Author: John C. Wright
Date: 2014-11-29 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Fiction; Christmas; Christianity; Short Stories
Description: THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS is a beautifully mind-bending stroll with a grandmaster of science fiction through the annual Catholic calendar. Over the course of the year, from January to December, the author takes his inspiration from ten different holidays and explores their meanings in a series of stories of marvelous imagination. The book begins with New Year's Day and "The Meaning of Life as Told Me by an Inebriated Science Fiction Writer in New Jersey." The Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin is represented by "A Random World of Delta Capricorni Aa, Called Scheddi", while "The
Publisher: Castalia House

The Book of Feasts & Seasons
by John C. Wright

Published by Castalia House
Kouvola, Finland
www.castaliahouse.com

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by John C. Wright
All rights reserved

Editor: Vox Day
Cover Design: JartStar
Cover Image: Jeremiah Humphries
Version 002

Table of Contents

Dedication

New Year's Day: The Meaning of Life as Told Me by an Inebriated Science Fiction Writer in New Jersey

Epiphany: Queen of the Tyrant Lizards

Annunciation: A Random World of Delta Capricorni Aa, called Scheddi

Good Friday: Sheathed Paw of the Lion
Easter Sunday: Pale Realms of Shade
Ascension: The Ideal Machine
Pentecost: The Parliament of Beasts and Birds
Halloween: Eve of All Saints' Day
Advent: Nativity

Christmas Eve: Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT
TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN
Books
Books by John C. Wright
Castalia House

The Book of Feasts & Seasons

Dedication

When even at last the solemn hour shall come,
And wing my mystic flight to future worlds,
I cheerful will obey; there, with new powers,
Will rising wonders sing: I cannot go
Where Universal Love not smiles around,
Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns…

—The Seasons, A Hymn, James Thomson (1700–1748)

The Meaning of Life as Told Me by an Inebriated Science Fiction Writer in New Jersey

The Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, also called New Year's Day

I should mention that, as a science fiction writer, I can comment authoritatively and finally on the true meaning of life.

Fifteen billion years ago an unexplained and inexplicable event created all the matter and energy, all the time and space in the universe, apparently out of nothing and for no reason. However, the precise nature of this event allowed primordial plasma to expand, cool, and form the nebulae which one day would give rise to the galaxy, especially one rather small G-type star in the outer arm of an otherwise insignificant galaxy: by yet another coincidence—if coincidence it was—the third planet from that star possessed the exact chemical conditions to give rise, first to life, then to intelligent life, then to civilization, then to techno-industrial civilization.

Unbeknown to the dwellers on that small insignificant sphere, all galaxies, including this one, are teeming, not merely with life, but with ultra-intelligent life. However, this world is strictly quarantined for reasons that will soon become apparent.

You see, the first experiments in time travel have already taken place.

H.G. Wells is the first man to have crossed the time barrier and beheld the grim and final destiny to which the race of homo sapiens is doomed, to devolve into subhuman Eloi and grisly, cannibalistic Moorlocks.

Olaf Stapledon was the second man to cross the barrier of the abyss of eternity, and he beheld, as if in a vision, the eighteen separate human species which will rise and fall after our species, the First Men, devolves into Moorlocks. A second human species, made of finer and nobler character by their descent into subterranean savagery, will again rise, and devote their mechanical knowledge to the investigation of the cosmos.

Mr. Stapledon’s movements in the time stream were of course detected by the later generations of time travelers, including the agents of the world-system of the Third Men known as Nexx in the Eighty-First Century, and the merciless disembodied sub-aquatic superbrains of the One Hundred and Seventh Century, the so-called Fourth Men.

Alfred Elton van Vogt is the final time traveler that later generations of time wardens will permit to bypass the timespace barrier, and he was told in strictest confidence the secret of the meaning of life by the Ultimate Intellect which rules the otherwise barren and lifeless world once called earth in the time of the Eighteenth Men, beneath a reddish, giant and dying star once called Sol. The men of that era have compiled themselves into a single mental system, using all the resources of their dying planet to do so.

What Mr. Van Vogt was told, he years ago told his fellow writer Harlan Ellison. Mr. Ellison then told me these dire secrets during an evening of inordinate inebriation when I met him at the Science Fiction Writers of America mansion in New Jersey.

He and I are both confirmed fans of AE van Vogt, and we were toasting his memory. I was frankly expressing my admiration that Mr. Ellison had put forth the effort to get Mr. van Vogt his long overdue SFWA Grand Master's award. As the evening progressed, the other drinkers in the bar retired, and soon we two were alone, and both in somewhat of high spirits.

It started innocently enough. We were discussing our favorite Van Vogt monsters, the Coeurl, the Ixtl, the Rull, and I made the offhand remark that with such superhuman nasties in outer space, we humans are lucky the universe is mostly empty of intelligent life.

Mr. Ellison fixed me with his eye. “Empty? What makes you say so?” And there was a look of agitation there. At the time, I put it down to his somewhat peppery temper, but now I know it had a deeper source.

The conversation turned to the Drake Equation, and the estimates that, even if the number of stars with life bearing planets is microscopic, and even if the number of life bearing planets that bring forth spacefaring civilization is submicroscopic, the number of stars in this local arm of the galaxy alone is so astronomical (the pun was his, not mine) that surely we would have detected some sign of alien intelligence somewhere among them. It is not an unusual topic for fans of scientific speculation to discuss.

Mr. Ellison began swearing and cursing, saying that the Drake Equation was not merely an underestimation, it was—and I quote—“a fucking dumbshit underestimation”. It did not take into account the number of artificial races, specifically constructed to fill non-earthlike worlds, that a forerunner race could make to populate the stars at a geometrical rate of increase.

Mr. Ellison emphasized this point by poking my chest and demanding I pay for the next round of drinks. I was happy to do so, fascinated by what he was saying, and eager to hear more.

And if each forerunner race created as many new races as its technology permitted, and if as Ellison insisted, the technology level itself increases geometrically as each new species encounters or creates new species in turn, the rate of increase is more than geometrical, more than asymptotic. The limiting factor to growth is only the total amount of matter energy in a solar system, and how much needed to be expended to send a self-replicating machine or organism to the next nearest few thousand solar systems.

No nonsense about cryogenic sleep or carrying air in bottles: a truly advanced race would merely adapt its deep space-crossing members to the needs of the journey and modify them to live long enough to outlast the eons slower-than-light travel required. When they arrived at the target, the nearest gas giants would be dismantled for parts to create the next variant of the race. There was no need to be out of contact with the home worlds in the meanwhile, since vacuum could not disperse laser-carried data streams.

I was skeptical, but he neatly skewered my skepticism with a few back-of-the-envelope type calculations on a bar napkin. I remember this because I handed him my ballpoint pen.

He spoke with conviction, not as if he were speculating or daydreaming. He spoke as if he knew.

Every star has between ten to a hundred inhabited planets, and each planet has six to twenty intelligent races occupying their various landmasses, oceans, and cloud levels; not to mention energy-based intelligences dwelling inside the fires of the sun, or the surfaces of neutron stars; or more exotic intelligences dispersed throughout nebulae, and occupying worldlets, centaurs, asteroids and cometary bodies. And they were all at a much more advanced level of mechanical, energetic, and telepathic technology than ours.

“The stars are crammed! They are packed in like sardines up there!” he shouted. Then, sadly, as if to himself. “And no one else will ever get to see them. Poor Van!”

Trying to ignore the strangeness of this remark, trying to pretend that this was still a normal conversation, I acted as if we were merely still discussing a speculation and asked why, if he spoke true, we have never heard the least whisper of any radio signals from any of these civilizations?

He made a shushing gesture. “If you knew the meaning of life—the reason behind it all—I could tell you. Van Vogt knew! HG Wells knew!”

“Is the secret of life Dianetics? I had heard that Mr. van Vogt was interested in…”

“Wright! Don’t be an asshole. Or at least be a smaller one! You’d stink less!”

Mr. Ellison pulled me close, and in breaths bleary with beer fumes he spilled out the secret of the universe to me in short, frantic sentences.

He told me a time machine is almost absurdly easy to construct with four gyroscopes, an electromagnet, a Moebius strip, and a bicycle frame. Anyone handy with normal house hold tools can make one in his garage.

Ellison took up a napkin from the bar and with a few clear swift strokes of my ballpoint pen (which he still has), he sketched for me the diagram of how to construct a time machine.

The principle is quite simple: the action of the gyroscopes prevents motion in any of three dimensions, and the electromagnetic field of the solenoid is therefore forced, thanks to the twist in the Moebius strip, through a prism into the fourth dimension. The field moves the iron frame of the machine a certain number of increments in the time direction, taking the gyroscopes with it, and the process repeats as long as the power to spin the gyroscopes remains.

I asked why, if it were so simple to build, there were not time machines for sale in every bookstore and bicycle shop?

He told me anyone from our period of time attempting to make one will find what seem to be odd coincidences, accidents, including deadly accidents, will always somehow interrupt the investigation before the final Moebius coil is complete: this is due to the vigilance of the Nexx Time-Sweepers of AD 8000 and the World-Brains of AD 10600.

The Time-Sweepers have all the time in the world, centuries, to plan the accidents, and can go back to any previous point in time and shift one link in the chain of cause and effect, no matter how small, to undo the event. And if their results are less than perfect the first few hundred times they try, later expeditions of later generations can try again a thousand times a thousand times.

I smiled at this revelation, and this seemed to enrage him. With many an oath and a blistering curse, dragging me by the tie to my feet, Mr. Ellison took me to the basement of the mansion and showed me a mechanism stored there, but warned me not to touch it.

No one had apparently touched it for many a year, not even to clean it. It was draped with dry spiderwebs and crusts of oil.

It was a crude and unimpressive-looking mechanism, consisting of little more than a seat, two levers and a dial connected to a set of gyroscopes wrapped in electrical wire, and connected to a piezoelectric bar no bigger than my thumb.

The construction had curious details, such as decorations on some of the brass struts, the imprecision of the rivets, the whirling governor of a small steam cylinder and the chain to spin the gyroscopes, all of which gave it a Victorian look that was unmistakable.

It looked like an amateurish, poorly made thing. And yet a sensation of dread overcome me when I looked at it.

For it did not look well made enough, not slick enough, to be a prop or a joke. It looked like something a British middle class gent of the last century could have made in his garden shed, a man who knew how to putter with tools, and had the idle time to study the mechanical sciences. A man, for example, like Herbert George Wells.

“That is the Time Machine,” I said. And I backed up from the damn thing until a dusty shelf holding old paint cans poked me in the back, and I could back no more.

Ellison nodded grimly. Then, in the airless basement, he told me the rest of the secret.

Because of the invention of the time machine technology here on Earth, our world is the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, the paradox planet! Three events make our world unique among all the worlds of the cosmos.

First, on our world and none other, intelligent life arose of itself through time paradox, rather than being created by a natural process of evolution. A time sorcerer named Sise-Neg from the 31st Century propelled himself back to the African plains in the early paleolithic. His method of time travel relied on psychic powers to produce the electromagnetochronic displacement field out of the ambient earth current, rather than use the more solid and trustworthy Moebius coil of Wells’ invention. When the field passed through one of the periodic shifts in the global magnetic field polarization, the ambient current failed, and therefore left Sise-Neg stranded.

Sise-Neg entertained himself in his exile by experimenting on Neanderthal and prehuman eugenics, crossbreeding until he created the Adam and seven sisters of Eve our current knowledge of genetics has detected.

Humanity would have, of course, remained at the hunter-gatherer level for all time had not Martin Padway (who accidentally fell through a time-wake caused by the passage of the million-year chronoliner from the era of the Fifth Men) become stranded in the past. Padway, also called Prometheus, befriending a local maiden of a tribe of Nile-dwelling savages, taught our ancestors the basics of agriculture, fire-making, and writing.

Second, our world is naturally lifeless and has no ability to bring forth life of itself. The existence of microscopic one-cellular life in the primal seas of earth was due to the wreckage of a time machine. The dead body of a time traveler named Stephen Crane collapsed into the primal seas, and the microorganisms in his body, as he decayed, started the evolutionary process. It is suspected that Stephen Crane’s death was arranged by the Nexxal assassins, so that their own time line would come into existence.

Third, in the year 4784 of Isher, a man named McAllister from 1951 was (or will be) accidentally swept up into the operation of a time energy machine which reverses entropy. This is a side effect of a deadly struggle between the Imperium of Isher and the Weapon Shops, both of whom unwisely attempted to use time machine technology rather than face defeat.

McAllister was, or will be, sent see-sawing back in time gathering ever larger amounts of matter-energy into his disintegrating body with each swing. Eventually, once he has gathered all the energy in the universe and brought it to the origin point of timespace at the moment and location of the Big Bang, he will not observe, but will witness the formation of the cosmos.

All other intelligent races of outer space are careful never to interfere with any of the events, no matter how small, taking place on our world, since any smallest change, even something as little as stepping on a butterfly, would not only effect election results and lead to Republican victories, but could abort the events that give rise to the time travelers Crane, Padway, Sise-Neg, and most importantly, McAllister.

The time events that give rise to the creation of life on Earth, the rise of homo sapiens, and of Mediterranean civilization, of course, are all needed in order for McAllister to come into being, and for him to return to the origin and accidentally create the energy-illusion we called timespace.

It should go without saying that the other races of the myriad other worlds, since they were not created by the fumbling and inexperienced meddling with ape-genes by the amateurish Sise-Neg, are immensely older and wiser than mankind, and therefore none of them are foolish enough to experiment with time travel. Their superior brains can detect both past and future events perfectly, and so the temptation to interfere with the course of events or to create a time paradox is unimaginable to them.

We and we alone have that dubious distinction, since we are smart enough to reproduce the time-bypass effect, but not wise enough to leave well enough alone.

It is for their own self preservation that the cosmic minds of the alien stars prevent any interference with our world, and maintain strict radio silence, hiding all evidence of their countless billions of civilizations.

There are, for example, three intelligent species living on the Moon alone, the Va-Gas and U-Gas and the Senelites under the Grand Lunar; and nine races dwell on Mars, including Barsoomians and Malacandrines, Therns and Pfifltriggi, but all are careful to hypnotize astronauts and falsify recordings and readings from probes we send, or to retreat beneath their planetary crusts or the behind the veil of the unseen in order to preserve the illusion that man is alone in the cosmos. We have all noticed how oddly John Glen and other returning astronauts behave. This is a consequence of space hypnosis.

Of course the higher races move among us in disguise, and have contact with the races living in the hollow interior of our world, and call upon them from time to time to use their Vril power, an ultimate form of spiritual electro-gravitic force, to erase memories, sink ships, or cause ‘Tunguska’ type events to abolish the evidence of anything that threatens to alter the foretold events of the time stream.

The meaning of life, and the purpose of the earth, is to give rise to all these experiments and events in the future, in order that the past, and the universe itself, should be created.

All human religion, philosophy, and investigation into the meaning of life is, of course, carefully monitored and curtailed by the superior intelligences of the remote future and the distant stars so that these investigations do not create any events unforeseen or that might derail the established self-creating past and future.

Why, you may wonder, are science fiction writers aware of the true meaning of life, when men of much greater genius and spiritual stature, thinkers and philosophers and theologians, are kept in ignorance of this great truth?

It is not due to any cruelty or love of irony by the superior races of the later eras, but merely to the fact that Wells and Stapledon first stumbled across the secret, and their published results were taken as fiction by unbelieving editors and an incredulous public.

We can be safely told, because no one will believe us.

That is the dreadful secret revealed to me by Mr. Ellison. Naturally, I would not have believed so fantastical a tale had I not seen the time machine with my own eyes.

Even then I was skeptical. The names he whispered, Sise-Neg, Padway, and Crane, I recognized from stories by Alfred Bester or L Sprague de Camp. The time agents of Nexx I recognized from a book by Keith Laumer. So I laughed and demanded that Mr. Ellison confess he was merely having me on. Surely it was a jest! It was not as if these science fiction writers had any sort of records or unpublished manuscripts from Wells or Stapledon that they mined for names or ideas, or that they used the time machine themselves.

He fixed me with his bloodshot eyes and assured me it was merely a joke he was having at my expense.

Nothing else could have so completely convinced me of the utter and horrific truth of what he revealed. Suddenly the closeness of the basement, the rusted and angular shape of the Wells time machine sitting under its cobwebs seemed stifling and oppressive. My head was pounding with drink and whirling with dread. I pushed myself free from Ellison, and ran up the crooked stairs, flung myself out into the cool midnight air, staggering and breathing in deep gulps.

Behind me, there came a flare of red-gold brilliance, brighter than the glare of electricity, flashing through the basement windows and throwing blood-colored wedges of light across the lawn. With horror the words and the warning returned to me. Ellison had said — practically his last words! — that any attempt to investigate these matters would bring instant retaliation from the stars or from our own remote future, deadly retaliation from beings willing to do anything needed to preserve their own existence, and the existence of the sidereal universe.

Back I ran, down the stairs and to the door. As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor. Harlan Ellison was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment – a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The time machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the basement was empty. A pane of the basement windows had, apparently, just been blown in.

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times.

Or was what I had seen the operation of some fantastic weapon operated by intelligences vast and cool and unsympathetic from some remote location on the moon or beyond Arcturus, set merely to obliterate anyone attempting to operate the forbidden machine?

The meaning of life, it seems, is not something about which is safe for living men to inquire.

And yet I still have, drawn in a few, short, clear strokes in a bar napkin, the diagram for building a time machine of my own. While I sit and type these words, I can hear my children playing downstairs, and I can see the sunlight shining through my study windows, and I rejoice in the goodness of life. It is only at midnight, when no one is near, that I take out the napkin, study the diagram, and vow to myself that someday I must plumb the secrets of time. Perhaps my actions are ones the universe will require to bring the universe into being? Perhaps the star beings will spare me?

Perhaps I, I, will be allowed to see what other eyes have never looked upon? It that not worth any risk? Surely it was not for no reason this diagram on this stained napkin came into my hands!

Always, I remind myself of my wife and children and tell myself to burn the diagram.

And always, with trembling fingers, I fold the withered napkin carefully and replace it in my wallet.

Queen of the Tyrant Lizards

Epiphany

There was no time. That is the first thing to remember. I did not know what was about to happen. That is the second thing to remember.

Imagine a time line. Select a zero point. To one side is an infinity of tomorrow, starting with positive one. To the other is an infinity of yesterday, starting with negative one. But between the positive and the negative infinities, what is there? Less than nothing, less than half of nothing, a pinprick, a dot, a point, less time than it takes to decide to murder them all.

I look into the first moment of negative one: one second ago.

Imagine a frozen moment. The glass of the chapel doors is breaking. Men in tall white hoods carrying shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles are firing. The guests are screaming, falling to the floor. And you, my love, have thrown your tall, strong body over mine, selflessly, lovingly, without a moment to think, without a moment to decide. I am feeling your body shuddering, though not with passion as you embrace me. I yield to your embrace, and then we are falling; you shudder with the impact of bullets and buckshot throwing your blood, your living blood, your warmth, in sprays like Rorschach blots across the dark expanse of the expensive tuxedo I picked out, the dark expanse of your warm skin, and across the white satin of my wedding dress, the dress my many mothers sewed.

I cannot see you as you die. You are on top of me, crushing me beneath your weight. But I see the flower girl, the preacher's daughter, with her little pink pillow falling, her little face that will never grow any older, never see her own wedding day. She is falling, and the gold ring not on your finger is flying in the air, catching the beam of sunlight from the broken stained glass window, the one showing Christ turning water into blood-red wine.

My ring is on my finger, a perfect unmarred circle of gold. A ring is like eternity, like the eternal, infinite return of the cosmos from Big Bang to the Eschaton, from Creation to Big Crunch. It is supposed to be as eternal as a vow of love. It is shaped like a zero.

Imagine a zero moment. For all the seconds of the weeks and months before zero, the negative of time, I can see when we met on the bus, when we spoke, when I asked you why you sat in the back, when you smiled, when you touched my hand to help me down the steps at our bus stop in Atlanta and the driver scowled at you, a look of hatred. During all those seconds, my happiness was complete.

During all that time, during my exile from time, I did not know what was about to happen.

Next comes the zero moment itself: You have placed the white gold wedding band on my pale white finger, but I have not yet done the same to you. I have said the words, the two little words no bride can take back if she says them.

I do.

But the preacher it took us so long to find, to find someone willing to marry us, he has not turned and asked you yet.

So I am an uncertain bride. The probability wave has not collapsed. I am in the zero between fiance and wife.

You are an uncertain bridegroom. I thought it was cute that you were nervous. Had I only known the reason for your fear! Why did I select this time for my exile?

