it works perfectly well on that level, too.

SCIENCE

By Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty | 2945 words

OUR SUPER COOL SOLAR SYSTEM

THE SOLAR system, taken as a whole, is a very cool place.

We mean that quite literally. Spacecraft exploring the planets and moons of the solar system beyond the Earth have found worlds ruled by ice—from the water ice on Mars to the icy moons and planets that are farther from the Sun.

Science fiction writers have long been aware that ice is very interesting stuff, and not just in drinks on the rocks. Science fiction has featured worlds of ice—from the planet Winter in Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness to Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.

And then there's our favorite science fictional use of ice—Kurt Vonnegut's "ice 9" in the novel Cat's Cradle. This fictional ice has a melting point of 114 °F and a unique property. A single crystal of ice 9 dropped in liquid water will seed the crystallization of the water, even at a temperatures well above the melting point of ordinary ice. If a crystal of ice 9 ever touched the Earth's ocean, the results would be catastrophic. The entire ocean would freeze solid along with every body of water in contact with the ocean.

We'll get back to ice 9. But before we do, we're going to explore worlds of ice—starting on planet Earth, venturing into the solar system to discover just how strange ice can get, and returning to the safety of home, where you can make your own personal ice world, using your household freezer.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF MICKEY MOUSE

You've probably seen photographs of snowflakes that reveal the hexagonal symmetry of the crystalline structure of water ice.

Snowflake photos by Wilson Bentley circa 1902

The ice in each snowflake is made of water molecules arranged in hexagons.

Why hexagons? That has to do with the shape of the water molecule. Being savvy sf readers, you all know that water is H 2 O. Each water molecule has an oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms connected to the oxygen. The molecule is shaped like the head of Mickey Mouse—with the oxygen as the head and the two hydrogens as the ears. The three atoms join to make a V shape, with an angle of 105° between the ears.

The bonds that hold each water molecule together are made when each hydrogen atom shares an electron with the oxygen atom. But oxygen doesn't share well with others—at least not when the others are lightweights like hydrogen. In water, oxygen hogs the electrons, pulling on them so they spend more time over by the oxygen than they do by the hydrogens. Since electrons are negatively charged, this means that Mickey's head (the oxygen) is negatively charged and the ears (the hydrogens) are positively charged.

The molecule as a whole is neutral, but it's what chemists call polar —that is, the molecule's charge is unevenly distributed. This has some important consequences. Four billion years ago (give or take half a billion), water served as a medium for the great mashup of organic compounds that eventually led to life on this planet. Water could act as a solvent for these compounds because it's polar and attracts molecules like sugars, nucleic acids, and many amino acids.

That polarity is also responsible for some unique qualities of water. Since positive charges attract negative charges, the hydrogens of one water molecule are attracted to the oxygens of another. That makes water molecules tend to stick together with what is called a hydrogen bond. That's why water stays liquid at temperatures where similar molecules that aren't polar are gaseous.

In liquid water, all the little mouse-head molecules are jiggling around. Cool the water to below its freezing point, and the molecules form into a regular pattern—with the hydrogen-ears of one molecule sticking to the oxygen-mouse-head of another. A regular hexagon that's perfectly flat has edges with angles of 120 degrees between them. The water molecules, with their angle of 105 degrees, get distorted. The angle between the hydrogen mouse ears opens up to 109.5 degrees, and the molecules then come together to make a hexagon that's not quite flat—the water molecules crinkle up and down as they form the hexagonal shapes that make up the snowflake.

If you have ever made the mistake of putting a glass bottle full of water in the freezer, you have already seen first hand a consequence of this hexagonal structure. Water expands when it freezes, busting the bottle and making a frozen mess surrounded by broken glass.

You owe that mess to the hexagonal structure of ice. Each of those hexagons has a fairly large open region in the center. In liquid water, molecules crowd together without such open spaces. That's why ice is less dense than liquid water. Because it's less dense, ice floats on water, and bodies of water freeze at the surface, leaving the lower water liquid. Fish and other aquatic animals can live below the ice in liquid water through the winter.