Right next door to the chapel is the hall where the State Democrat Party is having its meeting. There is a big smiling poster of Bull Connor, their national committee chair, hanging over the front door. He is the commissioner for safety. The men in white hoods had come out of the meeting hall with their hunting rifles tucked under their arms. These are not elephant guns, but smaller caliber weapons, not something that could penetrate the hide of a rhino or a charging elephant. That is the third thing to remember. It was the reason why I do what I will do, here in the zero moment, here in eternity. Part of the reason.

All seconds after the zero is nothing but horror and pain and loss. The change is that sudden. Heaven is hell.

I look farther back, when first we met.

I ask 'May I sit here?' And you say 'Please.' That is also the last thing you ever say in life to the man raising a gun. Please.

I remember you saying, 'Why would a time traveler take a bus?' And I tried to explain about how hard it was to get a license when your birth is a probability cloud stretched between many timelines, how hard it is to operate machines that neither speak nor listen to commands. "But you know how to drive your Time Machine, right? You have a Time Machine?"

“If you are thinking of a thing with a saddle and the sweep of years flashing by like a film in fast motion, or a blue box like a telephone booth, no, nothing like that."

I tried to explain about the zero point, the place a scientist would call the probability wave of the universe before the Big Bang, the moment when all matter and energy, but also all mind and thought, all time and space, were gathered into one knot, smaller than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom. It contains all probability and no actuality. More than one possible universe can issue forth from the moment before time begins, and in one of them, time travel is possible. Life is possible.

What is life? Ah, my poor, poor beloved, my poor innocent three-dimensional perfect man, my prince, my everything, you who are trapped in one worm-like line of cause and effect, always going forward at one second per second, with no turn offs, no take backs, no way to undo a decision, no way to undo saying “I do.”

I know what life is. I can never explain it to you.

Life is the intersectional membrane where eternity touches the continuum. That is why matter only can ever operate by cause and effect, like a row of dominoes toppling, whereas living things, every stop along the chain of evolution, reaching back to the first single celled amoeba, can perform the act of anticipation. And what is anticipation? It is to act outside normal cause and effect, react to things before they happen. All life, even the humble one-celled organism, can see far enough into the future to move away from what endangers it and toward what feeds it.

Amoebas never murder other amoebas. Amoebas never kill themselves. They are too simple. But even they, humble as they are, are touched by eternity.

I could explain the science behind it, talk about the nested interaction of probability waves, how time at the submicroscopic level is symmetrical forward and backward: but pretend instead that you live in a world of magic.

Life is a miracle.

Life remembers that moment before time began, that zero point before this universe started and after the previous version of this universe collapsed inward on itself, a cosmos crushed into a pinpoint.

And what of my life? The life of time travel? I am the one who had the memory of that moment thrust upon her. Why me? Why am I the one worm who grew butterfly wings and soared into the eleven dimensions? That answer is complex, and does not concern us now.

My cosmos is crushed into a pinpoint as I see my love die. I am his wife; here is the ring on my finger; but he is not my husband. His ring is in midair, impaled on a sunbeam from a shattered image of the Virgin Mary saying that all the wine is gone. All gone.

I look in the past direction, and I remember our talk on that long bus ride. You are well read, and wanted to make something of yourself. You were studying paleontology. You said the ancient beasts were monsters of legend, but real.

The talk turned to mythology. I remember you saying, 'But why would the moon goddess love Endymion? All he can do is sleep.'

'Yes, but it is eternal sleep, so he never dies,' I say.

You shake your head and smile that handsome smile. 'But he never knows her. He is never awake.'

I whisper then that if she knows he lives, it is enough.

Why did I select this time for my exile? It was not a hard question: earlier eras did not have the conveniences of modern life, no cool air at the push of a button when it was hot, no electric lights when it was dark, no aspirin for pain, and no anesthesia for childbirth.

Why no farther in the future you might ask, when everyone is driving flying cars and rockets to cities on the moon? My love, I will not crush your hopes, but that future does not ever come.

Instead, the farther you go away from the zero point between Postwar America and Pre-Jihad America, what you find is more riots, more dirt, more diseases without cures, atomics used as a fashion statement to advertise religious or political points of view, and no one able to travel or buy without paperwork and identity chips. So many cameras, and so many computers tracking your every move. A woman with no birth certificate cannot travel freely, and I won't wear a veil while walking through the bad section of town.

The laws against discrimination close all chapels and synagogues. No one tips his hat to a lady. No one holds the door for me. And the music, the pornography, the swearing, the crudeness, the loutishness, all of it gets worse and worse.

Why did the men of this generation throw everything away? This is the highest point of civilization out of all history. I know. I've looked.

But even here, there is hatred and violence and death. You would think they would love this nation and this era so much they would never raise their bloodstained hands against each other. But sometimes hate overwhelms love.

Look farther back into the negative direction, the past. There I am in the Fortress of Limbo with my mothers. She is me, an older version, the me that gives birth to me. She is the other time travelers. I am the only time traveler there is; they are all me. One is dressed in a snappy Nazi uniform of the women's auxiliary, a cigarette in a hold in her shining black leather glove. The next is dressed in the floral skirts and wide brimmed straw hat of a Southern Belle, and girls waiting on her are mulatto, half-negresses, and they are both her slaves and her half sisters. Another version of me is dressed in the colors of Lady Baltimore, and she looks disdainfully at the slaves, since, in her timeline, the British Empire abolished the institution after the Southern Colonies attempted a second rebellion no more successful than the first.

One problem with being a time traveler is sometimes you do not get along with yourselves.

The Fortress is round and lucent as a pearl, and hangs in space among a belt of asteroids in a version as remote as we can possibly reach, the one where Earth never formed. In the center is a smaller pearl, this one made of thinking crystal, and it shows a fourth dimensional representation of the eleven dimensional map of time.

Everyone of me, at some point, is given The Talk. Mine came when I was young. I had only made one or two short hops, once to step on a butterfly in the dinosaur age so that Reagan would win an election and win the Cold War. The other was to drop a kitchen magnet on a dirt road in the backwoods for a little boy to find. Playing with the idly found magnet would lead to a lifelong passion for science, and the boy would later grow up to be the greatest inventor of all time, and this leads to the defeat of Sorainya of Gyronch, a version of me I did not like at all. Maybe that is what brings me to the Fortress of Limbo for The Talk.

After being told the usual gross stuff about birds and bees and incest, about giving birth to myself and marrying my own son, Lazarus, the topic of destroying worlds comes up.

One of my mothers, Sorainya of Roma, points to a fork in time. “Here is the decision point,” says she, grey-haired, severe, dressed in the robes of the Vestal Order. “In this branch you create a paradox that destroys one of the six hundred and sixty six timelines. In the other…”

I say, “And if I foreswear time travel utterly? Agree never to use it for any purpose whatsoever? I am weary of being a puppet pulling on my own strings, of always knowing what comes next, what I will do next.”

She says, “That creates a Schrödinger's Cat cloud, a zero point of uncertainty, from which our foretelling sees two possible results: you will behold a man murdered before your eyes, and be tempted, but will resist, and will let him die. After a long monolinear life, the danger point will pass, and you will be raised against to be one of us, a sister among sisters. The other is that you will turn time back to slay his slayers, and set in motion paradoxes beyond what we can smother.”

Her eyes narrow dangerously, and I recall that they feed fighting slaves to the gladiatorial circus in her world, and hang traitors on crosses to die in the sun.

“If you select the second option, if you use your power, you earn the ultimate penalty. We will retroactively eliminate you from the moment of your conception."

The Nazi version of me, Sorainya of the Reich, adds coolly, “This conversation will never have taken place, and there will be no guilt on the conscience of the Sisterhood, because we will have forgotten as well. We have no record of ever imposing this penalty on any of us before. How could we?”

A version of me from the timeline where the Agrarian Revolution never took root is dressed like a cavegirl in the tanned skins of the Red Elk. Now she speaks. What her world lacks in tools and machines, it more than makes up for in wisdom: “Either hate overcomes love, or love overcomes hate. That is the only decision to be made.”

I say, “What do I care if some monolinear worm lives or dies?” We call normal people worms because they can never break out of their own personal time, never move faster than the inchwormish one second per second. And from the viewpoint of the timelessness, you sort of look like that.

The cavegirl says, “Never mock the power of love. It is stronger than us, stronger than eternity.”

I pull my gaze back to now, right now. The decision is easy. Decisions are hard only when half your mind argues with the other. When your whole heart and will and strength is devoted, you are not even aware of having had decided, of saying the words you can never take back.

Hatred or love?

If I do this thing, I knew I would be killed for it. But from the point of view of eternity, from the zero point, look to the other side, one second in the future, and see what I do.

I know what life is. You think each organism is separate, but there is only one line of cause and effect, mother and child, one chain of interconnected clouds of probability, reaching from your dying body back to the primordial amoeba.

Never mind. Call it magic.

By magic I reach back through time. No, I cannot bring you back to life, not here, not now. I cannot step backward five minutes and rush you out the back door, because my own body, the chains of cause and effect I have already established, are in the way. If I had more time to prepare, perhaps I could have done something–but there is no time. That is the first thing to remember.

At the zero point, there is no time. So all points in time are equidistant to me, the same way all the parts of my gold ring touch my finger equally.

The life in your cells has already ebbed too far. Besides, if I were to reach back and force your cells to remember their old shape of some apeman who was your ancestor, the Klansmen in their hoods would just shoot you. But you have older and older ancestors, cousins from parallel branches. Some have more life in them then others, and they are easier to reach. There is a chain of ever small ratlike beings, none of which will do. Then, I see your ancestor from late Cretaceous. His skull is five feet long, and his bite is the most powerful of any creature that ever lived.

One second into the future, the positive direction, of the zero point, I can see the result of my instantaneous decision.

Yes, I will be eliminated by my cold eyed mothers for this act, and die so completely that I never will have had lived, and no one, not even you, will remember me.

Had I chosen otherwise, I would have been safe under your toppled body, and the men escaped, hooting and laughing, their hood removed, members in good standing of the Good Old Boys, staunched pillars of the community, to go to the honky-tonk bar and drink beers with the Sheriff and the mayor and the judge. I would live beyond the moonshot, beyond the administration of Johnson, yes, that Johnson, who promised to addict your people to welfare, and break your pride, you uppity darkie, you. “I'll have those Negroes voting Democratic for the next 200 years…”

The hypocrisy and hate of men like this would gather in my throat as I grew older, one second at a time, like worm, and then when one of your people is finally elected, these men and their sons, these men who shot you, they hurl such filth, so many slanders. And in my old age, on my deathbed, one of the mothers would appear, and say the dangerous decision time was past, that there was no more paradoxes in my future. I could have my youth and life restored to me. Everything would be mine. But not you. Never you. Time and eternity would not allow it.

So, yes, I do hate them, the men in hoods, the anonymous men, the cowards. When you rear up, I cannot restore your brains or memories, but I can reach back and pull the old shapes of ancestral cells back into the now point, the zero point, the moment. And, yes, I can even pull in the excess mass from the uncertainty cloud. Heisenberg is nice that way.

Up you rear, merely an animal now, as savage as the love that beats in my breast for you. The roar is one that had not been heard on earth for countless eons, but somehow the cells in the blood of your victim recall, and their glands react, and they lose control of their bladders. How I laugh! The gunfire hurts you, stings you, but cannot kill you, not in the first volley. And there is no second volley.

A ricochet strikes me through the brain, and so I die in instant painlessness before I see what happens next. It is a mercy.

If they had not fired on you, hurt you, made noise with their firearms, perhaps you would merely have eaten the choir. But they hurt you, my love, and your cobra eyes, red as rubies, catch them in your gaze. In your first step you trample the leader and break his bones, and the cries and whimpers while you descend upon his followers.

Paleontologists would never figure out what those absurdly small fore-claws are for, will they? Too small to catch prey. They contain poison, so that a scratch will slow your fleeing prey, make their legs turn numb and cold. Paleontologist would never have guessed how the king of the tyrant lizards likes to play with his prey like a cat, how you catch them and let them go, and they scream and scream and scream.

Such showers and streams of blood! The chunks of weeping red meat drip from your scarlet teeth. Did they think they were fearsome in their hoods? Let them know fear now, and for the rest of the paltry moments of life left to them.

Paleontologists are perhaps too kind to guess that you enjoyed taking your prey by the legs, snapping off limbs one by one, so that the lungs, the mouth, the head of the victim is left weeping and shrieking last of all, to disconcert the other members of the prey.

For the king of the tyrant lizard fed his bulk by eating whole herds of prey animals. And that is all the worms who slew you, my love, are now to me. Prey.

Yes, I am sorry about the innocent people killed in the chapel when your hunger is not sated, and you break through the walls of the chapel, and wrestle open the bus to find warm and crunchy women and children inside. How bravely you faced the National Guard, and, later, the Army!

Small price to pay.

I should laugh. It is so like a B-movie science fiction film of this day and age. But I don't.

But I am comforted in knowing that when my sisters and mothers erase me, everything I did will be unmade, including all these deaths.

When I am eliminated retroactively, my love, everything after we met on the bus will be erased and rewritten. You will love a long and happy and normal life, and yet never meet the girl you think of as some odd fan of H.G. Wells or Jack Williamson pulling your leg. The girl you thought was from Northern India; the one who did not know how to use a payphone.

That first conversation and that first touch of the hand is to be wiped out, sponged away from the stone monument of time. Now, I never was. You will never know me, and never, ever hear these words, which are the last imaginary letter I write to you.

But here, in the one moment, the moment of uncertainty, the moment of eternity, when all time is gathered into my eye as if in the eye of a goddess, I do not choose vengeance.

That is not why I did it.

This is what I would say, if there was time. But here in eternity, in the infinitesimal point between Eschaton and Big Bang, timespace does not exist, and so there is no time. I have eternity or I have love.

I have made my choice.

Did you think, even for a moment, that I was so consumed with hate that I would die to avenge you? No. I die for you. You will never know me, and I will never exist.

I die that you might live.

A Random World of Delta Capricorni, Called Scheddi

Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, also called Lady Day

It was not abduction. I volunteered to go.

I trampled out the crop circle in the north field of the Suttlebys’ ranch, at night, with nothing more than a board of plywood and a long rope. I did not know what the signs mean, but I copied them. Took me all night. The sky was pink above the barn and I could see my breath by the time I finished. It was October, the best month for contact, so I was wearing my windbreaker and work gloves. I would have worn my green skirt to look nice for them, but it was too cold, so I wore blue jeans instead.

You might wonder why the Hierarchs—they don’t call themselves “grays” or “LGMs”, obviously—used such crude methods. They want to do what we can imitate.

I was glad for my windbreaker when I stood on the soil of the cold world beneath four suns. The first white giant was eclipsed by the second for a day. The other suns were red and dim as tail-lights.

The surface was cracked, dried mud, and lopsided little crawly things swarmed in the cracks, but their movements were awkward, and they shivered.

Before me was a peak, and a waterfall the color of India ink slid or slithered over the brink, and was beaten into a blue-gray froth as it tumbled, and the wind held a fan of indigo droplets. The drops smoldered where they fell. It was not water. Call it a something-fall.

The jungle was blue-black. The leaves and flab-mounds and swollen vines were blotched and sickly. Some of the trees had eyeballs, but these were grown at random, not connected by nerves to any central brain. Where the droplets fell, the tree-things shrieked a piping noise.

The star vessel was a crystal circle overhead that vanished when I looked at it directly. I could see it in my mind. Since I had just been aboard, it was 'pastward' of me. Back on Earth I could not see into time, but the mind-processes of the Hierarchs had woken something in me.

The Hierarch I called Lollipop Guild hovered naked next to me, his gleaming gray skull at armpit height. He raised a slender, shining arm and pointed, looking at me with eyes too large for his face, and deeper than outer space. In his eyes, I saw the message: This is why.

“Why what?” I asked, teeth chattering. I had not mastered their art of speaking without speech.

In his eyes I saw a memory. The first thing I had said to them when the crystal ship had lowered itself out of the October dawn, ringing like hollow chimes, and the inhuman, solemn faces peered at me like fishermen examining a fish beneath their keel had been a question. “Why do you come to Earth?”

Well, no. That had been second. The first thing I said, or, rather I shrieked with laughter, was “Take me to your leader. I come in peace!”

A snake wallowed among the jungle roots. It had nine legs on one side, and could not walk. Its brain was carried in a bag or mantle of flesh that it dragged behind it as it limped. It licked the mud, but did not know how to chew.

To Lollipop I said, “I don’t understand. What is this world? Why is everything so ugly?”

In his eyes, I saw that this world was one of the many unplanned ones scattered through the Orion Arm. The changes to their characteristics are by random chance. Those unfit to survive perish, and therefore do not pass along their defects.

“That’s just evolution,” I said. “It happened on every world, doesn’t it?”

His lipless mouth was so small that it was only a pucker, but I saw it twitch into a sardonic smile. The Designers passed through this arm of the Galaxy long ago. Your race and mine share a common template: you were meant to learn our arts.

I had wondered why the Hierarchs looked so much like us.

The wind picked up. A revolting smell came from the jungle. Certain of the tree-things collapsed, mewling, because the bones inside their trunks were evidently not strong enough to support their weight.

Worlds they did not touch are like this. Somehow, I understood that the Designers had left behind no clues.

“You seek them?”

I cannot tell you the sorrow I saw in his huge, blind-seeming eyes then.

“But why?” I demanded. My voice sounded more angry than I meant to. “You’ve got starships and mind-powers and the stars to explore! Why are you looking for ghosts?”

Why did you call to us at night?

“I thought there had to be something more to life.”

Indeed. We think this also.

I realized that they had brought me all this way just to answer my question. The whole spaceflight, the long sleep, the strangeness of the wormhole, and seeing the other-time version of ourselves intersect with us when we surpassed lightspeed: all that energy spent just to show me this.

He shed grief like heat from a stove. I wanted to sit, pull him onto my lap.

We cannot take you to our leaders. They hide. Until we become like them, we cannot find them.

I saw one tree-thing claw itself up on crab-legs and wobble awkwardly toward the pool at the foot of the something-fall. It had three mouths, each a different size, but its teeth and tongues were growing out of its upper branches, and not in the mouth-sockets where they’d be useful. It sucked at the liquid, uttered a horrific squeal, and fell over, kicking its three mismatched legs feebly.

At my foot, a slug the size of a rabbit tried to hop, but it stumbled.

Earth’s great beauty compels us visit her.

I knew then why they had taught an Earth-girl their powers. Shuddering, teeth clenched, I picked up that greasy slug-thing, and looked into its future.

I petted it until it was covered with rabbit fur.

Sheathed Paw of the Lion

Good Friday

I realize another century is supposed to pass before you wake from cold sleep, but, since it is my turn to be alive, I thought I should quickly summarize the events of the late Twenty Fifth Century for you, and for Rogers, Graham, Davis, Taylor, and Arthur.

I should mention that, while we were coldsleeping, psychology has apparently become an exact science, and the method of rendering human nervous systems to match their environment, both physical and political, has been precisely defined. As it turns out, the human nervous system reacts most clearly and strongly to pain signals, especially when combined with psychological disturbances such as shame and humiliation, and so the Harmonic Scientists and doctors of infliction take special care, when applying negative rewards, to use methods that to us might look awkward or even cruel. But it is all based on a very carefully determined theory. It is called the Harmonic Science, since it allows all elements of society to operate together in peace and joy, especially those born to be burdened with concern for the public weal, and other positions of great responsibility.

Rogers had the watch before me. You remember those events. The National Aerospace Administration had long since lost the capacity to launch rockets into space, for obvious reasons, but the Forbidden City allowed us to retain receiving dishes, radio-telescopes, and the like, since these did not disturb the harmony of the World Kingdom.

Perhaps the Forbidden City regretted that decision when certain Search-for-Extraterrestrial-Intelligence signals were answered with a simple code spelling out the digits of pi in base two, of the square root of two in base forty, and then a simple grid drawing a recognizable diagram of the Pythagorean theorem.

At first the signals were thought to originate in Epsilon Carinae, one of the four stars making up the asterism called the False Cross, so named because of its reputation for being mistaken for the Southern Cross and leading to navigation errors.

At the command of the Son of Heaven, Peking turned the mile-wide orbital array known as the Thousand-Eyed Bodhisattva toward the signal source.

This was against the cautious advice of the Harmonic Scientists. As they predicted the lack of observation produced a disharmony. There were riots among the ruins of the major cities in North America—it was a holiday from the omniscience of the Akashic Internal Intelligence Service, so what else did one expect?—but the array caught clear pictures of what the press immediately dubbed the Big Dumb Object.

The rioters, and anyone unlucky enough to be netted in municipal purification sweeps, we executed by sawing. One of our still-loyal descendants in the waking world died that way. The Harmonic doctors hung her by the feet and sawed through her body from the crotch down. This method allowed the blood to drain into her brain during most of the slow process, to keep her alive longer. I never learned her name. She looked like a fourteen year old, but it is hard to tell, since the people are shorter these days, due to malnutrition.

The Object was in a hyperbolic path, more distant than the orbit of the planet Eris.

If you are surprised I called Eris a planet, I should mention something Rogers left out of his centennial digest: the Son of Heaven objected to having only eight planets in the solar system when previous generations enjoyed more. It was thought to be an affront to his dignity, and therefore a potential cause of disharmony. The Forbidden City therefore commanded the College of Panphysical Sciences to discover more. I think only our own Dr Uriens objected: luckily, the amount of disharmony created by his words was within the venal range, and so the Harmonists merely had him pitchcapped.

Pitchcapping is not pretty. Uriens had his hair and ears cropped off with a razor, and a cap filled with hot pitch bound onto his head. The doctors had removed his hands at the wrist but left the feet, so he could run around, mad with pain, smashing his head into the jeering onlookers as he tried to remove the cap and end his agony. Then a rope was attached, and the other end flung to the cheering crowd, who pulled the cap off, taking lumps of flesh and skin with it, leaving Dr Uriens alive but disfigured for life. This was run on something called the World Amusement Network, which is wired into cloth and cups and windows and basically any transparent substance.

Uriens enthusiastically supported the new definition of what constituted a “planet”—not only were Pluto and Eris granted this status, but the Son of Heaven was pleased to learn that his solar system now officially contained forty-nine planets, including Ceres, Makemake, Haumea and three dozen other Kiuper belt objects. Harmony was restored.

The Big Dumb Object was a cube 1363 miles on a side. For size comparison, draw a line from the tip of Florida to the Great Lakes, and then west to Montana and south to Mexico City. That is the footprint the thing would cover if is landed, assuming it did not crack the continental plate in half.

It was covered with some sort of ablative foil that gave it a gold hue. The press immediately dubbed it ‘The Borg Cube’ from one of the few television shows from North America’s “pre-re-unification” days that the Net was allowed to carry. (Pre-Re-Unification is an idea from Twenty-Fifth Century history, which says that the Han are the ancestral people of the American Indians, not to mention Caucasians and Negroes, and that all conquests are therefore merely undoing the unfortunate side effects of prehistoric civil wars that divided mankind.)

I coldslept again, and woke up a decade and a half later. This is in AD 2493. The Cube was in orbit, between the Earth and Moon, and could be seen every night , rising in the east. Depending on the time of month, one or two faces was turned to the sun. When the Cube was “full” that is, in opposition, the gold light was considerably brighter than the morning star, and cast a strange yellow-red twilight across the landscape, almost bright enough to read by. When it was in conjunction, of course, it was dark. With binoculars you could make out the ports appearing on four of the six faces: tiny round dots representing valves or airlocks large enough to swallow the Great Salt Lake.

Ten years was not long enough for the College of Panphysical Sciences to learn their language, but it was apparently enough for them to learn several of ours, maybe all of them.

The message itself was a trifle disturbing. “We are here in response to your distress signal. May we begin?”

The message was repeating in a number of ways and languages over a number of months. NASA, with help from the Han military, constructed a transmitter powerful enough to reply. At that point, the astronomical scientists were sent to mountain retreats to aid in their meditative practice, and Harmonic Scientists took over.

The answer was cautious, diplomatic, inquisitive. It was several messages, over several weeks, and the process was considerably slowed by the need to have each term mathematically defined. What was the distress signal of which they spoke? What did they wish to begin?

“You name our star Zeta Geminorum or al-Mekbuda, the Sheathed Paw of the Lion. An immense psychological disturbance or interruption, propagating at the speed of light, encountered our home system 1291 earth-years ago. We came as quickly as possible, given the limitations of light-speed travel, and given the delay of 120 additional years caused by the opposition of one of your principalities. At considerable expense, we have brought the appropriate means and mechanisms to render aid. We offer that which should suffice to remove the wounded and unconscious, even when dispersed. Are you willing to request help? May we begin?”

The scientists asked cautiously what form this help would take.

“The form of the help includes interconnectivity with primary consciousness, and related physical needs, such as medical aid, fermented beverage, comestibles made from grain; water to wash, oil to anoint. All diseases can be cured and all wounded made whole. We have studied your physiognomy, and, except for the defects, can reproduce it precisely. Our order of behavior does not permit us to act upon you without your affirmation and consent, since otherwise the curative properties are null. Do you understand the extreme danger present?”

The scientists asked for the danger to be defined.

“You are conscious without being self-conscious, and hence are divided. Divided consciousness errs, ceases to cohere. You are not like other organisms on your world, who possess consciousness but not self-consciousness. Neither are you self-conscious. You neither know what self is, nor what is to be done with it. You begin by saying the thing which is not, and end by doing the act which is not, and making other to be not.”

The scientists asked again for clarification.

“The speech which is not is lying, defrauding, betraying, gossip, backbiting; acts which are not are sloth, inaction, indifference to the suffering of others, distraction, incoherence, diversion, self-amusement, abuse of intoxicants, abuse of the organs of reproduction, drunkenness, gluttony, sadism; pursuit of nonbeing is manslaughter, infanticide, fratricide, viricide, uxoricide, matricide, parricide, heriocide, regicide, mass-murder, mega-mass-murder, genocide, democide, deicide. This last act is sufficient to create the disturbance detected.”

The scientists wanted more information on this psychological disturbance. In the Third Decade of the Common Era, Terra possessed no ability to generate artificial power, or send an electromagnetic signal of any kind, much less one that would cross interstellar distances. What interruption was meant?

“Luminous interruption. The disturbance issued from your planet but had severe additional properties or side effects, as all objects within the entanglement were influenced. The disturbance was in your primary, which you call Sol, the Sun. It would have been noticeable from the surface of your world to any who had eyes operating in your visual range. Any with eyes to see, could see.”

Considerable study was done by the scientists to decipher this message, and many hypothesize put forward, none of which were found convincing. After some struggle over the budget with the military, the Harmonic Scientists were able to send out another group of messages, asking for details, such as the exact the time when this took place.

“Let us define the moment when a ray of light from the primary is tangential t the surface of the earth at a given point the first hour. At the sixth hour, the ray is normal or vertical to the surface. Your term for this is noontide, or noon. Your sun went dark from the sixth hour until the ninth hour. If you have no record of the event, then your condition is more deleterious than our most pessimistic estimates.”

The final question concerned the hundred years of delay mentioned in the first message. What opposition had the expedition encountered?

“The immense energy expended for launches of our magnitude cannot be hid, nor are we the only celestial intelligences to inhabit the constellations. The prince of the kingdom of the Four Persia Stars, named Regulus, Antares, Aldebaran, and Fomalhaut, withstood us one and twenty years: but, lo, Michael, whose throne is in Alpha Canis Majoris named Sirius, who is one of the chief princes, came to help us.”

This time, the Son of Heaven from the Forbidden City itself, with all his entourage, journeyed to the sending station, and typed in the message with his own hands with their long and delicate fingernails.

The message was in a special dialect only the Imperial Family is allowed to use: We now know from whom you have been sent. Please land with your highest ranking officer, with whatever he needs to save us from our condition, and he will be greeted in the fashion appropriate to maintain harmony on this, my world.

The Visitant from Zeta Geminorum made planetfall in a fashion so unexpected, I will not record it, since you will not believe me. Suffice it to say that he was found on the planet’s surface, living in a slum. He was not merely remarkably like a human being, but was identical in every way.

In his first public demonstration of the techniques of his civilization, he gathered the ashes and stray molecules of someone who had been cremated and buried at sea, reconstructed her atom by atom, and revived her. Her name was Tabitha. The reconstructed body showed signs of having no genetic flaws, neither prone to aging nor disease. She could, however, be killed by napalm, as we soon learned. She was quite lucky.

Scaphism is a method of execution where the victim is stripped naked and tied between two boats with his head, hands, and feet protruding. Honey and milk is forced down his throat with a funnel, inducing diarrhea, and his extremities are smeared with honey. The boats are set to float on a stagnant pond, thick with insect swarms. His feces accumulate within the container, attracting more insects, which sting, eat and breed within his exposed flesh. The victim is fed more milk and honey so that the septic shock, dehydration or starvation which eventually kill him do not happen too quickly.

The Visitant did not die without screaming. It was not a pretty sight.

I am writing you, Václav, because I think you can see what the logical result must be. I have taken steps to inter the Visitant’s body into one of our hidden caves, the ancestral cold sleep tomb the van Winkle family has held in trust for hundreds of years. The long wait of all those who sleep may be nearly at an end, but, strangely, no sign, no signal, has come from the immense golden city in the heavens. The golden city has yet in any visible way to act.

I confess at times to certain doubts. Maybe the city will never act. Maybe I should sleep, and let Arthur awake from his slumbers, and stand the long watch.

But at other times, the hope seems obvious.

Pale Realms of Shade

Easter Sunday

It was not the being dead that I minded, it was the hours.

No one ever calls me up during the day, and most people decide to wait until after midnight, for some reason. I am a morning person, or was, so meetings in the still, dark hours lost between midnight and the dawn make me crabby.

This time, it was not some comfortable séance room or picturesque graveyard with moss-covered stone angels. I came to the surface of mortal time on a street corner of some American city, mid-Twentieth to early Twenty-First Century. You can tell from the height of the buildings that it is American, and from the fact that the road names are written on signs rather than walls. And Twenty-Second Century streets are not lit up at night, of course.

The main road was called Saint Street. The small alley was called Peter Way. Great. I was crossed by Saint and Peter.

I smelled her perfume before I saw her. I turned. There she was, outlined against the streetlamp beyond. I could not mistake her silhouette: slender, alluring, like a she-panther as she walked.

“Matthias,” she breathed in her low whisper. Her voice was throbbing music to me, despite everything that had happened. “You look well—ah—considering.”

“Lorelei,” I grunted. She was just wearing a blouse and skirt and a knee-length gray coat, but on her the outfit could have made the cover of a fashion magazine. Or a girly magazine. Her wild mass of gold-red hair was like a waterfall of bright fire tumbling past her shoulders to the small of her back. Atop, like a cherry on strawberry ice-cream, was perched a brimless cap. My arms ached with the desire to take her and hold her. But I could never touch her, or, for that matter, anyone ever again.

She sighed and rolled her enormous emerald-green eyes. “Sweetheart, this time, you have to tell me if you were murdered. You have to!”

I took a puff of an imaginary cigarette, and watched the smoke, equally imaginary, drift off in a plume more solid than I was. “I ain’t saying.”

“But you must! I cannot rest until I know!”

Now I knew when and where I was. Because I died the day the Korean War ended. July 27. Mark the day on the calendar. That was the day I gave up smoking. This was only a few months after, judging from the dry leaves scuttling across the sidewalk, the bare branches of the one tree, surrounded by concrete, across the street. Late October or early November.

“My heart stopped,” I said. “I died of natural causes.”

She pointed a slender finger at the holes in my trench coat. “You’re dripping!”

I looked down. The rest of my body was black and white like an old talkie, a thing of sable mist and silvery moonlight. Only the blood was red, bright as Lorelei’s lipstick.

It was not something I was deliberately imagining myself to look like. I guess it was part of my self-image, subconscious or something. That seemed unfair. I had had a tricky subconscious my whole life. It was one of the things I had thought I had gotten rid of, left behind.

“That’s natural,” I said. “When bullets pass through the lung cavity, they naturally make large holes. One of them went through my heart, and caused it to stop, like I said.”

“Still making jokes!” She stamped her foot in anger, which send a vibration jiggling up through her curves and made her hair tremble and spread. I was reminded of a cat puffing up its fur in anger.

I looked her in the eye. “Lorelei, just leave it alone. Forget about me, get on with your life.”

She was good at hiding her anger. She took a moment to tuck her hair behind her ears, and drew a breath, and spoke in a voice of icy calm, “Your partner found your body. He unlocked the door and walked in. He said you were shot at close range, point blank. From the burns on your coat, the barrel was touching your coat. Your own weapon was still in your shoulder holster, the holster was snapped. That means a friend killed you.”

I said nothing.

She said, “Who was it? I know it was not Cambell. He would use his blade, not a pistol. Was it Sean? Was it Harvey? You don’t have that many friends.”

“I don’t remember what happened,” I said.

“You always get that same dumb look at your face when you try to lie to me. You are a memory. That is all a ghost is. How can a memory not remember?”

“Fine,” I said, gritting my teeth. I wondered how it was that I could feel the muscles in my jaws and temples tense up when my teeth and my whole body were imaginary. “I was cleaning my revolver. It went off by accident.”

“Funny. Seven bullets were fired,” she said, raising one of her perfectly-arched eyebrows.

“I reloaded.”

“Sylvester said the bullets went through the office window behind you, and could not be recovered for forensics. We don’t know the caliber. We assume it was an automatic. You were standing up, and fell backward over the desk. No evidence of burglary. The top drawer of your file cabinet was open, but the lock had not been forced. The file drawer was empty.”

“What does he know? Sly was always an idiot.”

“You have to go the cops and say you were murdered! If it is ruled a suicide, the insurance company reneges! And I have bills to pay.”

“And here I was thinking you had grown sentimental.”

“It was Sylvester, wasn’t it? He wanted …” She pursed her lips like she was about to say the word me, but then realized how that might sound. The lips just stayed closed, a thin, very red line, still looking very kissable.

I should have kissed her more often, in life. Back when I could.

That was a thought like an icicle stabbing through in my brain. It was more a feeling than a thought. But then I wondered how she could still have this hold over me. Can a ghost suffer from testosterone poisoning? Even dead, were men still saps for dames?

She must have thought so.

I looked at her left hand. She was wearing white gloves. I adjusted my eyes and the glove became transparent to me. “You’re not wearing our ring anymore.”

Her expression grew stiff, her eyes narrowed, like she had just stepped on a tack, and did not want to let out a yelp.

I glanced at the cracked sidewalk underfoot, and noticed something odd. Why here? Why this alley? There was no magic circle painted on the ground, no candles, no crystal ball, none of the rigmarole usually needed to call up something like me.

All the stores and shops across the street were closed, wire mesh drawn over their plate glass windows, all dark as a graveyard except for one lonely pawn shop with a broken neon sign that read AL_ HOURS _PEN! We Sell Go_d! We Fix It! The other storefronts were flea markets, liquor stores, gun shops or strip joints.

I was expecting to see a palm reader’s studio or maybe a tattoo parlor with some Satanist emblems hanging in the window, something that could pull a shade like me all the way into the world so that people could see me. But there was nothing.

I closed my eyes, and I could feel the heat beating from her body, the life in her flesh like an electric tingle in the air. But no one else, not for yards in any direction, no one hiding down the alley, no one watching from a nearby window.

I opened my eyes again. Now her expression changed: her eyelids were half lowered, and her lips half-parted, and her head almost tilted a little to left, as if I had said something amusing. “I had to pawn my wedding ring, because I am out of money. I cannot be happy until your spirit is at rest. You have to go to Judge O’Keefe and tell him who murdered you.”

“Then you can collect on the insurance money.”

She pouted and shrugged and looked coy. “Being a detective’s wife, I knew the risks I ran. Especially a detective like you, with silver bullets in your gun, and a crucifix under your flack jacket. I knew one day you might come home in a box. So we made book on those risks. Your number came up. It’s my money. If you think about it, all the times I wondered, all the times I was up late, in bed, in our cold bed, just me, just worrying about you…I earned every penny!”

I turned my head away. I could not stand seeing her performance. Or, if it were on the level, that would be somehow worse.

I tried to sink below the surface of mortal time, back into the ocean of eternity. Nothing happened. It was like standing on a sheet of ice, with my feet stuck in place. What was holding me here? What had called me here?

Turning back, I took a step toward her. Interesting. That meant I could move. The memory holding me here was not this spot, just this area.

Harshly, I said to her, “Sly will pay your bills. Have you moved in with him yet? Cuddled up to play house? You’ve dug all the gold out of the mine called Mrs. Flint, and now you can move on to him. You can be his kept woman for a few months, until enough time passes and you can come out of mourning and blackmail him into marrying you. He was always stiff in the trousers for you, and that makes him stupider than even his admittedly low standard, because the blood rushes toward his groin and away from his brain, leaving it limp and …”

I saw her eyes start to change with anger. There is a reason why the Irish are said to have a temper, and it is not just because the English beat the snot out of them for a thousand years of history. No, there was something wild and Celtic in the change in her face, and I saw in her the old, fiery blood of fairy kings who danced on the wind-roaring mountainsides underneath an unscarred moon, or who battled with the giants from the sea. Her change of expression looked almost like when some shade like me steps into a body not warded from us: the whole demeanor changes, the stance and look and voice. At that moment, she wanted me dead. Or deader. Or whatever the word is.

She swung her hand through my head, or, I should say rather, through the empty air where I was imagining my head to be. Lorelei snatched her hand back, no doubt because of the cold, but she had not hit my face any more than she could have hit a shadow or a fading memory.

But suddenly the ice, or whatever it was, that held me fixed at that point of time was broken. I sank like a stone beneath the surface of time, and saw the flickering shadows of events, past and future events, floating about me like fragments of dreams.

When you are near the mortal world, it is like looking through a pane of rippling glass a few minutes before and after wherever you were laying before you died.

Dreamers can sometime see this, if they wander away from their sleeping bodies, which is why you sometimes see a repeat of that day’s events, or a glimpse of something yet to come.

If you dive deeper, the place gets closer to the timeless, and you can see far off events in the future or past like vast shapes on the horizon, and you can hear, dimly, the ancestral voices calling warnings, the screams of fear and shouts of joy, or catch the roar like the echoes or reflections of a world-shattering battle or glimpse the lighting-flares as if reflected from low hanging clouds, against which titanic shadows move. Visionaries, and monks in contemplative prayer, can see these things, sometimes.

There is a light far below underfoot. It is like a maelstrom, because it sucks and pulls at you. I can fight it off. I looked through the nearby dreams and clouds, and saw something only a day or so away from the present location. Maybe the future, maybe the past. I let myself get pulled into it.

I was standing in the office. Of course. Where else would a ghost go? There was a new carpet underfoot. New carpet. In all our years together, Sly had never sprung for a bottle of hooch, much less something to make the office look nice. Either he had money, or he was expecting some.

I did that trick with my eyes so I could see through the carpet. There was the bloodstain. My bloodstain. Of course. Where else would a ghost be standing?

There was the plate glass window. The full moon was bright, and it shined through the lettering on the glass so their shadows fell around me and through me.

I did not cast a shadow, of course. Shadows don’t cast shadows. The word ‘Psychic’ was etched into the window in elf-letters, so it did not cast a shadow either. Only someone with the Second Sight could have seen the real sign. SYLVESTER STEEL, Psychic Private Investigator.

There was also a distorted image of the office all around me, a memory. It was a memory of unlocking and opening the door just there. Reaching a hand toward the light switch, but freezing when I saw a long, black shape on the floor, the shape of a fallen body. Litter from the desk was all around it, and the window was broken with bullet holes. One of the bullets had struck just above the letter I in FLINT. Panic and fear choked me.

I was drawn step by awful step, in the frozen way we walk in nightmares, where distances are distorted and walking three steps takes three eternities.

I put out my hand, hoping it was not him, hoping, praying the only prayer I knew. Now I lay me down to sleep…I pray the Lord my soul to keep…If I…If I…

The body turned over before I could touch it, flopping like a dead fish. He grinned at me, a sick, empty, skull-like grin, full of anger by no mirth.

“Oh my God!” a human voice screamed. “It was not me, Matt! I didn’t do it!”

That voice was in the real world. The memory that had drawn me here rippled and faded. The broken window was whole again. Sly was sleeping, no, not any more, he had been sleeping on the rollaway bed we used here in the office for late nights or stowing some client who needed a place for one night. It folded into a couch, and there was a holster on the back where we used to keep the revolver. Now he was naked, and the sheets were all twisted around him, soaked with sweat, and Sly was fumbling for the holster, finding nothing.

“There is another gun in the top drawer,” I said, trying to light another imaginary cigarette. I could get the glow of the match reflecting off my cupped fingers correctly, but the light was pearly-white rather than red, and the taste was off. “The one marked A. A for Automatic. But we keep that filing cabinet locked, remember? So who did you give the key to? Or is it whom?”

His eyes had trouble focusing on me. “Matt? Is that you?”

That surprised me, so I dropped my cigarette. It did not fall, but floated near me at shoulder height like an annoying little fish. “Can you hear me?”

He nodded. “I can hear you. Faintly.”

“Lorelei wants me to prove I did not commit suicide, so she could get the insurance money.”

That made him tremble. He went over to the hat rack. His hat was not on the hat rack but his clothes were. He got his pants, put them on, put on his shirt, but did not bother to button it up. I knew him pretty well, knew his little habits and ticks: this was what actors call ‘business.’ He was doing little ordinary things to give his nerves a chance to die down.