CRYOVOLCANOES AND STRETCH MARKS

Knowing this characteristic of ice has helped astronomers deduce what's going on inside some of the ice worlds they have observed. The surface may be covered with ice—but what's underneath that hard shell? If it's a liquid water ocean that is freezing, the volume of the planet must increase. That means the surface must stretch and crack.

Astronomers look for these stretch marks in the surface of ice worlds and find them. Take Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, for example. The bright icy terrain on Ganymede is covered with grooves, evidence of the freezing ocean underneath the ice. Europa, another of Jupiter's icy moons, has a beautiful pattern of cracks, formed by pressure created by ice expanding below the surface.

On Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft documented cryovolcanoes that shoot out geysers of water vapor, salt water from the under-ice sea propelled by internal pressure. You may have seen a similar phenomenon in your own ice cube tray. An ice cube, like a planet, freezes from the outside in, resulting in a center filled with water under pressure. Sometimes, the pressure creates a crack in the surrounding ice and then pushes water out the crack through the top surface of the ice cube. The result is a "unicorn horn" or ice spike growing upward out of the ice cube.

So far, we've been talking about the density of ice. As anyone who has been ice skating can tell you, another attribute of frozen water is its hardness.

Geologists measure hardness on the Mohs scale. On the Mohs scale, diamonds have a hardness of 10, the top of the scale. Talc, the softest of stones, has a hardness of 1. At 0 °C, ice has a hardness of 1.5, about as hard as lead. But as temperatures drop, ice gets harder.

On a visit to the dry valleys of Antarctica, Paul saw granite carved into fantastic shapes by blowing snow. The snow was below -40 °C and had a hardness of greater than 6. It was hard enough to chip away at the softer minerals in granite.

Remember this when you look at images of other planets. Images from the Cassini spacecraft show that Saturn's moon Titan has water ice mountains. With a surface temperature averaging about -179 °C, Titan's ice mountains are as hard as granite. They are eroded by rivers of liquid methane.

New Horizons sent us amazing images of Pluto that show water icebergs floating in a "sea" of nitrogen ice. You can think of nitrogen ice as Silly Putty—it flows slowly even at Pluto's estimated surface temperature of about -233 °C.

ICE OF MANY NUMBERS

The water ice we've described above is just one form of ice—the one you're most likely to encounter in day-to-day life on Earth. You just call it ice, but when talking about the many forms of ice, scientists call it ice Ih (pronounced: "ice one h").

Each one of the many forms of water ice has its own geometry and each has been given its own number. What type of ice forms from water depends on temperature, pressure, the rate of cooling, and radiation it receives.

Other than ice Ih, the only form of ice you'll find on Earth is ice Ic (pronounced "ice one c"). The c stands for cubic, because water molecules come together with cubic symmetry in this form. Ice Ic forms in cold high altitude clouds at temperatures between -140 and -50 °C. When ice Ic falls to lower warmer regions, it turns to ice Ih.

Many of the other kinds of water ice require extreme pressures to form. Ice III or ice 3 forms at a pressure of 3000 atmospheres and at temperatures below -23 °C (250 K or -10 °F) . That's not a pressure you're going to find on Earth—not even in the deepest part of the ocean (the Marianas Trench in the Pacific). Given the temperature and pressure requirements, this type of ice will never be found on the outside surface of a moon or planet. The most likely place to find it is inside one of the ice worlds in our solar system—like Callisto, a moon of Jupiter.

Ice III is denser than liquid water. If it formed in a planet's ocean, it would immediately sink to the bottom. This means there could be liquid water sandwiched between two layers of ice—ice I at the surface and ice III at the bottom.

There are also forms of ice that are not crystalline. Instead, these forms of solid water are amorphous—the molecules don't form a regular geometric pattern. To make amorphous ice, the water must cool so quickly that the molecules do not have time to move around and find their place in a crystal. To make amorphous ice, you have to cool the water at a rate of 100,000 degrees Celcius per second down to a temperature below 136 K (-137 °C).