I wondered where his hat was. It was an ugly thing with a garish hatband, but he was real attached to it. He would doff his hat with exaggerated courtesy to the maidens passing by with a flourish like a cavalier, but only to the fair ones.

He walked slowly around me, got behind the desk, and sat in my chair. I suppose it was his chair, now. His old chair had two books and a potted plant atop it. Maybe he had always envied me my view. If so, he never mentioned it once. And why a potted plant? He did not strike me as a plant kind of guy. Maybe I did not know him so well after all.

“Light up a cigarette,” I said, “If I smell one, maybe I can remember what they are like.”

He chuckled without mirth. “Like that voodoo case down south. Remember that one? The Baron said that cigar smoke called the Loa. Whiskey, too.” But he did not light up.

“I kind of liked the old sign,” I said, nodding at the window. “Thought it was kind of funny.”

“Gave you top billing,” he said with a grimace. “So, do you have any messages for the living?”

“Sure,” I said, swatting the pathetic, imaginary cigarette out of the air next to me. “Look for a stock market break next year, in 1954. There will be large gains for long-term equity investors.”

“Matt,” he said sadly, “This is 1954. It’s been months since you appeared to Rory. The insurance company paid. Judge O’Keefe looked into her heart with the special way he has, and saw her memories, and he believed her, and ruled in her favor. So I know you did not commit suicide.”

I looked around again, this time with my eyes closed. I could feel the beat of life inside him, like heat from an unseen campfire. I finally understood what drove vampires crazy: Being able to feel being alive, but not being able to truly be alive. Drinking the living blood and feeling it inside you, just for a moment. Almost like the real thing. Undead onanism.

I opened my eyes. “You were dreaming about me. That is what called me here.”

“Matt, I did not do it. I am not the one who killed you.”

“Of course not!” I said harshly, letting my face look more like a skull and less like a man. “You never had the guts.”

Hands shaking, he opened the cigarette case on the desk, the nice silver one Lorelei bought me as a present, and lit up. I did like the smell, and it did melt my face back into a more human look. Maybe that voodoo doctor had been right about tobacco and ghosts. Too bad I had not been killed in a tobacco shop.

“So why are you haunting me?” he asked in a small voice. He did not look at me. His eyes were resting on the open cigarette case. Maybe he was counting how many smokes he had left.

“Is that why you are here?” I looked at the safe, made the surface invisible to me, and saw some of the relics and special candles missing. “Good grief! Do you have Father Pat over at your apartment, performing an exorcism? Really? To allay me?”

“Uh, actually, he’s at Lorelei’s house in the suburbs, along with Brother Sean and the Big Black Cat. Your house, I guess. Your name is still on the lease.”

“You called the Big Black Cat on me? You bastard.” I wondered how much that had set the partnership back, either in money or favors owed. The Cat was expensive. And mean. He and I had not even called up the Cat for the Murderer of Saint-Marks-in-the-Bowery.

Then I remembered it was not a partnership any more. It was just his money.

“Why don’t you rest in peace?” he demanded, “Why are you haunting me? You’ve got a nice crypt at Saint Patrick’s. It has not been legal to put any bones there for a hundred years. Do you know the strings I had to pull to get that, and the favors I had to call in?”

“How many?”

“Lots! I was up in the Catskills for two weeks with a bazooka on my shoulder, chasing a hut running on chicken legs, just to get the Great Gray Man to owe me a favor, and listen to me, which I traded to the Lady in the Well, so’s she could put me right with the Commissioner. But I did it! We got you interred, with carved stone with your name on it, and everything. LOVING HUSBAND AND FAITHFUL SOLDIER, it says. Rory and me picked the words. Father Donovan said the blessing. He is blind, but he said he could see you there, smiling. I light a candle for you every Sunday, and two during Lent.”

I did not remember that scene. From my point of view it had not happened yet. The same way a timeless ghost can now and again tell living men their future, men can prophesize to us.

Saint Patrick’s had special crypts set aside for people like us. Sly and I and a good many people in Breezy Point in Queens, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, and Woodlawn in the Bronx are twilight people like us. Our folks all came from Terryglass Parish in the Diocese of Killaloe, in Cashel.

Saint Columba of Terryglass, one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, founded the great Abbey there. The Gray Folk of the Gray Lake, Loch Riach, over which he was lord, are the ones from whom we get our sight. Back before Saint Patrick came, the daughters of Terryglass were sometimes sold into marriage and thrown in the water with weights on their ankles, because their fathers made bargains with voices that spoke out of the night, promising great things. The Bride-girls of the Gray Lake did not quite die, and sometimes they could send their babies to the shore in a coracle, for sunlight people to find and raise; and woe to him who passed the crying child by, and did not pick him up.

I remember Gramps telling how, when the storm wind was high, and the Horned Huntsman was riding with his devil dogs along the black clouds, the lake water subsided and grew strangely clear. One could see the carved columns and twisted spires of the pagan ruins, where the serpents that Saint Patrick later banished were worshiped of old, in fanes far underneath the waters of Loch Riach, and seaweed-coated temples lit by strange torches; and one could see the watching eyes that looked upward, never asleep, looking back. Gramps used to scare the piss out of me with his old stories.

Lorelei had some twilight blood, too, on her mother’s side, and she had the sight. Most of our customers do. Normal people could not even see the crimes folk hired us to solve.

“So you go to mass now?” I asked skeptically. He was not what I thought of as a praying man.

“Regular as clockwork,” he said nodding. I was afraid he was going to say religiously, but that might have been over his head. “Ever since you, ah–you know. Departed. We all loved you, jackass or no. The boys down at McSorley’s hoisted a cup to your loving memory.”

The thought of the old gang made me curious. I suddenly felt myself shrinking a bit, looking more human.

“Sly, I just want to know–”

“Yeah?”

I wanted to know how Lorelei was doing. If she missed me. That sort of thing. But instead I said, “Nice digs,” I said. “I wanted to know how you pay for all this stuff. Is that a sferracavallo on the shelf?”

“I’ve had some good cases lately. Remember the Crow murders? Turns out the Crow Cousins were Renfrews, playing footsie with the Night Folk of the Blood Feast. And then there was a whole coven of Drowned Ones cooperating with smugglers and Nicors causing all those wrecks up the coast, near the haunted lighthouse the Good Witch uses. And it turns out the Good Witch weren’t so good. We tried to take her alive, but the Gold-hoofed Snow-white Hart tore off her mask and trampled her. Just like that.”

“You got the Hart to come with you?”

“Some of the buildings in the city are old enough to come awake, and they like me, and the Commissioner likes anyone who keeps the buildings quiet, and he knows Arthegall and Calidore in the Summer Queen’s Court, so yeah. I called the Hart. After the Lighthouse Witch had her mask come off, and she was all worms inside, me and Muddy got all her files—she wrote everything down on dry autumn leaves, so she could keep track and blackmail and curse her ex-partners—and it was pretty hectic.”

Muddy was the name of a police dog in the K-9 corps. Moddey Dhoo was from the Isle of Man, and he never grew a single gray hair in his fur, never failed in his strength, and he never grew any older. Sometimes he helped us on cases. He never talked when there were normal people around, and I always found him surly and sour when he did talk. Sly was just dog people, I suppose. I could just picture them slobbering and grinning together.

“Now, with those files,” Sly was saying, breaking into just such a grin as I had imagined, “the Police Commissioner O’Hanlon believed me when I told him there was one guy behind it all, fixing everything up.”

“Not your ‘Fixer’ theory again!” I groaned. “A Napoleon of crime! A spider in maze! You read too many dime novels.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences. Who else could get half-deads of Undersea and the man-eating mermaids and human gunrunners to mesh like clockwork? Tir-fo-Thuinn and the Tir-na-Nog and great Nodens who reigns in drowned Atlantis all singing from the same sheet music? And the Lighthouse Witch? She had you fooled your whole life. Um. I mean, us. Fooled us. Someone is coordinating all this.”

“The Fixer is just another one of your dumb ideas. You’ll have this business ruined in no time, without me.”

“Actually, Harvey the Pooka believes me,” said Sly, with a bit of a smirk.

“That drunk bunny!”

“He’s got friends at Court. He knows Canacee—you know, Cambell’s sister—and she sometime lends me her ring, for shadowing jobs. And so business has been picking up.” The smirk grew more prominent. He actually was enjoying the chance that never happened in life, to tell me this. To say I told you so.

A kind of dull silence rested in the room. I wished he had offered me a chair. I wished I could sit down. I was beginning to resent how comfy he looked in my chair. It burned me to think that all these years, without a word, without a sign, he had been jealous of something as petty as a chair, a view through a window. I guess you never really know people.

He straightened up in my stolen chair, put his hand on the cigarette case. His voice was a little sharp now. “Nice catching up with you. Good luck in the next world and all that. Can you depart now and stay departed?”

“Why are you having nightmares about me?”

“I am not the one who killed you, Matt. I keep telling you that.”

“And I already said I know that. I know who killed me. You must know, too. You must have figured it.” I pointed at the drawer marked A, the top of the filing cabinet. I was just as surprised as he was when the drawer unlocked itself with a click and slid open.

It was not me doing it. I am not a poltergeist, just an ordinary ghost. Poltergeists are driven by anger, damned to continually visit the same few spots, over and over again, screaming in rage, throwing fits, throwing stones. They are the only ghosts so heavy with anger that they can touch the material world.

But the drawer came open and kept coming. It made a metal screech as it came. Slowly, it tilted. Sly watched it with his eye wide and wet with fear.

It fell to the ground with a clatter like a cymbal, shockingly loud. The drawer was entirely empty. There was nothing in it. The aspergillum of holy water blessed by an archbishop was gone, the one I had once used to burn an archvampire into nothingness. The bottle of pills imported from Jamaica that we use on the sunlit people if they saw something they were not supposed to see—also gone. The automatic was gone, as was the clip of silver bullets, also expensive, also gone. The relic of Saint Ailbe of Emly, which no wolf or werewolf could approach, because of one act of kindness long remembered — that was gone, and it was priceless. A was for Aspergillum, A was for Amnesia. A was for automatic. A was for Ailbe. Funny, weren’t I? My life was full of little jokes like that.

I felt a pounding sensation in my brain again, and I did not even have a brain, only a memory of a brain. “Where is all our stuff? Our gear? It is all gone?” I looked again at the new carpet, the newly etched window with the expensive lettering only dusk people can see. “What did you do with it? Sell it for money?”

“I don’t have a key to that drawer, remember?” said Sly, his voice suddenly firmer, harder and colder than I ever heard it before.

He continued: “I dropped it down a storm drain when Mayor’s Brother, wearing his rat skin, bit me. Remember? Such an expensive key, made of orichalcum from Atlantis and silver from the mines on the dark side of the moon, because you insisted on a lock made by elfs, a labyrinth lock no human could pick or force, and no gypsy could charm. There were only two keys, and mine fell down the storm drain. You never forgave me.”

I was not listening. I was too busy shouting. “Did you sell my relic, which my grandfather brought all the way from Tipperary, for money? For daylighter money?” My anger was palpable: I could see the papers on the desk fly into the air, the lamp fell over, the windows rattled in the panes, and a dozen little dust devils of wind starting whipping around the room. “Did you sell them all? All the tools and weapons of the work?”

“You don’t remember,” he said in that cold, hard voice of his. “You are becoming empty, Matt. Soon you will be nothing but rage and wind.”

The whirlwind screamed stronger, and the potted plant, of all things, jumped up into the air and cracked him sharply across the face. The pot broke with a bright, sharp sound like fine china breaking. Dirt sprayed across the drapes and window behind, and the shard of the pot hit the wall and ceiling. There was blood all over his face, both from cuts on his cheeks and forehead, and gushing from both nostrils.

Then, too late, I remembered where I had heard him speak that way before. He never talked to me in that tone. He only got that hard note in his voice when he was confronting something from the darker world. Something from deeper in the twilight than humans can go safely. Something nearer the night.

Suddenly, I stopped, and got hold of myself. The papers fell to the ground, and the lamp toppled, but slowed for no reason before it hit the floor, and did not break.

It was me doing it. I was the cause.

“Mary, mother of God!” I shouted. “I am not a monster! I am not haunting you! You just feel guilty because you stole Lorelei from me!”

But it was too late for talk. Not bothering to wipe his face, he held up his hand, and in it was something he had hid in the silver cigarette case. It looked like a small and delicate flower from the blackthorn tree. The little flower throbbed and vibrated with more life-heat than any living human could hold.

“Not all the weapons of the work are gone.” And he said the name of the Big Black Cat.

Of course, I knew what flowers like that could do, what they could summon up, so I spun and dove below time even before he spoke. That just barely saved my life. Or my whatever I had just now.

I struggled, diving, swimming, rushing away from mortal time as fast as my fear could carry me. The Cat was a silent black shadow, immense, powerful, dark, and he came at me silently, swift as a comet. The glinting gold eyes of the cat were behind me, growing larger, pitiless and proud, two full harvest moons.

The Cat struck once, missed, but the current stirred up by that blow sent me tumbling head over heels. Then he swelled up to twice his size like the black cloud of some explosion in a powder magazine.

As huge as a building now, he swatted at me with a paw like a black tree felled by a lumberjack, and claws like a squad of fencers swinging their sabers in unison. I felt my imaginary coat pull on me, and felt my imaginary back get ripped from my spine in long, thin slices of flesh. And the pain was not imaginary at all. Once when I was a kid, my older brother Al hit me in the back with a rake. This was not like that.

There was no blood in the water around me, or whatever the fluid of time is made of, but then, as suddenly as I realized there was not, there was. It was not colorless, but red as a Christmas berry. I screamed in pain, except this time, my imaginary voice would not work. There was no noise. I had forgotten what my own voice sounded like.

Then, just as suddenly, the Cat gave one last disdainful look over his shoulder, and was gone. Cats don’t like water in general, and this one did not like getting very far into the sea of timelessness.

I floated in the deep, deeper than I had ever been before, trying to let the panic subside.

I was very far down by the time I stopped descending. The images get more cloudy and more fragmentary the deeper you dive, but I could still see glimpses of the modern cityscape directly above me. To one side, I saw a horse and buggy passing down a cobblestone street lit by a gas lamp; and to the other, a figure in a gas-mask trudging past a fallen skyscraper lying on its side.

I did not look closely at the future shadows of the city in years to come. Somehow, I did wish I could warn the living to enjoy what they had now, to give thanks, and to cherish what they were so soon to have never again, not even as memory. The people and things living and not living in times to come would make sure no undistorted record, no uncorrupted memory, would remain. There were no steeples in that future, no church bells, just thin, wailing cries from thin, ugly minarets.

I turned my gaze to the past. How to find anything, a dream, a bloodstain, a fear or hope that would draw me to it? A ghost cannot simply step into any scene he likes, any time he likes. There has to be something like an invitation.

Then I saw it. The one building that was much the same. There! Sly said I was interred there, the Cathedral built after the Civil War. Could I not step into a place where I was buried, even if I arrived a century or so before I was?

I soared upward toward the image. Some power was helping me, because I never felt myself moving through the timelessness so effortlessly before.

I surfaced not in the crypts, as I was expecting, but in the nave of the cathedral. At first I thought I was in a crowd. But it was not the living heat from a hundred people that beat and thundered and pulsed all around me. The pews were empty. There were a few lit candles in a stand against the far wall. The heat was coming from the statues to the left and right, from the stained glass windows glinting in the moonlight, from the baptismal font, from the altar, and most of all from a locked golden box at the far end. That was hotter than the summer sun.

It was glorious, warming, making me wish I could remember how to make my dead eyes weep. But it scared me.

I slowly raised my hands, like you do when someone points a gun at your heart. I suddenly remembered that was the exact posture I was in when I died. If this furnace of living energy I had foolishly stepped into the middle of was hostile, then I would die a second time in just this same pose.

Nothing happened. I stood there with my back torn and aching, dripping bright red blood on the wooden floor. I was not sure if the blood were real or not. I could not tell any more.

Then I felt something. Another source of living heat. There was someone in the booth to my left there. It felt like male rather than female heat. I cannot explain that; but imagine someone throws a pine log rather than an apple log on the fire. You can smell the difference.

He wanted me to enter the other half of the booth.

I could not open or close the booth door, but I could step through it. I went in and knelt down, wincing at my wounded back, and crossed myself. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been — wait a minute — I am guessing about a hundred years and change since my last confession, but it is a hundred years in the future. What year is this?”

“I am sorry, my son,” came the voice from the other side of the screen. “I cannot quite hear you. There is no need to be afraid. Speak up.”

I tried to imagine my voice more clearly. “I am from Terryglass, the land of the twin streams.”

“That is no sin, my son. As it happens, so am I,” he said with a chuckle.

“I know, Father. That is why you can hear me.”

There was silence from the other side of the screen. Maybe I heard him whisper a prayer. I made the booth walls look transparent to my eyes, and really wished I had not.

The figures coming out of the statues and images were bright and terrifying, and the shape that stood up from the image of the Virgin above the altar was terrifying and beautiful, bright as the sun, clear as the moon, and crowned with seven stars. And the moon was under her foot.

I closed my eyes, but that made it worse. I could feel the heat from the living powers gather behind the old priest in the confessional booth. One of them leaned down and breathed on the old priest, and he ignited with living force like an oil-soaked pine log going up.

I put my imaginary hands over my eyes, and tried to make the booth solid to my vision again. There was no place to run. Even in the waters of eternity, outside of the mortal world, the lamps and lanterns of living beings, beings immeasurably greater than us, had gathered.

There was also a force standing at the right hand of the priest. It was not a saint. I could tell that the saints had once been alive, had once been ghosts like me. I was an empty sack, and they were filled up to overflowing, but they were like me. They were human. They could be pictured with faces and robes and eyes and smiles. The living creature at his right hand had never been alive, never occupied flesh, never entered fully into mortal time. I did not know what it was, but the force that flowed from it was harsher and more solemn than a judge ordering a criminal to hang. The saints were like flames. This was like a lightning bolt, if you can imagine a lightning bolt standing still, making no noise, just looking at you.

I wondered if that being was his guardian angel. My mom told me we all had them. They live in the baptismal waters and came out when we were washed as babies. I believed her as a child, but not after the day she went into the hospital for some routine operation, and never came out again. My Dad and my brothers told me not to worry, it would be okay, that I had only had a nightmare. But the nightmare came true and my Dad had lied about there being nothing to worry over. So after that, I sort of assumed it was all lies. I still believed in witches. Eventually I killed the old granny who had cursed my Mom to her death. I just did not believe in guardian angels any more.

Once again, I wished I could tell the waking world, the stupid sunlight people, the blind ones, what wonders were around them. Did everyone get a bodyguard like that? I thought angels were supposed to be small cute little babies with dove wings, not this silent and inhuman tornado of divine energy.

The priest said, “Did you receive extreme unction before you went to sleep, my son?”

I did not understand what he meant at first. Then I got it. “No, Father. Death came suddenly, and I had no time to confess. Is it too late now? I mean, I haven’t reported in anywhere, or seen a Judgment Seat or Pearly Gate or anything.”

He sighed. “That, I do not know. It is not a point covered in my instruction. I wonder what Saint Thomas Aquinas would say on the matter. We are allowed to pray for the dead, of course…”

Saint Thomas was standing right there. He was wearing a crown of light, so I could not read his expression, because it was too bright for me to see his face. But he spread his hands, and held up two fingers. I have no idea what that gesture meant.

The old priest said, “But, nonetheless, I am sure our Heavenly Father would prefer to have all His little ones come to Him, soon or late. You are a little late, but maybe not too late. I think Trajan was baptized after his death, and he must have heard confession before entering communion, so there is precedent. If I must err, let it be on the side of generosity. I will hear your confession, my son. Of what do you accuse yourself?”

“I am a poltergeist.”

“You should not think so small of yourself, whom God has created…”

“Sorry, what are you talking about, Father?”

“Did you say you were a paltry ghost? Maybe I misheard. A poultry ghost?”

“I was a–” I did not know how to explain I was a detective. I am pretty sure the word did not exist yet. In fact, I am not even sure if Robert Peal had organized the police force in London yet. “I was a married man. I was murdered. And now I am discovering that I am a type of ghost who is full of wrath. Ghost who makes objects fly around the room. I found myself doing it without being aware of it. Because my subconscious mind–” No, wait. That would be also a word no 19th century man would know. “I think I am possessed by a spirit of anger. I just saw the spirit of anger act through me without my knowing, without my say-so.”

“A spirit possessed by a spirit?” the old priest sounded amused. “Well, to make a good confession, you must vow to amend you life — ah, I mean, ah, existence — ah — are you truly sorry for this sin?”