Amorphous ice is biologically useful. When water in a cell freezes slowly, it can form sharp crystals that can puncture the cell wall, killing the cell. However, amorphous ice does not form crystal spikes. If you want to preserve cells by freezing them, a technique known as cryopreservation, amorphous ice freezing techniques are the way to go.

That's how people "bank" human sperm—creating amorphous ice by adding compounds that lower the freezing point of water and by carefully controlling the rate of cooling. It's relatively easy to freeze a sperm cell. It's tiny and can be cooled rapidly. Large and complex collections of cells—like a functioning human brain, for instance—present a significantly greater challenge.

Amorphous ice doesn't naturally form on Earth, but it may well be the most common form of ice in the universe. Water molecules striking cold grains of dust in the vacuum of space can make amorphous ice, freezing into a random position wherever they hit the dust. So the geysers from Enceladus's cryovolcanoes are adding to the Solar System's supply of amorphous ice.

Amorphous ice can also form when crystalline ice is blasted with radiation that knocks water molecules out of their positions in the crystal. The Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS) on the Galileo spacecraft detected varying amounts of amorphous ice on the moons of Jupiter. Europa and Ganymede orbit in a heavily irradiated region around Jupiter and have more amorphous ice than Callisto, which orbits outside Jupiter's radiation belts.

Here on Earth, you can make amorphous ice by spraying tiny drops of water into liquid propane cooled to 80 K (-193 °C). But if you manage to make some, you need to keep it cold. If amorphous ice reaches a temperature above 136 K (-137 °C), the water molecules jiggle about enough to vibrate into a crystalline form. Give those polar molecules half a chance and they'll snap into a configuration that brings the positive bits closer to the negative bits.

A WORLD OF EXPERIMENTS

Most of us aren't equipped to make our own amorphous ice. But that doesn't mean you can't do some experimenting with ice. Paul likes to create his own ice world by filling a balloon with water and putting it into the freezer for twenty-four hours or longer.

Once you have a balloon that's frozen solid, Paul has a few experiments to suggest. First, take the balloon out of the freezer and measure the temperature of the surface by touching a thermometer to it. You'll find it is colder than 0 °C—often as cold as -18 °C or 0 °F.

Now you can experiment with the real world equivalent of Vonnegut's ice 9. Using an eyedropper, put six small drops of water on the surface of the balloon. Watch them and you will eventually see one or two of the drops freeze solid. Once a couple of drops have frozen, you are ready to crystallize those unfrozen drops. Just touch them with a bit of frost from the freezer or a chip of ice with a dry surface.

That unfrozen drop will turn solid almost instantly. In this experiment you made supercooled water—water that is colder than the freezing point, 0 °C. If supercooled water comes in contact with solid ice, the ice can initiate crystallization in the water just like the ice 9 did in Cat's Cradle.

Why does this happen? Because it is hard for an ice crystal to get started in liquid water. When water molecules come in contact with the polar surface of a pre-existing ice crystal the crystal will help line the molecules up so they can snap into position.

Water ice isn't the only thing that can serve as a seed crystal. In cloud seeding, small particles of silver iodide are released into cold moist air to seed the formation of ice crystals. These crystals, once started, can grow large enough to fall. They become raindrops when they melt. (And for those of you who wonder where science fiction writers get our ideas, here's an interesting aside. Kurt Vonnegut's brother Bernard was an expert at cloud seeding and discovered that silver iodide crystals could be used to induce ice crystal formation in clouds. Coincidence? We don't think so.)

If you want to experiment with the super cool but don't have the patience to wait for a water balloon to freeze, Paul offers an alternate method. Stretch plastic wrap over the mouth of a plastic tumbler. Use an eyedropper to put 6 drops of water (each about the size of a small pea) on the plastic wrap. Place the tumbler and drops into the freezer.

Every few minutes, check on the drops. You want to catch the moment when one or more have frozen solid, but the rest are still liquid. The water in those liquid drops is supercooled. Touch them with an icicle or bit of frost and watch them instantly harden.

If you are the patient sort and have a frozen water balloon, Paul offers some other experiments to try. Cut and remove the balloon material. While the ice is still colder than 0 °C, use an eyedropper to place drops of water on top of the ice balloon. Because these drops are in contact with the crystalline ice, they will not supercool. But they will freeze into ice bumps. This is what happens on Earth during "freezing rain," rain that falls when surface temperatures are below freezing. Unlike sleet or hail, the raindrops are supercooled water. They crystallize into ice as soon as they hit a surface, like a road or a tree or a power line.

You can also take a look at the ice that's inside your miniature ice world. If a coating of opaque white frost prevents you from seeing inside, just wait until the surface reaches 0 °C. The frost will melt, giving you a clear view.

If you want to speed the process, put your ice balloon in a tank or bucket or bathtub of water. Let it float, and you'll see that most of the ice is beneath the water. In fact 91 percent of the ice ball is underwater. Most people are surprised by just how large a fraction of the ice balloon (or an iceberg) is underwater. (The passengers on the Titanic certainly were surprised.) As a bonus, putting the ice into water melts the frost on the outside.

As you look inside, you will see clear ice on the outside of the balloon and air bubbles inside. As ice freezes, it forms a crystal structure that is made of nearly pure water. Impurities in the water—like the dissolved air that's in tap water—do not get included in the ice. As the water freezes from outside of the balloon in, the dissolved air is squeezed out of the ice into the remaining liquid water in the center of the ice balloon.

Eventually the water inside becomes saturated with air and bubbles begin to form. Once one bubble forms, it seeds the growth of more bubbles. Often you can see lines of bubbles that formed along a radial line pointing toward the center of the balloon as the water froze from the outside-in.

BUT WHAT ABOUT ICE 9?

In 1968, five years after Kurt Vonnegut published Cat's Cradle, scientists discovered a type of water ice that they named ice 9—or actually ice IX. (Scientists prefer Roman numerals to designate different types of ice.) If you want to make ice IX, you need to start with ice III, which will require pressures over 200 million pascals (2000 atmospheres of pressure). Once you have ice III, cool it rapidly to below 140 K, and keep it there. Ice IX has a melting point near 140 K (-133 °C), so it doesn't present the danger of global freezing. And we're grateful for that.

__________________________________

Paul Doherty works at The Exploratorium, San Francisco's museum of science, art, and human perception—where science and science fiction meet. For more on Paul's work and his latest adventures, visit www.exo.net/~pauld. Pat Murphy is a science educator, a science fiction writer, and occasionally a troublemaker. She works at Mystery Science, developing hands-on lessons for elementary school. You can learn more about what she's up to at www.brazenhussies.net/Murphy.

PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS

By Paul Di Filippo | 1391 words

The London-Ehrenreich School of Applied Textual Fortitude

AS instructed, I appeared for my first day of classes at the London-Ehrenreich School of Applied Textual Fortitude dressed in the manner that the school's preparatory materials had dictated.

I wore a pair of sturdy workboots, brown Carhartt overalls, and a denim shirt. I wasn't quite sure why this uniform had been selected, but I was desperate enough to comply.

My entire adult life to the present day, it seemed, had been spent inside one classroom or another, all to no real profit or fulfillment of my overriding dream.

I had worked incredibly hard in my mediocre high school to qualify for entrance to the Ivy League, and succeeded. My postgrad degree was an MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins. I had taken several online writing workshops with highly regarded instructors thereafter. Somewhere in that academic hurlyburly I had even managed to snag an intern's position one summer at The New Yorker. All of this activity with the sole goal of becoming a published novelist, the high-minded literary career I had longed for since adolescence.

And where was I, at age thirty-one? Back living with my folks, buried under a mountain of student debt and facing a stack of rejection letters as high as a wind turbine, with the partial manuscript of my fourth unsold novel gathering dust, because I was too disheartened to continue.

Naturally, when I had encountered the publicity for the LESATF, full of authentic testimonials from recent bestselling authors, everyone praising the school to the skies and attributing all their success to it, I jumped at the chance to enroll, taking out one last loan for the modest ten thousand dollar tuition cost. This would be my final attempt to learn the secrets and skills of a real novelist.