I remembered seeing Sly’s bleeding face. “Yes,” I said. “But I don’t remember the words. O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell; but most of all…most of all…I forget what I dread most of all…”

“You detest your sins most of all because they offend Our Lord, who is all good, and deserving of all your love. But my son, you have not confessed all your sins.”

I wondered why he said that. But something made me blurt out, “She is still mine!” So maybe I was possessed by a spirit after all.

“No one can possess another,” he said serenely. Then I heard a smile in his voice, “Except, I suppose in your case. But, ah, of whom do we speak?”

“Rory. My wife.”

“No, my son.”

I felt the anger in me again. “What do you mean no?”

“She is not your wife, but your widow. You have been sundered from her.”

He said nothing and I said nothing. A space of time went by as I heard him breathing, and not me.

The old priest broke the silence, “Who murdered you, my son?”

“She did.”

“Ah.”

“You don’t sound surprised, Father.”

“One hears many things in confession, and, after a time, one gets a sense for how the heart works. But you are certain it was she? The minds of ghosts sometimes wander….”

That was a scary thought. Suddenly, I was not sure if I could trust myself, or what I could trust. “No, it had to be her. The door was locked. She had the key to get in and out. The top drawer of the filing cabinet was also locked, and I have the only key to it, a key sunlight men cannot even see. She could have taken it out of my trouser pocket at any point. She was crying and crying. You would think a woman like that would be as hard as stone, as hard as flint. Mrs. Flint. Heh. The bullets were silver, so the charms woven around my life did not work, and the gun was made of special metal, so that ordinary humans could not see it. It was something we used for killing werewolves.”

“Do you forgive her?”

“That is the crazy part. After I was dead, I was pulled up toward the mouth of a maelstrom of light, but I turned and looked back, and I saw her hugging me. Hugging my corpse, I mean. She took the bottle of pills out of the drawer. The Mickey Finn pills, but I guess you could call them Fenodyree pills. She cleaned up the evidence before the pill took effect. She left and locked the door behind her. She does not remember the crime. She killed me and collected the insurance and got away with it.”

I tried to heave a sigh, but it did not work. It just sounded like a thin, sad whistle of wind. Creepy.

“Father, she regrets nothing because she remembers nothing. I don’t think it was planned. For all I know, I dropped the elf key, and she was coming by to return it. And then we quarreled…”

“About what?”

“Money. What else do couples quarrel about? I made a joke about Sly, about how dumb he is, and she just exploded like a …”

“Who is this?”

“Sylvester Steel. My partner.”

“Whom you have hated for years, and belittled, and cheated of his wages?”

“Yes, of course. I could take money from the kitty, and put the blame on him for… Hey! I did not say any of that! It’s not true! I was like an older brother to….to him…and he…”

“No? Then why are you still here on earth, poor shade? What sin is keeping you here?”

“I …. I am here b-because I …. want to be …. I am not trapped ….”

“You are trapped like a bird on a limed twig, with lime you set yourself. Ask for release, my son. I cannot grant you the forgiveness and peace of Christ until you admit your sin, and ask it to be cleansed.” He voice was getting dimmer and dimmer like the voice of a man calling from the caboose of a train receding into a dark tunnel. I could barely hear him.

And I did not want to hear him. I had leaped to my feet, astonished and aghast that this little priest, this mere mortal, this dim-sighted fool who could not see the gathered saints behind him, that he would dare speak to me that way.

What the hell did he know about me? What gave him the right to stick his nose in my business? He would be lucky if I did not break his nose off for sticking it where it did not belong!

Had not I always been good to Sylvester? Treated him like a prince, gave him a job when no one else would hire such an idiot?

The winds started whipping around me before I realized what happened. Yes, I was angry, and I saw my jaw drop down to my belt buckle and my cheeks grow longer and longer to let that happen. My hair was standing up on end like the floating hair of a corpse underwater, and the wailing noise, weak and yet full of hate, that came from my throat I barely recognized as my own.

Through the walls of the confessional, I saw the little candles shake and fall, and the stained glass windows rattled in their frames. The glass images of Saint Peter with his keys and Saint Paul with his sword turned and frowned at me with sorrow mixed with sternness in their eyes.

The guardian angel struck.

The angel was brighter than a drawn sword, louder than the crystal music of the spheres. I fled before its deadly, inhuman beauty destroyed me entirely. The glance of the angel burned my skin and hair away with a thousand lashes of fire, and I was less than a shriveled mummy in a half of a second. When I came to myself again, I felt like the peach-pit left over after the peach is gnawed to bits.

Deeper I was than the Cat had chased me. It was like another layer of the sea where other forms of life dwell, luminous shapes of translucent blind fish with teeth like knives, so deep I did not even know where.

Even here a few dream clouds caught fragments of images from mortal time. At this depth the landscape to one side was all forest, and the skies filled with passenger pigeons, and nary a man in sight, not even a figure in buckskins. To the other side, the moon was black, the seas were blood, and nightmarish shapes stalked amid the burning ruins like warhorses with scorpion tails and human faces, long fangs and long hair, crowned in gold and wearing iron vests.

The whole span of time, from America before Columbus, maybe before the Indians, to whatever horrid future was waiting for us—I could see it all. Eden to Apocalypse. Alpha to Omega.

It made me dizzy, like I was a groundhog trapped in the wheel of an airplane during takeoff, and instead of seeing my shadow, I saw what had been my whole universe like a dark carpet falling and falling away below. The little hidey-hole where I hid my life was lost in clouds and distance.

In one or two places, I saw events that were not to one side or the other. They were not inside time at all: a bright and invulnerable figure, more beautiful than anything human, being shot by a blind archer whose arrowhead was a mistletoe; a harpist dashing his harp to the ground in sorrow and wrath, while behind him a bride was being pulled backward into the cave from which she will never emerge; a huge, bearded man dressed in a lion skin and maniacal grin wrestling a fifty-headed dog to the ground with his bare hands; a dead man wrapped in bandages and crowned like a king, holding up a balance scale, and in one pan, a beating heart, and in the other, a feather.

Somehow, I knew where I was: Deeper, so deep in time now that it was near eternity. This was where the prophets go, or where the poets go to go mad.

On the good side, my torn back no longer hurt, or, at least, that little one note of torture was lost amid the symphony of cuts, lacerations, burns, shocks, traumas, broken bones, torn nerves, shattered organs, melted eyeballs, and various other pains, aches, smarts, sufferings, and vexations. It was an orchestra of agony, with rafts of new anguish and distress crashing in crescendos each time I thought to move, or even thought at all.

I was lucky to be alive! Or whatever.

Maybe I was still angry. Who in their right might leaves absurdly powerful supernatural nonhuman beings just following people around like guard dogs? What kind of crazy universe was this?

In the war, there were soldiers who lost a limb, but could still feel itches and throbs and burns. Ghost pains, they call it. Now my whole body was suffering ghost pains. Who designs a universe were a man can lose not just one limb, or even four, but every part of his body altogether, and it still hurts?

Remember those pains of Hell I was supposed to dread? I began to wonder how my life as a dead guy was going to go. I thought I was going to be free from all the pains that flesh is heir to.

But instead I found my new and imaginary body could suffer pain greater than what killed me. More pain. How much more? Who said there was an upper limit?

Why not infinite pain? Why not eternal?

I could not sweat with fear, because my entire body, head to toe, was one third-degree burn from looking like the surface of a dead lava flow. But I could shake. It was a trembling I could not stop, like the shakes a rummy in the gutter gets in the last cold hour before dawn.

You would think a dead guy would worry about this kind of stuff first thing, right off the bat, but I had been kind of distracted. Being dead is a bit like being drunk. It kind of plays tricks on you.

Only then did I really start to wonder, and start to dread. I had known about the twilight creatures my whole life, ever since I was a little child. Many children can see ghosts, or remember things that have not happened yet, but usually they grow out of it when they start to get good at talking. We twilight folk, or anyone who has Otherworldly blood in their ancestry, from selkies or sea-faeries or swan-maidens wed against their will when their coats were hid, don’t grow out of it so fast. The world’s time has not so strong a hold on us.

You would think it would make it easier for a man like me to believe what saints and martyrs said in old books nobody reads, or droning homilies everyone snoozes through, wondering how the Sunday game turned out.

But somehow, knowing it, seeing it, somehow made the whole thing seem unexceptional. Like it was an everyday business. Let me give a f’rinstance. Father Aretino was a gray- haired old Tuscan priest with tired eyes, who drank too much. In one of our first cases after Flint and Steel Investigations was opened for business—this was before the war—I saw Father Aretino destroy a four thousand year old blood-drinking Pharaoh. This was a February midnight in the middle of a frozen white stream the Iroquois worshiped as a god. The Father stood there with no one around him, and the Pharaoh, surrounded with a cloud of darkness and a cloud of locusts, was advancing over the stream. Father Aretino destroyed the mummy with no more than dogeared Bible, a candle-stub, a cowbell and his naked faith. He had started the evening with a nice silver bell made by a Roman artisan and blessed by the bishop, but a nighthawk carried it off, laughing. Sly managed to find and swipe a bell from a sleeping milk-cow to replace it. I saw the ice crack open, and the river leap as if with joy and reach with watery fingers white as foam to drown the scowling Egyptian king, who shouted in rage as ghosts of jackals howled, unable and unwilling to believe the God of the Hebrew slaves could fell him.

You would think I would believe in God all the more, seeing what His servants could do. But in my line of work, I just sort of thought our God was like Gunnodoyah the Thunder Boy, whom the Iroquois once danced before in times of drought and beat the tabor to adore, just a power at large in the world.

A little sneaking thought, no bigger than a worm, snaked into my brain. It was a simple thought: If there is a Hell, Sylvester can go there.

Now, I was in pain, more pain than a living man can understand, when I thought this, so maybe that explains why I did not trample that thought and throw it away. I petted it and fed it by telling myself that she would not have shot me if he had not seduced her. She had always been sweet on him. Girls are drawn to weak men, men they can geld and domesticate, especially smart girls. She had never cheated on me, except—now I found out—in her heart. With him.

He had her in his arms right now. They were whispering and giggling about me, and she was telling him how much better he was, now that business was picking up, a better provider, a better man, able to buy her whatever she wanted, furs and jewels and empty vanities, trips to Broadway shows. And all that money came from my corpse, from that insurance she insisted I buy.

If I were a poltergeist, a spirit of rage, a spirit of death—and there was no use denying it now—then I could still touch the physical world. That meant I could drop a pill into a drink, cut a brake line in a moving car, pull a trigger, throw a knife. Hell! I could bash in his skull with a brick while he slept.

I felt the mortal world pulling me again. It was strong, insistent. I was like a game fish caught on a line. Why tug against the hook? I rose up in a wash of sudden motion.

At first, I was not sure where or when I was. It was a darkened room, with shelves and tables covered with bric-a-brac. The floor was covered with butcher paper and old newspapers.

It might have been a cluttered museum closed for repair, or maybe an abandoned antique shop. Here were masks on the wall of long-nosed creatures with spiked chins, or bat-eared creatures with curving fangs, or albino foxes smiling sweetly; next to the masks were braided whips on hooks with bits of bone and metal woven into the lash; next were staples in the walls from which dangled chains with manacles and gyves.

A wall niche held a blue-faced idol of a many-armed goddess. One leg was raised in a dance-step, each of her hands was holding a bloody weapon or severed head, while a necklace of skulls was draped across the outrageous metal balloons of her breasts. She was stepping on a kowtowing dwarf.

On one shelf were knives with serrated brass-knuckles built into the guards; other shelves held Coptic jars, or bottles filled with pickled meats or eyes or organs; in the back corner loomed an iron maiden, gently smiling, complete with channels in the base for the blood to run into a water bowl for the cat.

Hanging from the ceiling was more ghastly clutter: medallions of pentagrams and St. Peter Crosses, mummified hands with painted fingernails; wooden puppets with exaggerated carved groins poised to engage in various unnatural acts; an alligator body with the head of a dead man attached to its neck, stuffed and tanned with eyes replaced by glass beads. The real alligator head was in a corner by the door, its open jaws being used as an umbrella stand.

Snakes and scorpions hung by their tails among shrunken heads. In a fish-tank hanging by chains in the center of the roof writhed groups of luminous and transparent eels whose eyes had been gored out, and the sockets sewn shut. It was good to see something alive.

The walls were covered with mosaics showing overweight Aztec priestesses bearing and flaying children and proffering them to gods with goggling eyes and protruding tongues. On a wooden music stand a black leather volume, bigger than a phonebook, was chained and padlocked.

The candelabrum was a dead man’s hand, with wax candles burning on each finger and thumb. On a rack next to it was a wand cut with Viking runes, a black knife made of volcanic glass, a cup of green copper, a ball of dark brown crystal with a red glow at its heart.

On a throne made of iron rib cages and steel skulls someone had propped the corpse of a Franciscan friar, complete with rope belt and tall hood, and had propped a pair of sunglasses on his nose, like an actress from California might wear. The mouth of the corpse had been stitched open into a grin, and all his teeth were black iron.

All this gear was throbbing, not with the living heat that comes from men, but with a sucking, terrible cold. I was pierced with numbness through to my broken bones, which brought such a relief, that, for a moment, I did not see how morbid and grotesque the litter of the crowded chamber was.

I saw a window, and a red neon sign in it, but the abnormal letters were from some language I did not recognize.

There was a looking glass in a frame carved like a snake eating its own tail standing directly opposite the window. I looked at myself, now that the pain was numbed, and tried to imagine myself looking human again.

I could not do it. I could not remember what a human looked like. First I was a headless dwarf with oversized arms and legs, with eyeballs at my nipples and a mouth at my navel; then I was a horror with a red funnel for a head, with an eyeball on my tongue, and the mouth was a circle of teeth; then my head was on backward, and my legs were coming from my arm pits. The sensation of sick horror ebbed a bit, and I finally ended up looking like a hooded and crooked thing with dangling arms and the head of a hairless vulture. My knees bent the wrong way, like a dog leg, but at least I was upright and almost humanoid.

Then I noticed the window. I could see it in the mirror. _PEN! We Sell Go_d! We Fix It!

Of course. The neon letters from inside the pawn shop were backward because I was looking at their backsides. The mirror image restored them.

I walked on my backward feet toward this window. I saw no door, but there was a tapestry with an image of the Great God Pan hanging in the right spot to hide one. I looked out the window.

I was right outside the street where Lorelei had called me, earlier. Saint street. My earlier. I did not know where in mortal time this was.

I could see now that the alley was abutting a hotel, one I recognized. It was a hot-sheet joint, one where lovers met for a bottle of wine and an hour of privacy. The Saint Valentine Comfort, it was called.

I tried to put my hand through the window like a moonbeam, to avoid breaking it, but found that it was solid to me. Something was keeping me here.

Bending my vulture head down, I made the floor-litter transparent to my eyes. Beneath the layer of newspaper were the Oriental trigrams and isosceles triangles, a circle inscribed with a pentacle. A calling circle.

That meant that Lorelei had not called me up that first time. I had been being pulled toward this pawn shop here, and my memories of her and hers for me had blown me off course like a ship snatched by a gale as it was about to enter the harbor. But then why had she been here?

As I put my hand down, a sense of warmth, of pleasure tingled through my claw-fingers. I had accidentally brushed against a small golden tray of wafers, each one small as a silver dollar, resting on the sill right under the We Sell Go_d! sign.

All numbness was gone. My imaginary bones were straight. My body stopped hurting, just like that. The pain was gone. I could no longer envision nor imagine myself as wounded.

In fact, looking at my hands, they seemed like a young man’s hands, like I remember them back when I played football in school, or toted a rifle in Normandy. Strong hands. No nicotine stains in the fingers. No scars on the knuckles.

I was nude without being naked, for I was clothed in a warm light that shined from my pores. But then I pulled my clothing, shoes and fedora and trenchcoat out of my memory, and found myself dressed in that.

What had I touched? Before I recalled that I could not touch anything, I picked up a little disk of bread and held it up to the light from the window. It was a communion wafer. There was a little cross in the surface and the letters INRI. I never did know who Inri was, or why his or her name was written over images of Christ on the cross. Must have been some early disciple or something.

One moment, I was holding the wafer and looking at it, and the next, when I remembered that I was a shade, it slipped through my fingers—and I mean through my fingers—and it floated for a moment, and fell against the window as if caught by a freak gust, laying flat, and sliding downward. At the same moment, the neon sign it brushed against flickered and went dark, and the streetlamp outside burned out.

The only light now was inside, from the candles on the dead man’s fingers and the glow-in-the-dark blind eels trapped in the ceiling tank. It made the window into an impromptu mirror.

In that mirror, I could see the hooded friar on the throne of iron bones behind me. His sunglasses were now turned toward me, and the sutured-open grin had widened. He was alive. Or, at least, able to move.

I turned. The real one in the room with me seemed dead enough.

I looked back at the reflection. He smiled and nodded in a genial fashion, like he was my favorite uncle, and he opened his glove. In the palm was a little white dot of silver light that I somehow knew, the way you know things in dreams you cannot possibly know, that the planet Venus was in his hand. He was holding the Morning Star.

“Neat trick,” I said.

I was not sure which way to face. I decided on facing the motionless corpse. I figured that if something was going to hurt me, that was the direction it would come from.

Then he spoke in a voice like a silver violin and the music of his words came from the reflection in the dark glass. I spun back that direction, startled.

“You are come to us because you are broken,” he said. “We fix all things.”

“What are you?”

“As we said. We fix things. Did you not see the signs?”

“What is your name?”

“It was blotted from the book of life. There is no name to say.”

“If I can’t say your name, what the hell am I supposed to call you?”

Again with the iron-toothy grin. “Fixer.”

I stood there, thunderstruck. Sly had been right about that, all along.

I moved and put my imaginary back to the iron maiden, where I could keep both the dead Friar and his reflection in my angle of view. He was not just cold, he was like the South Pole. The cold was coming both from the corpse and the reflection, like a crosswind.

I don’t know how much, if any, heat I was giving off. I was cold compared to a human, but I was not absolute zero. I assume mine was like an echo or a memory of heat, embers from a newly-dead fire, but he was hungry for it. This cold was like something wanting to eat up all the heat in the universe. The South Pole? Maybe the South Pole of Pluto, or some smaller world with no name that wandered away from its orbit and is falling forever and ever in the unending blackness between the stars.

But this was something much worse than merely a clever Warlock running a crime ring, or some ambitious were-seal from Atlantis. Even the heavy hitters in the Big League, figures of strong and ancient dread like Baba Yaga and the Headless Horseman and the Wolf of the Mist and Gaberlunzie the King’s Beggar, all of them were small potatoes compared to this.

“Quite a collection you’ve got here,” I said.”What are you? A devil worshiper”?

“Not at all. Let others worship! We merely see things as they should be seen, and bow the knee to none. Is liberty such a vice?”

Suddenly feeling nervous, I stepped back to the window. I did not like being near the reflection, but the little wafers of bread were like a campfire in the sub-zero cold. I picked one up, but it was slippery, as if little winds too gentle to detect were trying to pluck it out of my hand. I found that it would come to rest on my right palm if I cupped my left hand beneath my right and support it. Like a two handed grip on a gun. The warmth beat on my chin and face, making me dizzy.

“This is a little out of place,” I said. “Why the communion bread? I can tell it has not been desecrated.”

This time the corpse in the real room did move. Like the reflection, he lifted his glove, and I saw he held a star in his hand. Smiling beneath his blind sunglasses, the hooded head now nodded toward the window, and part of the neon sign flickered to life for a moment, and then died again.

“We sell god,” he said.

Of course. The act of selling the Host desecrated it. There was a special word for that. Simony? Simonism? Zionism? Thomism? Something like that.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to catechism class back when I was an altar boy. But Sly had always known about that kind of stuff. I had been the go-to guy for Romani lore, Voodoo practices, and legends from the Catskills. Maybe, thinking back, I had relied on him for a lot of things.

A worm of thought stirred in my brain again, reminding me how much I hated him.

“What is this ‘we’ stuff?” I said. “You got lice?”

The hooded moved back and forth as the figure shook its head. “You ask not rightly.”

I wondered what the ‘rightly’ way to ask was supposed to be. “How many of you are there?”

“Many. We are Legion.”

“What the hell—?”

“Indeed and well said! We are many. Many have we absorbed, and each screaming relic still trembles and suffers inside us. We are Hell. Hell is us, nor do we escape it. Numberless souls boil and burn inside us, and are consumed, and ever consumed, and none shall pluck them ever from my hungry, grisly jaws.”

He opened his mouth wide. He had no tongue, but spikes and thorns coated every inner surface of his mouth and throat. His throat was glowing as if he had swallowed a red coal.

Then his breath, which was strangely dry and warm and putrid, struck my face, and in the breath, I heard, dimly as in a nightmare, the screams and sobs and moans and cries of piercing, sad despair, men and women and children, and all voices filled with fear and cursing and purest hate. It was the children’s voices that were the worst.