I stepped into a small office and looked about curiously. Two framed photos hung on one wall, headshots of a man and a woman, neither of whom I recognized. The man was handsome in a rough-hewn, retro way, the woman rather modern and dowdy.

There were no other exits that could possibly lead to classrooms or an auditorium, conference space or library, studios or Dean's quarters. But the school's brochure had promised "No online components!" I couldn't figure out how the teaching was supposed to happen. Had I been rooked? My check had already been cashed.…

The fellow sitting at the lone spartan desk, fortyish, trim, and vibrant, looked up at me with a confident and piercing gaze. I felt inexplicably reassured by his assured and intimate vibe. He stood and thrust forward his hand to shake.

"Mr. Funderbunk, I am glad to see you show up on time, and dressed in the proper attire to continue your education. We'll get you started right away. But first, the barest of lectures.

"I have read the manuscripts you sent us as your qualifying submissions. As is the case with all of the disciples we take on, they exhibit two essential qualities which perfectly fit you for our unique course. An utter mastery of sentence by sentence construction—"

I grinned broadly and stood taller at that praise, although I had heard similar words before, from professors and TAs and my workshop peers.

"—and absolutely nothing to say or any grasp of real life. To put matters plainly, you are a perfect modern millennial product of the MFA system, and this is why you have been unable to convince anyone to publish you, and why you will remain unpublished forever unless you acquire some fundamental understanding of how the world works and the ability to peer sympathetically into the hearts and minds of myriad types of people outside your normal sphere of activities. Now, take this piece of paper to the address thereon, and I will see you again in six weeks' time."

To say I was poleaxed would be the understatement of the century. I mindlessly accepted the invoice, and then managed to summon up enough wits to ask one instinctive question that must have seemed an utter non sequitur.

"Who—who are those two people in the portraits?"

"Those are the spiritual gurus and namesakes of our school, Jack London and Barbara Ehrenreich. I suggest you consider their biographies when you get a moment free from the rest of your, ah, 'studies.'"

With that, the head of the LESATF (whose name I still did not know, I realized) swiveled his chair away from me, and so I left.

The address on the paper was a cargo firm on the city's waterfront. There I reported to one Hernan Portillo, approximately six foot two and with arms big as sequoias.

"Okay, kid, just pay attention and try to learn quick, and you'll do okay. Now, follow me. These sonsabitchin' ships ain't gonna unload themselves."

Did you know that not every cargo ship nowadays is a highly mechanized container vessel? There's still a lot of manual labor involved with the smaller ships. Here were a few of my official duties.

"Tie/untie incoming/departing vessels to moorings. Hook up shore power, phone lines and install/adjust/remove gangway as needed. Deploy/retract oil boom around vessels as needed. Monitor tidal fluctuation and make or report the need to make necessary line adjustments accordingly. Open containers and inspect and sort cargo, if applicable, before loading and unloading. Load and unload materials or garbage onto or from pallets, trays, racks, and shelves by hand and keep dock free of debris (cardboard, pallets, and garbage). Load and unload ship cargo, using winches and other hoisting devices.…"

There was a lot more than that, but you get the picture.

That first night I went home, fell asleep with my face in a plate of my mother's corned beef and cabbage, then shuffled off to bed like a zombie before getting up at five A.M., bone-weary, to do it all over again.

At the end of six weeks, I had learned incredible amounts about the underpinnings of modern commerce, developed biceps almost as big as Hernan's, attended afterhours weddings of co-workers from six different ethnic backgrounds, and cultivated a scatalogical vocabulary second to none. The crew at the docks gave me a drunken farewell party on my last night, and the next day I reported back to the LESATF office.

When I entered, I immediately said, "Jack London worked for the Fish Patrol, as an oyster pirate, in a salmon cannery, and as an able-bodied seaman. He became a hobo, was thrown into jail, then joined the Yukon Gold Rush, all before he was twenty years old. Then he started to write. As for Barbara Ehrenreich, before writing Nickel and Dimed, she worked as a minimum-wage waitress and a maid to understand her topic."

The head of the school nodded approvingly, then said, "Very good. But don't get smart, kid, you still got a lot to learn."

He handed me a new assignment, and I left.

Over the next year I worked as an EMT, a crossing guard, a tour bus guide, a crematorium operator, a swimming pool installer, administrative assistant to a city councilman, a garbage truck driver, a short order cook at a roadside rest stop, a carpenter, a grocery bagger, a chicken de-beaker, a cabana boy, and a dozen other highly heterogenous jobs.

After the last assignment, I returned to LESATF a changed man. The scales had fallen from my eyes, and, like the Grinch, my heart had grown two sizes.

The mysterious head of the school regarded me with an assessing eye, then said, "You've graduated. Here's your tuition back, with interest. Consider it a grant to support your new writing."

I looked with bafflement at the check. "But, but—"

"Don't sweat it. We make plenty off commissions as an employment agency."

I folded the check and pocketed it. "I just want to say thank you. But I do have one little problem."

"Oh? What's that?"

"Now, mimetic fiction looks pointless to me. I want to write something speculative and important, like science fiction."

"Oh, you do, do you? Well, you're going to need further training then."

The man picked up his smart phone. "Hello? Mr. Qfwfq? Could I see you here now, please?"

A whirlpool portal suddenly opened up in midair and out of it stepped a gnomish man with a slight green tinge to his skin.

"Mr. Qfwfq, we have here a budding science fiction writer. What would you suggest as his first assignment?"

The elderly sprite studied me up and down, then snapped his fingers and said, "The droid-repair factory on Mizar Five has an opening. Yes, I think that will do splendidly!"

COMING ATTRACTIONS

By C.C. Finlay and Gordon Van Gelder | 204 words

"THE THING ON THE SHELF" was a sneak preview of our next issue, which celebrates the works of David Gerrold. September marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, a series for which the young Gerrold wrote "The Trouble With Tribbles." That would be a landmark moment in most careers, but for Gerrold it was just a launching point. He went on to invent the Sleestaks for Land of the Lost, created The War Against the Chtorr and Star Wolf series, and wrote a host of other screenplays, novels, and stories, including "The Martian Child," which first appeared in this magazine, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker Awards along the way.

In our September/October issue, we bring you not one, but two new David Gerrold novellas, a short memoir, and an essay about Gerrold by former F&SF editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch. And if that's not enough for you, we'll also include brand new stories by Peter Beagle, Leah Cypess, Lisa Mason, and Geoff Ryman, plus some surprises. It's our first Special Author issue since 2007 and we think you're going to like it.

We say it all the time, but it's still true—there's never been a better time to subscribe or renew your subscription. Don't miss a single great story in the months ahead!

CURIOSITIES

By Robert Eldridge | 268 words

STAR OF THE UNBORN,

BY FRANZ WERFEL (1946)

PLACE: California. Time: 100,000 years in the future. Hero: the author himself, revived by a spiritualist for a wedding entertainment. Earth has been subjected to a catastrophic solar event that irradiated the exposed hemisphere, killing most life forms and mutating survivors. The only flora is an "iron-gray turf." Humanoids ("Astromentals") spend most of their 200-year life spans underground with advanced technology and an exquisitely refined culture. Then they journey to "the Wintergarden"—a deep subterranean realm where their bodies are packed in "retrogenetic humus" and later transplanted to a field to become daisies.

Franz Werfel wrote Star of the Unborn (published posthumously in 1946 as Stern der Ungeborenen, and translated from the German in the same year by Gustave O. Arlt) while he was dying. He referred to it as "a travel novel," and it certainly is that, heavy on painstaking description. But its 645 pages of dense first-person narrative is studded with discursive asides and provocative epigrams. Its philosophical heft will enrich patient and adventurous readers.