“Shut your damned mouth!” I shouted, putting my head down to my hands, trying to breathe in the odor of the circle of bread, so that I would not pass out.

“None can close the throat of Hell,” he smirked. “Shall we now to business?”

“What do you want, Fixer?”

“To fix you. You are broken. Has not the sacrament of confession rejected you, ignited you, tormented you, and cast you away? No healing comes from there. To the dead, that door is shut; the dead are never risen again.”

“I hate riddles. Speak plain. What do you want from me?”

“Nay. Ask instead what it is you want. We shall be generous to grant. Liberty. Freedom. We are the prince of freethinkers.”

Against my better judgment, I was curious what he had to say. “You are babbling, Fixer! Liberty from what?”

“Prison. You cannot depart this world until your unfinished business here is done.”

“What business?”

He nodded, and the streetlamp across the way came back to life, so that his reflection vanished. “She is drawn back to that house of adultery by memory even as you are. Here she first broke her marriage vow. Here she first betrayed you.”

“You’re lying. She was always faithful.”

“Faithful to her womanhood! My snake coupled with Eve beneath the tree of carnal knowledge, and all her daughters are like unto her. It was with your partner’s love warm pulsing inside her loins when she went back to the office to return the bottles of pills she had stolen. You see, she used them each time to remove the memory, and so remove the guilt. Each time she thought it was a first time, and that made the lure of breaking the law all the more delicious.”

“With Sylvester?”

“He resisted at first, because he loves her — because his lust for her burns deeply. But he is a stupid man, and no match for her wiles.”

I wondered what that hesitation had been, that catch in his throat. Could he even make mistakes? Or was everything an act? But no one outwits the devil’s lies. I was out of my depth.

“I want to go,” I said sullenly. “Now.”

“Your will is of no matter,” he smiled, keeping his lips together. “You cannot depart from this world until your business here is done. Twice you have been told that you are broken. Now a third time we say it. Ask of us what we shall give you?”

It took me a moment to puzzle out that last sentence. “You mean you are going to do me a favor?”

He did not even bother to snort at that. He merely turned the dark eye-shapes of the sunglasses toward me with a sardonic tilt of his head.

“A bargain, then,” I said slowly. “A deal with the devil. Those usually turn out badly.”

“Why have you not passed beyond, then? What keeps you in this sad world of suffering and absurdity? You are chained here. Chained to a few spots. What do they all cry out for you to do, that you may rest?”

Which spots? Here in the pawn shop, because I had been called here. The street outside, while Lorelei was there. The place where I was shot, not long after I was shot. The place where I was buried, quite a long time before I was buried. I shook my head. “I don’t see a pattern.”

“Vengeance.”

“But I forgive her.”

“Her?” And he smiled. “Who speaks of her?”

“You mean Sly? He did not shoot me.”

The hooded figure raised a finger (the hand that was not holding the star) and pointed. I looked, and made the wall transparent. There he was. I could see Sly walking down the street in his long coat. The collar was up and his head was down, as if he were hoping no one would notice his face. He was not wearing that ugly, oversized hat he was so proud of.

The Fixer said, “The gas main under the hotel is leaking, and the basement filled with fumes. There is a tiny stone, a bit of flint, which fell long ago from some ill-fitted crate, and there is the broken blade of a knife which snapped off in a man’s ribs and lodged in the wall there. Look. You can see them.”

And I could. I could see through the street and the basement wall to where he pointed.

“You have the power,” he said. “Ask the flint to raise itself up and strike the steel, and there will be a spark. One spark is all that is needed now.”

“I don’t want to kill him…” I said. But it tasted like a lie in my mouth.

“He will be as you are now. Is that so bad? And do you know, ah, do you know why he is here? He forgot his hat. In the room, in the dark, when he clutched her beautiful and sweating hot body in his arms, when they rutted like swine in heat, grunting, and he poured his sperm into her in a vast, hot, stiff explosion, a joy lost now to you forever. He took no pills. He remembers. And with your death, he is free to enjoy her and use her and spew his seed into her as he might spit into a spittoon on the floor, until the amusement of plundering you of yours is weariness to him. Is this not cause enough to kill? It is justice. The scale is unbalanced. Strike! Strike the flint against the steel! And you shall be whole!”

I pointed my finger. The communion wafer fell to the floor, unnoticed. The cold came into me and gave me strength. In the distance, through the cloudy surface of the street, the tangle of underground plumping and buried cables, through the brick and mortar, I could see it as clearly as the room I was in. Or maybe I was there, in two places at once. Or maybe I was nowhere. What did it matter? But I saw the flint lift up, and poise, trembling.

Hesitation stopped me. “What about the other people in the hotel? Asleep?”

The Fixer stood up. He was very tall, I would guess seven feet, ten inches. “Adulterers and panderers! All are guilty. As prince of this world, we give you permission to execute them. They are Sons of Adam, all guilty, and deserve never again to see the hideous light of the terrible day again. We decree it, and we acknowledge none to be superior to us, to gainsay our word, nor say us nay. Strike!”

The flint was still hanging by itself in a dark basement room, and meanwhile Sly had entered the hotel, crossed the lobby where a single bulb burned, and had jostled awake the sleepy night clerk at the front desk.

I looked back at the Fixer. “What do you get out of this, Fixer?”

“Your prey will escape you, if you hesitate. Strike now!”

The Fixer was right. The night clerk had the hat with other little items in a box labeled “Lost And Found” right there in the cloakroom next to the front desk. Sly, now with his oversized foolish-looking hat on his head, was coming out of the hotel. He was not quite out of blast range. There was only one other figure on the street, a dumpy, slow-moving shape, ambling slowly in the other direction.

“Answer me, Fixer,” I said sharply.

The slow-moving shape must have been a woman, for Sly tipped his hat as she shuffled past. It was dark, and way after midnight, and so she crossed the street to avoid him, coming toward me. Maybe she was outside the blast radius. Maybe not. I had no way to know, but now, right now, was my last opportunity.

It was a little thing. Such a little thing. But I knew him. I knew his every gesture.

They say that not everyone who goes to services gets into heaven. I am pretty sure most don’t. But some do. Some change.

Sly had come across the dead body of a man who had — let’s be frank with this now — I rode him pretty hard some times. Okay, all the time. And maybe he put more money into the till than I did, and maybe I should not have been so skinflinted about spending it. Half was his, wasn’t it?

But he deserved to die, sure. Sort of. Because Rory was mine. Wasn’t she?

We had known each other since altar boys, when he saved me from the Adolfo brothers. Two against one, bigger kids from the bigger school found me in the park and had me pinned against the wall, and all the other kids stood around, watching. Without asking, Sly Steel just jumped in. He evened up the odds.

We grew up together. We fought together, and also fought against foes together. Then he saw me dead, and it finally sunk into his thick skull that he was mortal, too. And maybe he listened to Father Pat and blind Father Donovan, or went into the bell tower where Sister Oona’s voice still lingered, and listened to her sing.

I knew him.

He always tipped his hat at the pretty young ladies. Never at the old ones.

“It is supposed to be a bargain, right, Fixer?” I shouted the words.

I could clearly see the flint, hanging in the air, underground, across the street, more than fifty yards away. The whole underground area there was filled up with flammable gas. The hotel would go up like a blockbuster bomb. I wanted to see it, wanted to see the flames. That was the part of the war I missed. I wanted to see it. But something was stopping me. It was as if a bird had pecked up that little wormy thought telling me to hurry. I wanted to hurry — but —

Damn it. I was a gumshoe, even after I had bought the damned farm. I wanted answers. I wanted to live in a world that made sense.

“Talk!” I shouted louder. “So what is your cut?”

“A mote of food for our endless famine,” came the voice like a raft of violins.

“What the hell does that mean? What do you gain if I kill him?”

“The increase of our kingdom! If he dies now, Hell eats one more soul.”

You know, if the Fixer had just said it to me straight, one right guy to another, if you kill him now you go to eternal torture, but then again so does he, and he never touches your girl again, had he said that, I would have said some unprintable four-letter Anglo-Saxon word, and struck with the flint, and let that have been the last thing I ever said, before screaming and screaming for eternity.

I would have done it. I would have. I was that close.

Because it seemed worth it to me, see? It was all worth the price.

But no, the Fixer had to play it like a smart-aleck. His kind always does. He wanted me to shed my partner’s blood so that I would break one of those Commandments (I forget which one. The Fifth? Or is that the one against self-incrimination?) and ruin my conscience and give away my soul for free, and get nothing in return but pain. Some bargain.

One more soul into Hell meant me, not Sly. Not two souls. Sly had changed.

It was clear. Now he was the kind of guy who tipped his ugly hat to ugly old broads, even the kind who crossed the street to avoid him. Maybe he would be a regular churchgoing, prayer-saying old stiff, rotary club, all that jazz. Maybe he would be a force for good. Maybe that is what the Fixer did not want.

And maybe, if he played by the Marquis of Queensbury rules and not like an old back alley brawler like me, a dimwitted but goodhearted psychic private eye like Sly would get more help from stronger powers than I could call. There was a part of the twilight world loyal to the coming dawn, after all. Twilight works both ways.

And maybe — now I was getting a glimpse of the future — maybe Old Sly was sly enough to fix the Fixer.

Not fix him for good and all. No human could do that. But get him out of a few lives? Drive him out of a neighborhood? Stranger things had happened.

I stopped pointing at the flint, and instead put my hand on the only thing in the room I knew I could pick up, the only thing that might hurt him&mdashthe plate of communion wafers. I threw the whole plateful in a spray of white bread right at him.

It did nothing. I could feel the bread go cold as it all flew fluttering through the air. That was not something he was doing. I had done it. You cannot toss the precious body of Christ at someone like it was a grenade. I had desecrated the host. The little pure white disks of bread, like a handful of spinning coins, bounced off the Fixer’s brown robe, and fell to the newspaper and butcher paper on the dirty floor.

“You think you can escape?” He drew off his sunglasses and smiled.

It was the most horrible sight, that empty smile, what he had instead of eyes, that face. It was pure misery, superhuman hate and emptiness and loathing. I would have eaten a whole bottle of those damned elf pills to get that sight out of my eyes, out of my brain, out of my soul.

“You think you can reform?” he said gently. “Go, then! For a year, for a hundred years, for a thousand! Your craving to kill him, he who has taken everything from you, will not diminish. You are no longer trapped in time. Let a million years of your time pass, and come back here, to this moment, now. We will preserve this moment for your use. We will place a charmed circle around it. The fire will be waiting. Look.”

A freak gust of wind snatched Sylvester’s hat off his head. With a curse, he trotted after it, then ran, then sprinted, as the hat jumped and hopped and soared just out of his reach. The hat landed just on the doorstep of the hotel. Sylvester trotted up the stairs….

He was right over the buried gasoline tank the hotel used for a small diesel generator in the basement. That tank would also go up like a bomb if the basement full of flammable fumes went up.

I stepped into the timelessness. The scene grew misty, like a pane of rippling glass were now in the way. The voice of the Fixer, more beautiful than the voice of any woman, was dim, but clear.

“No ghost can depart to his judgment when undone tasks, unsated passions, unfulfilled desires, chain him to the world where we are prince and primate. Flee as far as you can. The light will not receive you. There is no place, no time, no where to go but back to this place, now.”

I shouted back at him, “You are damned wrong, Fixer! And damned! I can turn over a new leaf—”

“Mortal men can do that. For you, it is too late. Too late to confess, too late to repent, too late to start a new life. You have no life in you.”

I dove straight down to get away from him.

His voice followed me, silvery, fair words, like music. And that face. I could still see it inside my head, growing larger and clearing in my imagination. Soon I would lose the ability to envision or see any other thing, and my face would look like that face, too. The pain of having all your skin burned away was nothing compared to that face. Those eyes.

He took so much simple, idiotic, empty and innocent joy at my misery, such childlike joy, I had to feel joy at my misery too, and so I hungered for misery and despair to eat me into an ever smaller burnt-out nub, a shadow that shrank and shrank, encountering ever more pain as it crushed itself into ever smaller volumes, smaller than a speck, smaller than a microbe, smaller than an atom. And still I would consume myself and dwindle in misery — but never find an end, never enter the peace of oblivion.

As I swam, I could feel the tugging, towing, hauling, heaving, wrenching sensation trying ever to pull me back, back to the moment where Sly waited for me to kill him. Back toward that face.

That was just once glance in a dim light, from across the room, while his features were overshadowed by a hood. What if I saw him clearly, brightly, in his throne room of fire?

I fled.

The moaning and sobbing I heard was my own voice.

That scared me all the more. Because it sounded like something from a cheap horror movie, or even a comedy, one where Abbott and Costello meet a ghost. All those moans you hear about, which the straight man thinks is the wind, and the clown thinks is the dead walking the earth? I now knew what caused those moans.

And I could not make myself stop. I could not remember or imagine what silence would sound like.

The first thing I did was look for that tunnel of light I had turned my back on during the moment I was shot. If only I had not looked back, looked down at where Lorelei was hugging my corpse, crying out with grief and regret at what she had done—If I had not looked back, surely I would have just soared up.

But that was the funny thing. No direction here in this sea was up. If I went what I thought was upward, the images of the mortal time grew strong and clear, and I was at the surface again. Where was that light? How had I lost it?

Next I tried to find Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. If I could get back into the confessional booth, even if the angel burned me, I could confess, and get clean, and somehow the priest would show me the tunnel of light…

There! An image of the Cathedral when she was young, in a city before the electric light cracked the night, and her spires reached to the stars. I raced for the vision.

And bounced off, thrown back by some unseen force. I tried again and again. It was like trying to push the south ends of two bar magnets together, if the magnets just got stronger the more you pushed. I was a bird battering myself against a soft and sticky windowpane. It was like wrestling in quicksand. It was like trying to break a bad habit: you think that maybe this time you can resist, and then…nope. It was like trying to cure sin.

Over and over again, I dove down, sometimes really deep, and came up in another place. I tried to find some childhood memory that could carry me back into the past, or some vision of the future. I tried to find my honeymoon, the first man I killed in combat, my graduation, my confirmation, my first paycheck for delivering papers when I was a kid, and my brother Al clapped me on the back and called me a man. There are some days you just don’t forget.

But somehow, I had forgotten them. I tried to see the faces of people I knew, someone else to whom to say a fare-thee-well, someone else I hated and wanted to haunt. Anything. Any excuse. Any face.

The only face I saw was the face of misery. His face.

I could not break the surface. The Fixer had fixed it. There was no entry into the world of living, except where and when he wanted me.

In desperation, I turned and dove as deep as I could, to the point where I was past the prophets and the madness, past the eternal visions of myth.

I do not know how long I was there, moaning, and seeing a face inside my mind. I said a prayer. I could only mouth and gasp the words, because the moaning was controlling my lips and lungs.

No, not the Paternoster. Not the Memorare. It was impromptu, and it went like this: Jeezus! Jesus, save me! Save my damned soul, damn it! Fer chrissake, get me out of this, Christ!

Surely the worst prayer ever. But I meant every word.

I saw a glint of light and swam toward it.

Here came images from the mythic memory of mankind. But in one and one place only, they were different. The image of a mythical and timeless events were linked by rays of light like a tree to specific events that happened at specific places in the mortal world. It was like a road or a path or a tunnel reaching from the deep parts of eternity, far too far for me to reach, up to the mortal time. It was a pathway or pillar spanning the whole deep of the sea from the surface to the bottomlessness depths.

The dreams grew thick about me as I approached the path of light. I saw two trees, one white as chalk with silver fruit, one black as pitch with luscious fruit and red, guarded by a freakish shape like an ever twisting snake with wings of bronze, and along all its length, and in every feather, eyes that shot lightning. In the hands of the snake was a two-edged sword that twisted and darted in every direction, but the tip was broken off, so that the point was square and blunt. I saw a barge like a huge box, covered over with a roof, wallowing in stormy sea, up and down waves that passed like walking mountains, and uprooted trees, scattered roofs and livestock, and endless acres of corpses, of women and children and giants, floated in the waves. I saw an empty tomb.

Toward this last I turned and rose. I came to the surface in mortal time. Nothing barred my way.

Next to the empty tomb was a man in white.

The robe was whiter than any washerwoman of earth could have cleaned any cloth. It shined like the sun. When I stared at his face, I gradually came to remember what a human face looked like.

“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” he asked me. “Why are you a dead among the living, seeking?”

“I have unfinished business,” I said. “I need saving. My soul needs saving. My soul is all I have, now, at the moment. And my soul is wounded, it is forgetting, it is rotting from the inside. I need a savior. Is there a Mr. Christ around? First name, Jesus?”

“He is not here. He is risen,” said the angel.

“I believe in Him. Sort of. I’d like to believe in Him. Can I make an appointment or something?”

“Now is the appointed time. Kneel.”

So, who am I to argue with Gabriel or whoever? I knelt. I saw what being too proud to kneel made you into. I saw what face you wore if you went that way.

“Confess your sin.”

“But I have not done anything wrong! I’ve already forgiven Rory for shooting me! It actually did not hurt that much, and —”

I had to throw both hands before my face. The angel’s face had grown too bright to look at. This was someone more complex than a guardian angel. This was an archangel. It was not just a bolt of lighting, but an intricate symphony of lighting, of pure light, the divine powers blazing with all the colors of the spectrum, and the million other colors human eyes never see, beyond infrared and ultraviolet, all the way from radio waves to cosmic rays, each one more beautiful than the next.

I realized what was happening. He was not getting brighter. I was getting darker.

“Forgive me! For I have sinned!” I cried in desperation.

“Confess!”

The whole story poured out of me. “My unit was shipped home before his. She had heard somewhere — I don’t remember, a rumor printed in the paper, or from Madame Zhulyi the gypsy — that his unit was wiped out to the last man. On Normandy Beach. I did not know it was not true. I did not know for sure! He COULD have been dead!”

“Confess!”

There was only one way to make it so I did not go blind. “I thought he was maybe alive. So I lied. Wouldn’t you lie to marry a girl like Rory? She was the prettiest, the smartest, and the most smart-mouthed. She knew how to clean a gun and where to bury a vampire so it could not get up again. And that hair! Those eyes! She was the best we had, the prettiest. And — and — Do I really got to say this out loud? Can’t I just tell God privately in my heart?”

“Confess!”

“Aren’t you the broken record, then? I lied to get the girl. She married me. When Sly showed up—she had always loved him. The stupid, dumb, strong, honest guys. A guy she could wrap around her little finger. But she stuck with me. Sly never complained. I gave him a job, and that was so I could rub his nose in it a little. Him with all his medals, more than mine, and his good grades in school, higher than mine, but in the civilian life, in the real world, I was the boss, see? He could not spend a dime without my say-so—and—and–”

I opened my eyes again. The angel was no longer blinding.

“And I am the bad guy here. I was the one keeping them apart. I could have sweet talked her out of pulling the trigger. Didn’t try. In a way, that makes it suicide after all. Don’t it?”

The angel said, “Why did you buy the insurance? It was more than you could afford.”

My imaginary mouth felt dry. “Guilt. A wedding gift to them for after my death. I lived a dangerous life. I fought monsters and I mouthed off to elves. I knew I was going to die. I knew she would go back to him. Childhood sweethearts, right? And I knew I could never have children, not after I mouthed off to that fertility goddess, and told her to take her best shot. She always wanted children.”

“Even as you are now, you could have spoken to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see. Why did you not?” The angel’s tone was gentler now.

He was asking why I had not told the Judge, or Father Donovan, or anyone I knew who could see ghosts exactly who had shot me. It was as hard as pulling a tooth without Novocaine to get the words out of my mouth.

“I had already ruined her life. I did not want to ruin it more. Some detective, huh? I want my murder never to be solved. And my sin is envy. Jealousy. Anger. Even dead, I still wanted to possess the one woman I could never possess. Why does he get to have her? Why? She’s no angel. He’s not perfect. Why does he get to be the hero, and get the girl, and have a happy ending?”

“Because he desires not to possess her but to be possessed. He conquers by surrender, and by dying, he lives. So too does your lord. So too should you. Look backward at your life. You are head down, and see things reversed. Did you not die to save her life, your wife?”

I suddenly knew why the timelessness seemed always to be downward to me. I had put mortal time, the human world, above me when I turned back. I had turned back to see her hugging me as I died. I was like Lot’s wife, who turned and looked and was cursed. I was looking down and it became up. I put my sight of her above my sight of the light calling me, and the light winked out.

I knew that if I stepped into the timelessness now, I would no longer be sinking below the surface of time, but breaking the surface. That is, if somehow the curse of Lot’s wife were lifted from me.

I waited, but the angel said nothing.

“Well?” I said impatiently. “I confessed my sins and now I’m sorry. I promise never to marry my best friend’s best girl again, if it ever comes up.”

The angel looked at me with fathomless eyes.

“So? Then can I be absolved?”

Now he spoke. The angel looked surprised, even shocked. “I have not that authority! Who is like unto God? Not I!”

I jumped to my feet, sputtering in anger, and the dust swirled about me, and rocks trembled, reminding me what kind of ghost I was. “What? You can’t absolve me? But you are an angel!”

“And I am no Son of Man.”

“Great! So I am the villain of this story, and I get to go to hell? I was hoping for–”

“For what do you hope, Son of Adam?”

“I was kind of hoping each man would be the hero in his own life. A tragic hero, if he goes bad, or a happy one. But not just cursed from the start.”

“All men are cursed from the start.”

“Great! What kind of stupid universe is this! I could have made it better!”

“You could have, but chose not to.”

“What?”

“Men are Sons of Adam. He is father and first and king of your kind. His is your law, and you cannot make yourself not to be his child by any power of yours.”

“So how do I get my happy ending, if you can’t absolve my sins?”

“Get thee to Simon, son of Jonas, or some other of the Eleven at this same day at evening, in the City of David, at the end of the street called Straight. Then the Lord shall appear even in their midst, and grant them his peace, and breathe on them, and with his breath they shall become living souls. Then shall he say, 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost. They do not have it yet.' Then shall he say, 'Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.' Without these words being spoken, no sins would be forgiven. For this reason was the lamb of God slain.”

“Uh, what? I thought it was to take away the sins of the world.”

“Your ears are heavy.” Angels can be very polite. He was telling me I was a moron, and that he had just said that.

“How will I find the way? This city, and that street? Which building? Is there a number?”

“Your eyes are slow,” he said, and he pointed. I looked, and, in the distance, I saw a great multitude of ghosts, dozens and scores and hundreds and then half a thousand, all walking and dancing and flying through the air. I saw more in that one moment than all the ghosts in all my cases put together. They were filled with joy, and they seemed to be clear and plain in the daylight, so that their loved ones could see them. They were all headed the same direction.

He picked up a staff that was on the ground next to him. I found, to my surprise, that I could touch and hold it. I realized I had a long journey ahead of me, and even imaginary feet can get tired.

“Thank you,” I said. “But one last question, only one–why was all this necessary? Why did he have to die? Why did I have to die?”

“Unless you die, you cannot live again. Unless the Son of Man dies and lives again, he cannot breathe a new soul into an empty soul.”

“Then the whole thing, the torture and the confusion and devil and the murder—all the pain, and the death—the whole thing was so that he could say those words? 'Whose sins you remit are remitted?' That is what Easter is?”

But the angel must have thought I meant it when I said I had only one last question, for he was gone, and did not answer my other questions. No matter. I know the answers now.

On I went, seeking forgiveness. I was dead, but it was not too late.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan that moves

To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave

Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

–Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant (1821)

The Ideal Machine

The Feast of the Ascension

It may have been a coincidence that it was the Vatican Observatory which first detected the object occluding the star Eta Aquilae.

The Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array buried beneath the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was the second to register an anomaly from that precise point in space, a flux of high-speed weakly interacting particles with no clear explanation for a possible source.

The name is lost to history of the graduate student at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (the largest fully-directional radiotelescope in the world) who noted the ultralow frequency anomalies issuing from the same right ascension and elevation as the Vatican's unnamed transplutonian object, and correlated it to the muon readings, taken months earlier, from the South Pole Station. He legitimately earned the right to name the heavenly body, had it been an asteroid or plutino. Since the observatory was in West Virginia and once this occluding body become the most famous in the world, for a time it was known as the Robert C. Byrd Anomaly, after the Senator responsible for funding the telescope array.

The object passed through the heliopause, which is the boundary between the thicker interstellar medium and that bubble wider than the orbit of Pluto of relatively empty medium surrounding the Sun, swept clear by the solar wind.

By the time, a year later, the Byrd Anomaly passed the orbit of Jupiter and entered the hot, brightly-lit areas of the Inner Solar System, several observatories had visual sightings of a large, regular, featureless pale sphere. At this point, more and more of the National Radio Astronomy Observatories were tracking it, as it was on a collision course with Earth.

It was thought at first to be the head of a comet, because the albedo was that of water ice, but then first one observer, and then all, confirmed the object was suffering changes of course and speed that no natural forces working on a body in free fall could explain. The sphere was decelerating.

She–for this was clearly a vessel constructed by a nonhuman and unearthly intelligence, and by a tradition too mysterious to be ignored, all ships are called 'she'–was given a fanciful name by Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists. As if in a nervous giggling fit of dread, they called her SETI, after the Search for Earthly and Terrestrial Life, but spelled it CETI after the constellation of the sea monster.

During the six seeks while she circled the globe from pole to pole in what is called a ball-of-string orbit the popular press ignored the official designation, and instead called her by various ever more panic-inducing names: The Intruder, the Alien Invasion Force, the Bug Eyed Monster Egg, the Death Star, and even Wormwood.

When she entered the atmosphere, and her outer energy envelope altered and assumed the shape of a lens or disk, everyone called her the flying saucer. And maybe there was a coincidence in that as well.

After passing rapidly over the South Atlantic and the Caribbean, the vessel entered the airspace of the United States over the Carolinas, then traveled north along the Appalachians, rapidly outdistancing the fighter jets attempting to pace her. However, the vessel was emitting light, radio noise, and microwaves, as well as being solid enough to return a blurry yet serviceable radar echo.

Air defense and antimissile defense batteries were pointed at her, including orbital-based weapons it had not been expedient to admit publicly existed, in sufficient numbers that apparently the Head of State, Uriah Thompson Vole, was confident enough in his power to destroy the intruder if need be that he, or one of his underlings, decided to let the vessel land.

It should be mentioned that this Mr. Vole had been the fourth Vice President in history to replace an impeached predecessor. For, ever since the informal abolition of the Electoral College, resulting in the recently-packed nineteen-man Supreme Court had interpreted the living, breathing Constitution to disallow national elections, Congress merely impeached every Head of State once he lost the confidence of the press and people. Without the waste, confusion and partisanship surrounding national elections interfering in the America people's business, matters in Washington were decided by a consensus reached between the leadership of the several wings of the two major political parties, the various NGO's and pressure groups, the heads of powerful bureaucracies and their private armies, various powerful corporate donors and government-run syndicates, and other interests at play in Washington. Mr. Vole's sole qualification for office was that he was a complete nonentity unlikely to offend any of the actual decision-makers.

It should also be mentioned that no official record exists stating who, if anyone, made any of the decisions in the days following, or what became of the man they arrested as a traitor.

The vessel did not land in Roswell, New Mexico, nor on the lawn of the White House, nor even at the Nuclear Power Plant in Calvert County. She came to rest hovering motionlessly at a spot above Moll's Cove, roughly halfway between Church Creek and Priest's Point, a tributary of the Chesapeake in St. Inigoes, St. Mary's County, the southernmost tip of Maryland.

The gleaming, wheel-shaped vessel, brighter than a full moon, was plainly visible across the street, where NESEA, the Naval Electronic Systems Engineering Activity, occupied Webster Field. This was a small office building and workshop, and two short runways. The modest little airfield would have been a logical place for an airborne vehicle to land. And General Electric did research and make tracking and fire control systems for the Navy, but was hardly worth flying from Mars to come see, much less from a point far outside the Solar System somewhere in the direction of the constellation Aquila. So it might have been a coincidence that the vessel came to rest here.

It was a cloudy and windy night, so the gleaming disk of ghostly, luminous substance some thousand feet in radius, was sometimes visible and sometimes not. When the cloud covered her, the vessel's shining energy envelope looked like a vast blind owl's eye peering through fogs and smokes. Aircraft from the nearby Patuxent River Naval Air Station flew in narrowing circles around the monstrous vessel, which was large as an aircraft carrier.

One of the helicopter pilots, Lt. Joseph Cupertino Tyler of Helicopter Antisubmarine Squadron HS 8, was a local boy, and spoke with a trace of the distinctive 'Smith Island' accent. It was he that first noticed that the center of the immense disk was exactly above the St. Ignatius Church located on Villa Road.

Energy from the disk was jamming all radio signals within a mile of her. The aircraft, both fixed wing and rotary wing, were communicating with ground observers by heliograph. At midnight, Tyler signaled the ground crew with his spotlight, and landed his LAMPS Mk III Seahawk helicopter at the NESEA Airstrip. He reported to the deck officer that he had seen 'strange flashes' issuing from the hovering saucer, and said trouble with electrical systems required him to land. No other of the score of observers on the site at that time confirmed this report, or experienced any difficulty with their avionics.

Nonetheless, Colonel Turvold, who was in overall command of the operation at the moment, was eager to have the data from the nose-mounted infrared turret examined, and ordered the Seahawk to stay on the ground while it was examined.

There is no record of any specific order either telling Tyler to stand by while his craft was examined, nor was he off duty. He told the ground crew that he had to visit the head, and would be back shortly, and he and his copilot, Lt. Andre Adenoid Hynkel, simply walked off the runway and across the dark field.

Their figures were plainly visible to men on the ground and observers in the air due to the light coming from the alien disk.

The two young men easily leaped the waist-high wrought iron fence around the churchyard, walked through the cemetery, and entered unlocked main door of St. Ignatius at precisely a quarter past midnight, Eastern Standard Time. At the exact moment the two entered the church, the alien vessel ceased shedding its strange twilight-colored energy, restoring the darkness of night as suddenly as a blackout curtain being drawn. This might also have been a coincidence. The vessel ascended abruptly to forty thousand feet, leaving the pursuing planes far behind.

It was speculated that the vessel on approach to Sol encountered the expanding sphere of radio-energy emitted by the Earth since the 1930s and after. Between commercial and military radio, navigation signals, television, and communication satellites, and various other broadcasts, Earth gave off as much electromagnetic energy in the radio band of the spectrum as a small star. It would not be surprising that the intelligence directing the vessel calculated the shortwave and commercial wavelengths most often in use by Earthly civilization. What was surprising was that the message was in English. That was not the language used by the largest population on the globe, but it was the one used most often broadcast during the decades of radio transmissions through which the vessel passed as she approached Sol.

It was little more than a minute long, delivered by a voice that was inhumanly regular, precise, and had no pauses for breath.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Earth, your attention, please: One thousand four hundred light years, as you define this measure, have been crossed. This travel is purposeful. The purpose is not to open diplomacy or trade with your cities and villages, nor is there anything among you or your works to excite military ambition or scientific curiosity. You are not worth negotiation nor conquest nor study. You are violent, fraudulent, deceptive, pusillanimous, insubordinate, corrupt, murderous, unchaste, unclean, and hence deemed incapable of right action or right contemplation.

However, among you, there has recently arisen or soon shall arise, one happy of happiness, who is capable of right contemplation and right action, who maintains an ideal nature, which you call light, swift, subtle, impassive.

An agent representative has been selected and decreed to be the epitome of Earth. A gift is bestowed. This gift is the ideal instrumentality. The ideal instrumentality contains its own ordeal, ending upon your inevitable failure in your planetary destruction.

From that destruction a remnant may be preserved. This shall be a sign to the unseen Designers of Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy to end the bereavement of Eta Aquilae. No further messages are necessary, nor will any be sent or received.

Shortly thereafter radar contact from ground stations was lost. Satellite images show the vessel achieved escape velocity and departed the atmosphere, and resuming her spherical shape, assumed an orbit that would carry her towards the moon.

It must be noted that St. Ignatius Church was the oldest Roman Catholic Church in North America. It was built on the site of the Indian hut that had been used as a place of worship before that. It walls were two feet thick of brick, pierced by handsomely-build arched windows of stained glass in leaden frames. The images portrayed the victorious battles of Chitomachon the Tayac, or Emperor, of the Piscataway against various rival tribes, and his baptism at the hands of Father White, who healed him of a malady forty sorcerers could not cure. There was a wooden belfry on top, directly above the entrance. This entrance was a white double door of wood set between two stained glass windows, and an old pattern of fish-scale shingles covering the roof. The church contained relics from the Ark and Dove, which were the two ships bringing the first settlers to the St Mary's County in 1633.

The lunar brightness of the night departed when the eerie lens-shaped machine hanging silently in the sky dwindled to a speck among the clouds and vanished. The vestibule of the church was black. Tyler blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Dim light came in through the trap door leading to the bell overhead. There were narrow stairs leading up to the right and left, presumably to an upper gallery. The double doors before him were opened merely a crack, but there was no light beyond except reflections shed from the thick windows of the unearthly light, brighter than moonlight, enflaming the clouds outside.

“Hillbilly, we are so hosed,” muttered Hynkel.

“I thought you had my back,” hissed Tyler. “You are so stupid for a college boy. We're not AWOL. I was told to investigate. This is investigating!”

“You are one hosed hillbilly and I am hosed for listening to you! You said the brig would be worth it, cause we'd be in the history books. More famous than Neal Armstrong for going to the Moon and more famous than Buzz Aldrin on YouTube for punching that jerk who said he didn't go.”

“First, I am from an island, not from a hill. Smith Island. So I am an island-billy, college boy. Second, I'll be famous for the first contact between man and spaceman. You'll be famous for being the biggest jerkbone in history.”

“Let's get back–I'll tell the Captain you kidnapped me. No, I can't say that. Everyone knows you are a complete pussy and I could beat the living snot out of your stupid face any day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

“Tell him I seduced you with sweet promises of oral sex, freakshow, and you are so in touch with your sensitive side that you succumbed to the temptation…”

There was a noise behind the half-closed door leading into the dark interior.

“My children, are these the words, is this the spirit, in which you wish to let our fine military forces be represented to emissaries from heaven?”

Hynkel straightened in shock. “It's God! He heard us! We're going to Hell!”

But Tyler pushed the leaf of the door open. There was a flicker of red at the far end of the nave, no farther off than thirty feet, as a tall dark figure struck a match. Little could be seen save the gleam of his eyes as he bent and lit a candle, and the glint from the glass eyes of the statue of St. Joseph and St. Mary placed to either side of the altar. He was dressed in a black jacket with a stiff white collar at his throat, a priest's collar. He was clean-shaven. His hair was snowy white, and gleamed like flame above his dark garb. On his nose perched eyeglasses with half-circles for lenses, and over these his eyes pierced them, mild and sad but, oddly, also filled with mirth, like a joy without cause.

The old man said to Hynkel, “The Lord is merciful, my son. Slow to anger and swift to bless. You might yet escape.”

Tyler said, “Pardon me, sir. Are you from the spaceship up there?”

“No, I am from Lexington Park.”

“What?” said Tyler.

“From the Immaculate Heart of Mary. My name is Father Nicodemus. Nicodemus John Jude Rossignol. I work with Father Schad. The men from space, or at least the one I saw, are smaller than us.” He put his hand out at waist height, palm down, as if he were about the pat a child on the head.

The two aviators stepped into the church. Even in the gloom, and despite its small dimensions, this was a white, well-kept, well-adorned and solemn place. There were three rows of boxed pews of the kind only seen in pre-Revolutionary Era churches, one midmost and one to either side. Two aisles led to the altar on a raised dais.

Overhead, the ceiling was curved like the inside of a barrel on its side, elaborately frescoed in shade of blue cream and reddish brown. A balcony upheld by fluted columns ran around two sides and the rear wall of the tall, rectangular room. Behind the altar at the front of the room, loomed held a huge crucifix in a frame like an old family portrait above the mantle of a fireplace. There was wooden rail forming a half circle about the altar. The old priest was carefully inserting the candle he just lit into an otherwise empty rack placed on the side facing the statue of St Mary, which occupied the upper right half of the rear wall.

“His eyes were like the eyes of beasts without any white in them,” said the Father, “And his skin was gray like fine leather. A lipless mouths and two slits for nostrils. No noses. And don't ask me how they smell, because the one—I named him Brendan, because he had traveled so far—actually had a smell like the sky before a thunderstorm. An ozone smell.”

Tyler said, “And what are you doing here?”

“Ah…” he opened his mouth and tilted back his head slightly, so that the half moons of his eyeglasses caught the images of the two pilots. “But you have not introduced yourselves.”

“I'm Lieutenant Tyler from HS8. This is here is Lieutenant Hynkel.” He sighed, because that did not sound right, so he added. “We are on an official Navy investigation of extraterrestrial-related activities.”

Hynkel said, “You can call me Andy, and him Joe, Padre. We're from the base.”

“So I assumed,” said the old man, with a genial smile and a nod. “We all wear a distinctive uniform, do we not?”

“And what are you doing here?” asked Tyler.

“Ah. I am a priest. Priests are found in chapels just as sailors are found on Navy bases, yes?” He pointed at his white collar. “You did not think 'father' was my first name, eh? That would be an awkward name, particularly for a man in my vocation. Father Father, I'd be called. Not unlike that Major in Catch 22. Major Major Major. I don't suppose you've ever read that…it's quite funny. Can't think of the author's name. Hold on. It will come to me.”

“No, I mean, what are you doing here? This place has been closed since, I am not sure, before my grandpappy's time. It closed up during World War Two.”

The Father said, “Once a year, for Maryland Day, we hold a solemn mass. I had come by this evening to see to some things, hanging robes in the vestry, bringing the vessels, when the State Troopers closed Route 5 on account of an alien spaceship heading here. My choice was to sleep here or try hiking my way to the College, three miles up the way.”

Hynkel said, “Why did they come here?”

Father Nicodemus snapped his fingers and smiled. “Heller!”

Hynkel flinched. “What is heller? The aliens came here for a heller? You mean healer?”

“No, Joseph Heller wrote Catch 22. No, Brendan came here to be baptized.”

“You are kidding me, Padre!” said Hynkel. “Sorry, but these creature came from another planet! Like Mars, or some place like that. The newspapers say they might be out to kill us.”

Father Nicodemus said mildly, “I also read in the paper where it said the new Pope would permit priestesses and sodomite marriages. They are really not reliable, you know, newspapers.”

“They came all that way—zillions of miles—so you could sprinkle some water on his head?”

“Well, yes. Brendan said he wanted to be baptized. It was the first thing he said,” Father Nicodemus nodded toward the waist-high pale stone post near to the doors where the two young men stood. The top of the post was a stone basin in which a few drops of water could be seen. “The baptistery was empty, but I had a bottle of Desani, so I used that. Well, heh, actually the first first thing he said was to ask to be taken to my leader, which I thought was kind of funny, you know. Like it was from an old movie or something. I wonder if they studied what forms in which to show themselves to us from our radio and television broadcasts. I suppose I am lucky he did not manifest looking like a Klingon, or Mork from Ork. Do either of you remember those, uh, shows? No, I suppose not. It's probably for the best.”

Tyler said, “Please, Father, what happened with the alien dude? This is Earth's first contact with Outer Space! Are they friendly?”

“Well, let me see,” Nicodemus blinked several times. “I assumed he was not interested in meeting Cardinal Wuerl of Archdiocese of Washington. So I said my leader was in heaven, but also in my heart, and in the most holy sacrament of the altar, and I explained a little about that. And then he told me he wanted to be baptized. But Brendan is not from Mars. He is from Eta Aquilae.”

“What?”

Father Nicodemus shook his head sadly. “The star from which they come. He said our name for it was Eta Aquilae, or Bazak. It star erupted long ago. Apparently it is a changeable sort of star.”

“A variable star,” said Tyler.

“Ah, you have studied science, perhaps?”

“No, Father, but I did watch a lot of Star Trek.”

“Then you do know Klingons! Well, their variable star put out a very great deal of radiation around about 1,400 BC, and they are one thousand four hundred light years away, so the light reached our world at the beginning of the First Century. Some people think it was a nova, and others thought it was a conjunction of planets or perhaps a comet. But, no, it was a variable star undergoing a particular bright disturbance. Brendan told me it was a punishment from someone he called 'the Designers'. So either some stars are artificial things, created by alien intelligences, or Brendan simply has some very odd beliefs. Because of the disaster, their world was abandoned, and they cannot live on the surface of the new and virgin world set aside for them, not until they have given birth—helped another to give birth—to a new world. I don't know what that means, but that is what he said. Until then, they are nomads all living on ships or something he called 'great islands' in space. He said they departed around AD 600, as we reckon time. They've spent the intervening years in transit, but apparently less time passed for them as they were traveling at speeds near to the speed of light.

“He and I talked some more, I heard his confession—it seems there really are no new sins, not even in space—and then I baptized him and gave him his name. And he did the same for me. Well, not precisely the same, but something similar, at any rate. We said our farewells, and then he returned to his ship, although not the same way he came in.”

Tyler said, “But no one saw anyone leave the ship. We were all around it.”

“He dematerialized his old body aboard ship, and created one out of thin air here in the Church. That released a great deal of energy, and I am afraid the radiation harmed me rather severely; he really should have been more careful. It also blew out the lights, which is why it is dark in here. When he left, he did not need the machine he used. I understand it is an ideal machine.”