The novel's fertility and profundity of vision is comparable to Stapledon. Its yearning for transcendence brings to mind David Lindsay, its faith in Christianity, C. S. Lewis. Yet its author was a Jew who barely escaped Europe for America in 1940. Werfel never converted, yet he believed that Orthodox Judaism and Roman Catholicism historically required and eternally complemented each other. He accepted "the conservation of evil," yet paradoxically embraced an optimistic teleology.

Werfel was the third husband, after Gustave Mahler and Walter Gropius, of Alma Schindler, who once described herself as "a collector of geniuses." This novel should confirm her critical acumen.

—Robert Eldridge

Cartoon (Masear-1)

By Arthur Masear | 2 words

—Arthur Masear

Cartoon (Masear-2)

By Arthur Masear | 13 words

"I think I'm going to erase my own memory after this one."

—Arthur Masear

Cartoon (Downes)

By Nick Downes | 12 words

"You know how I felt losing my job to a robot."

—Nick Downes

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

Classified Ads | 333 words

BOOKS-MAGAZINES

S-F FANTASY MAGAZINES, pulps, books, fanzines. 96 page catalog. $5.00. Robert Madle, 4406 Bestor Dr., Rockville, MD 20853

Benchmarks Continued: F&SF "Books" Columns 1975-1982 by Algis Budrys. Ansible Editions/Lulu.com, ISBN 978-1-300-34659-3

WHAT IF? #3 ed. by Richard A. Lupoff. Stories that didn't win a Hugo, but should have. Brand New. www.ramblehouse.com

Spiffy, jammy, deluxy, bouncy—subscribe to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. $20/4 issues Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060.

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Tarzan in Kentucky . Poems by Judith Moffett. www.davidrobertbooks.com/moffett.html

"DAWN OF THE SIXTH MILLENNIUM" series by V. A. Blaine now on E-book. Major distributors.

Back in print after almost 40 years: The Surreal Feminist SF Classic, Passing for Human by Jody Scott. digitalparchmentservices.com

SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, CATTLE 0. The first 58 F&SF contests are collected in Oi, Robot, edited by Edward L. Ferman and illustrated with cartoons. $11.95 postpaid from F&SF, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

MISCELLANEOUS

If stress can change the brain, all experience can change the brain. http://www.undoingstress.com

Space Studies Masters degree. Accredited University program. Campus and distance classes. For details visit www.space.edu .

New from the Cartoon Network: The Karmic Avenger meets the Three-Armed Man. No holds barred!

A better world awaits, among the stars. Help make it happen. Extend the web of life beyond this pond of death. Scientists, engineers, idealists—visit www.gypsyweb.net .

Longtime professional editor will help you polish your manuscript for submittal/self-publication. Betsymitchelleditorial.com

TechieAnnex.com for your small business. More to do than time or people? Hand off web or software tasks to a solid pro.

F&SF classifieds work because the cost is low: only $2.00 per word (minimum of 10 words per issue). 10% discount for 6 consecutive insertions, 15% for 12. You'll reach 100,000 high-income, highly educated readers each of whom spends hundreds of dollars a year on books, magazines, games, collectibles, audio and video tapes. Send copy and remittance to: F&SF Market Place, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

Enjoy the Extended F&SF Edition now
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Table of Contents

- Issue Preview, Fantasy & Science Fiction

- Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

- July/August • 67th Year of Publication

- The Vanishing Kind
- The Desert of Vanished Dreams
- Vishnu Summer
- The Thing on the Shelf
- Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful

- Spells Are Easy If You Have the Right Psychic Energy

- An Open Letter to the Person Who Took My Smoothie from the Break Room Fridge

- Last One Out
- Killer
- Jesus Has Forgiven Me. Why Can't You?
- Martian Garden
- BOOKS TO LOOK FOR
- BOOKS
- FILMS: BUNKER MENTALITY
- SCIENCE
- PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS
- COMING ATTRACTIONS

- CURIOSITIES

- STAR OF THE UNBORN,

- Cartoon (Masear-1)
- Cartoon (Masear-2)
- Cartoon (Downes)
- FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE
- Enjoy the Extended F&SF Edition now