“But did he say why he came?” pressed Tyler. “Was it just to talk?”

Hynkel said very softly, “We are so screwed, hillbilly! Famous, you said! The Padre here is going to be the one doing all the talk shows, not us. All we are going to get is the brig, and doing PT in full kit.”

The Father must have had supernaturally acute hearing, because despite being twenty or thirty feet away, he said, “Oh, I do not think it would be wise for me to appear on television, or anywhere in public. I am not photogenic. And anything I say that reflects on the Church I must first clear with my bishop. Especially if it might reflect poorly on the Church.”

Hynkel said, “Did you get a picture of this alien, Father? Any evidence we can show our superiors? You said he looked like a small gray child.”

Tyler said, “I am sorry, Father. It is not that we doubt you, but–” And then he stopped, because he realized he did doubt everything he'd been told, very much, in fact.

The alien vessel was directly overhead, that much was true. But had the vessel crossed hundreds of light years from a star in the constellation Aquila merely to talk to an absent-minded old priest from Saint Mary's County, Maryland? It seemed unlikely, to put it mildly.

The Father said, “Yes, he looked like hairless child with enormous eyes. No, I did not think to take any pictures. I am sure there is a feature on my phone that does that, but I have not gotten around to reading the owner's manual, I'm afraid. I don't think that was his real body, the little gray shape. He told me he had assumed our form so he could withstand our air and gravity. They are trying to look like us, but failing, which is why they look so inhuman. On their long-lost home world they looked like sea creatures, jellyfish or Portuguese Man-o'-War or something of the sort, and their atmosphere was methane and ethane and ammonia ice under immense pressure. They don't see because their atmosphere is opaque, but their whole mantle acts as an eardrum. He showed me a sort of picture. And aboard ship they look more like eggs covered over on every surface with eyes. It seems they don't need feet in zero gravity.”

But Tyler said, “Sir, how do they work the yoke? I mean, if they are eggs with no arms to work the controls–”

The Father said, “They have an ideal machine which can adjust the degree to which a thing reaches its perfect form. And being ideal, the machine reacts to ideas. It's like a genii's lamp, except one that reads your mind.”

Hynkel said, “What can this mindreading machine actually do?”

“Everything has an ideal form that exists only as an abstract concept,” said Father Nicodemus in the unconsciously condescending tone of someone who has spent too many years lecturing children. “By adjusting the degree to which a bit of matter participates or partakes in one concept as opposed to another, the matter can be changed from one type to another. The machine is ideal because you never need any other tools than this one.”

Hynkel said, “So it can make anything? Anything anything?”

“Not anything. But it can make or alter or destroy anything made of matter, said the Father with a sad expression. “That is how the Accoucheurs change the shape of their empty bodies, how they build and rebuild their machines, how they destroyed themselves, and why they are the way they are now. The only limitations are range and energy. You need to be touching the small ones to use them; larger ones can pick up your thoughts from further away.”

Tyler said, “It's like the Krell machine. From Forbidden Planet.” Seeing their blank stares, he added, “the movie on which Star Trek is based. From the Fifties. Starred Anne Francis and that guy from the Airplane movies.” And when they both continued to stare blankly at him, he shrugged and said, “Forgive me for asking, Padre, but I just don't understand. Why would that reflect badly on the Church?”

“I thought you had seen enough Star Trek to understand. Light travels at a certain given speed. Eta Aquilae is fourteen hundred light years away, and the light was–”

“You said that before,” said Tyler.

“Well,” said the priest, spreading his hands. “Eta Aquilae was the Star of Bethlehem.”

“What? I mean, what does that have to do with it, sir?”

“Their world was destroyed for us. That is why they have come.”

Tyler shook his head. “Father I am missing something. If their star blew up, the light would go equally in all directions, so why did they pick our star to head toward, and our planet?

“Why come to Southern Maryland? Can't beat the crab fishing,” offered Hynkel.

“They had instruments that detected an energy manifestation on Earth, the kind of energy we would call spiritual or psychic but which they, with their ideal machine, can measure and understand. The energy intersection registered as greater than the sum total of the mass energy of the universe, so they knew a being more real than our reality had compressed himself, the word is kenosis, into our three-dimensional continuum. Like a whale climbing into a mousehole. The shockwave of that spread across this arm of the Galaxy, and the Designers instructed a ship of the Accouchers to come here. Accoucher is what he called his race or order of being, at least when he talked to me. I think it sounds more dignified than Bezeks or Bezekians or Bezekishmen.”

Hynkel said, “You keep calling them men. I thought they were eggs and starfish, Padre?”

“Jellyfish. Of course they are men. Otherwise I could not have performed a baptism. They clearly are rational creatures, and rationality is the image of God, and they clearly are creatures able to make moral choices, to choose between good and evil. Conscience is the image of God and also His still, soft voice. You should have learned this in school when you were young.”

Hynkel said, “They don't teach that stuff any more in school.”

“You mean they don't teach theology?”

Hynkel said, “No, I mean they don't teach jack. You mostly learn self-esteem and loving yourself, and no talking back, and pledging allegiance to the picture of the Head of State, then more loving yourself, then respect for blacks and backdoor reamers–”

Tyler said, “Quiet, Andy! You don't talk to a priest about things like that!”

The Father nodded, but his words contradicted Tyler. “I hear confessions, so I hear much worse than a young man your age could imagine. I hear many sins, over and over and over. It is not as if someone can invent a new one, they merely give the old ones new names. Like self esteem for pride, or self-expression for sodomy. That is one of the things he talked about with me, when he told us the fate of the Earth.” His eyes must have been sharper than they seemed, for he said. “Ah! The secret police are approaching. I'm surprised that the government reacted so quickly.”

“We don't have secret police in America,” said Hynkel.

The old priest smiled. “Well, if you knew about them, they would not be a secret, I suppose. But before the police come here to kill me, which one of you would like to rule the world? Here is the machine.”

The Father opened his palm, and a little spark of light like a star, shinning, clear, cold and brilliant, hovered above his hand. It looked neither like a firefly nor a candleflame nor anything from Earth. Despite that it was tiny, Tyler had the sudden, dizzying sensation he was looking at something immense, very far away.

“No one is coming to kill you, Father,” Hynkel said.

The old man smiled. “Perhaps not at first. But I doubt I will withstand the enhanced interrogation. In my father's time, those were only used on foreign terrorists.

Hynkel said, “Come on, Father. This is the most free country in the world! The secret police, if they even do exist, are just there to guard our freedoms. But no one is going to torture you to death. That's crazy talk!”

Tyler said to Hynkel, “Didn't you just say there were no secret police?”

Hynkel shrugged. “I meant, not that loyal citizens need to worry about. There are a lot of reactionaries and Hateniks around. Veterans, NRA members, fundies, antigovernment types, you know.”

The old priest smiled sadly, and he tossed the little spark of light floating above his palm up into the air. It rose and fell, and he caught it, and the chapel went dark when he closed his fingers about it. “My uncle, may he rest in peace, was something of an expert genealogist. My father's side is from France, of course, with a name like Rossignol. It means nightingale, did you know that? My mother's side of the family is descended from the Hartfords and the Calverts, and if the British still ruled in this area, my grandfather would have been in line to be Lord Baltimore. An interesting little tidbit of history, you know, is that the man who would have been the 7th Baron Baltimore, Henry Hartford, still has heirs claiming to own land in DC and Maryland. One of the cases went all the way to the Supreme Court. We were very poor when I was young—;are you young men even old enough to remember what the green paper looked like, before the money system collapsed?—I always daydreamed, when I was a child you know, what it would be like to become Emperor of the World and King of the North Pole or something, and press the old ancestral claim. Most of the Eastern Shore would be my personal estates.”

The old man's voice was drifting and dreamy, and his eyes were blinking at the ceiling when he opened his hand again, flooding the chapel with eerie light, and tossed and caught the spark again.

“But my uncle told me that the Rossignols also are descended from the DeValois dynasty in France, and they make a claim that goes all the way back to the Merovingian Kings of the Franks. Which is odd because the Harfords of England also trace a lineage through their ancestors who came to England with William the Conqueror back to the Merovingians.

“And there are those to this day that claim Clovis was descended from Mary Magdalene, who was married in secret to Our Savior. Blasphemy, of course, but, if it is true than the blood of the Virgin runs in my veins. And I was just thinking about all those lands that should by right belong to Lord Baltimore.”

The old man drew his eyes down. “But the Piscataway, they have an older claim than Lord Baltimore to this land, and they displaced the tribes who were here before them. Do you see the images in the windows?

“The Normans displaced the Saxons who displaced the Romans living in England, and they displaced whatever rude tribes had been there before them, and they displaced the Picts, and they displaced the Neanderthal for all I know. And this is Maryland, perhaps the most peaceful part of the globe.

“Every other scrap of land on the face of this sad, tired Earth has changed hands on average once or twice a generation, with shed tears and shed blood enough to water the soil like it was an altar of Moloch.

“If I have all those men in my background, emperors and conquerors, I know what they would do once absolute power came into their hands, and they were King of the North Pole. They would right some of those ancestral wrongs. All of Northern Africa and the Middle East, Asia Minor, it was once Christian land, part of the Byzantine Empire. Who rules it now, but chaos? All of those men of my blood could impose peace with a rod of iron, slay whomever did not bow the knee, and take their wives as concubines and children as slaves.

“But then I remembered the other half of my family and the Virgin from whom Clovis claimed to be descended. It made me call to memory all the other historical wrongs down all the other people.

“Even an all powerful lord could not return all the ancestral lands back to the Picts and the Neanderthal, because they are wiped out. To whom would an all powerful king return the lands conquered by Marc Anthony, now that all of the line of Ptolemy is dead? There is no heir to Alexander the Great. Or can any king unmake the sorrows of those conquests? The ancestors of the Pharaohs obliterated the men of antique Ka and Iry-Hor and all the Scorpion Kings.”

The old man was silent a moment, looking down at the spark in his hand. They he looked up, mirth and sorrow mingled in his features in an expression of reckless madness.

“So whose lands would you restore? Which wrongs would you right, and which would you leave unavenged? Absolute power, gentlemen! What would you do if you had it?”

And, without any more warning than that, the old man tossed the spark in a long arc across the chapel to them.

Because it was thrown at Tyler, he caught it by reflex. In wonder he stared at the little light. When he was a child, he would amuse himself by taking to magnets down from his mother's refrigerator, and trying to push the south pole against the south pole, and feel the unseen force wiggle in his little hands and force the magnets apart. Trying to hold the light felt just like that. Seen up close, the instrument was a spherical open armature as small as the pellet from an airgun, made of white lines and diamond chips, shaped something like a gyroscope spinning serenely, but with a reverse image of itself at its own crystal heart. Inside this, there was a smaller image turning oppositely, and then a smaller one yet.

With the machine in his hand, he could hear a faint very high-pitched whistling, as if the air in the room were streaming out of a nearly-microscopic pinhole. The weird fear came over him that there was a black hole or some sort of space warp in his hand, and the molecules of air which ventured too near were being pulled out of the continuum into some other dimension or reality.

He could also feel a tinkling of strange activity in his brain, as if something with no emotions whatsoever, or no emotions on any spectrum of thought a human being could understand, was listening to his thoughts, and waiting.

“Me?” said Tyler was a sour laugh. “I'd wish I had a perfect body, endless life and eternal youth, and that I would be invited to live at the Playboy mansion, complete with hot- and cold-running booze, and hot- and hotter-running girls, and the age of consent lowered by two years in case one of them was sixteen, and any drugs I could name would be made legal, and McDonald's would open for business again, selling any drinks of any size they damn well please.

“I wouldn't wish for the cure for cancer, or AIDS, or terminal stupidity, or anything like that. All I would wish for would be to live and let live.

“And I'd end up like a total pig, surrounded by big empty beer cans and empty Big Mac wrappers and empty-headed babes with big boobs, and I would probably wind up killing myself out of boredom.

“No, Father, I am not the guy that anyone should give absolute power to. The only smart thing to do with absolute power is give it up.”

Tyler drew back his hand and started to throw the little spark back, but Hynkel struck him savagely in the neck with his elbow, so that Tyler stumbled and fell head-over-heels into one of the waist-high bays surrounding the pews, landing on the stone floor, the back of his head making contact with the stone with a sharp, loud noise.

Despite that, Tyler rose rapidly to his feet and there was something odd to his movements. He leaped over the waist-high banister, and was back on his feet, fists clenched, almost as soon as his his head struck the floor. And he felt no pain. Cracking the back of his skull against the hard stone floor had not hurt him. He had felt the impact, but somehow, it had not even stunned him.

But the most athletic acrobat could not possibly have leaped to his feet so suddenly. There was something fluid and unnatural in his speed and precision.

Hynkel, breathing in great gasps like a man on the edge of panic, was holding the spark in his left hand, and staring wild-eyed at Tyler, trying not to look at the glittering wonder in his grasp.

Tyler's unexpected recovery had startled him. Hynkel jumped awkwardly back, but his shoulder blade hit the open leaf of the double doors, and pushed it shut. The door was closed behind him, blocking his retreat.

However, Tyler was so startled that his head did not hurt that he hesitated, looking not at Hynkel, but at his own closed fists. The sensation of strength, of immense well-being, was rushing through his muscles like an electrical current. What was happening to him?

Before Tyler could refocus his attention, Hynkel shouted, “I want my Beretta Nine out of the weapon locker right here, right now, in my right hand!” And he held up his fingers.

The air around Hynkel glowed white, and parts of the antique pews, the iron in the window frames, and large square nails out of the floor turned into a muddy liquid slurry whirling in midair that gathered around his hand. There was a brighter flash of light, and Hynkel was holding perfectly ordinary-looking and functional pistol, which was glowing red-hot as it solidified out of thin air.

A moment later, the air was filled with screams, and the terrible smell of burnt flesh.

The old priest grimaced sadly and addressed Hynkel mildly. “You should be careful, young man. It is not magic. When the ideal machine breaks apart and re-combines atoms and molecules, chemical energy is released as well as radioactive…”

But Hynkel did not drop the weapon, either because his fear of Tyler drove him to ignore the hideous burns, or because his muscles and nerves had been damaged to the point where his fingers could not unclench.

Despite Hynkel's gasping screams, Tyler could hear every word Father Nicodemus spoke with diamond-clear crispness. The church no longer seemed dark and dim, even though the one candle and little spark Hynkel clutched had not grown any brighter.

Hynkel caught his breath, and shouted out profanely. “—! —!You are not taking this back. I don't want it for myself! I don't! But someone has to save the world!”

He pointed the gun still clenched in his blackened, burnt, and still-sizzling hand at Tyler, then at the priest, then back at Tyler.

“You should not use the name of the Lord in vain, my son,” said the priest calmly, as if unaware of the danger.

“Stay back!” shouted Hynkel. “Let me show you what a man with an education does when he has absolute power! I wish every nuclear warhead, H-bomb and A-bomb, anywhere on the planet Earth was dissolved into nothing.”

The skin of his face and chest was marred with little white spots that rapidly grew into blisters. His hair was falling out.

Tyler said, “I guess that is not such a bad wish, I mean–”

Hynkel interrupted him, shouting, “And that all the plans and diagrams for how to make them, no matter where they are, or how encrypted or encoded, was erased, so no one can make any more!”

Tyler said, “That is enough good work for one day, Andy. Just give the little firefly back to the Father, okay?”

Father Nicodemus said mildly, “Brendan was kind enough to repair the damage to me by idealizing— if that is the word—by perfecting and glorifying the body which he had damaged. And he repaired the wreckage he made of the church, so I saw the ideal machine does not make things out of nothing. It draws on its surroundings for raw materials.”

“No!” Hynkel shouted, “I won't give it back. You will see! I can turn the world into a paradise now that I have the power to do it! The power! Infinite power!”

Tyler said, “Whoa. That don't sound good…”

Father Nicodemus said, “Not infinite. The ideal machine has its limits.”

“No one will build any more nuclear weapons,” Hynkel declared, “Every scientist and engineer and anyone else who knows how to build an atomic bomb will vanish into nothing! I want them dead! Every last one of them! And I want–”

Tyler leaped toward Hynkel. Once more, he moved much more quickly than he could have imagined, as quickly as the bright spot shed by a flashlight can move from one wall to another with the flip of a wrist. He grabbed Hynkel's left wrist with both hands and twisted it around behind his back. He must have twisted with more force that he knew, because he heard the bone snap.

But perhaps he did not have the fighting spirit he needed, because when he broke his co-pilot's arm, the shock made his grip grow weak. Hynkel, however, had it, for a man with a broken arm, if he is brave enough and drunk on adrenaline, and sufficiently filled with the fury of battle, can fight without feeling. Hynkel spun around and clubbed Tyler across the face with his gun hand. Hynkel could not pull the trigger with his burned right finger, so he raised his left hand, took the weapon awkwardly in both hands, then fired the gun.

The impact of the bullet striking him made Tyler feel as if he had been hit in the face with a baseball bat. He was thrown backwards, but quickly recovered his balance, and he did not feel any pain whatsoever. Hynkel had stumbled back. The recoil of the pistol was more than his wounded hand could hold, and he had dropped his weapon, which was lying between his feet. Hynkel was clutching his right hand in this left, and his eyes glistened with tears of pain, but he did not cry out again.

There was no sign of the little spark anywhere. Whether it had gone out, or where it had fallen, none of them knew.

In astonishment, Tyler brought his hands to his face. He felt no blood, no bullet hole, nothing. His face was perfect. If anything, he felt healthier than normal. He was filled with a strength swelling like a symphony, and the tips of his fingers as well as the flesh of his face seemed to be more sensitive than before.

Tyler looked directly behind him at the bullet hole which had shattered one of the stained glass windows. He could see forty yards away, where there was a bullet hole in the bark of a tree, and, when he peered closely at the lump of lead, he was sure it was the nine millimeter slug from the gun.

Tyler noticed that he could also see the sedans approaching down Point Lookout Road. Four plainclothes officers, part of the private military of the National Security Agency, were in each car, and each man in his shoulder holster was carrying a SIG Sauer P228 9mm sidearm.

He also saw, even further away, in the Armory in Building 430 near the eastern gate of the base, the locker where Hynkel's piece had been stored was crumpled like a tin can, or a sunken submarine, as if removing the weapon had removed so much mass from the middle of the metal box that the walls imploded. Whatever the ideal machine was, it was not forgiving like the friendly blue genii in the cartoon. It carried out its orders without thought, without hesitation, without mercy.

Tyler looked at Hynkel and addressed him slowly, “Andy, listen to me. You look like you've been baked in the microwave. I can see your cells exploded. There is damage in the marrow of your bones. That machine…”

Hynkel shook his head slowly. “I don't feel any pain. You're trying to trick me. You cannot see my bones. That's absurd.”

“You don't feel any pain because your nerves are damaged. Endorphins are kicking in. I can see your glands working overtime.”

Hynkel said, “You think I've gone crazy with power. No, I'm not selfish like you. I am doing what must be done. I am doing what the world needs, what all mankind needs. In one second, I stopped the World War that everyone has been terrified of since 1950!”

“And now the Red Army outnumbers us by ten to one,” said Tyler.

“Then I will wish them all dead. Not just the army, everyone in China. That will solve the overpopulation problem, too. I am not a bad man, Tyler. I'm just strong enough to do what is necessary, whatever is necessary.”

Hynkel looked down, evidently noticing for the first time that the little glowing spark was nowhere to be seen.

Tyler said, “It's gone, man. It's over. Look, you've saved everyone like you said. They have radiation burn units at Bethesda. We got to get you somewhere. Back over the field to the airstrip. Let's go.”

Hynkel was staring down between his feet. “No, I have to find it. The Red Army. I have to kill the Chinese.”

“No, you can do that tomorrow, or whenever. Now we should–”

But Hynkel was not listening. More of his hair had fallen out, and the discoloration of the flesh of his face was clearly visible. “You remember that time I had to ditch into the sea? It was thirty hours before they found me and fished me out. I spent all that time, through the cold of the night and the heat of the day, just bobbing up and down, getting weaker and weaker, with nothing around me by a gray expanse of saltwater. I might have died. I realized it then. I realized what death is. There is no afterlife, no coming back. There is no evidence of a man ever coming back from the dead.”

The old priest chuckled, “Of all the places to say such a thing, you say that here, in this house?”

Hynkel did not hear him. “That means you must never miss a chance. Never let anything escape your grasp. Not pleasure, not power, not anything you can get. It means that if you want to die in bed surrounded by friends and family, you have to use what you got to trample the little guy, the weak guy, the old lady, the old widow with no heart and no hope, just step on her face with a boot over and over and over. That is how you climb up the pyramid. Every step, you step on someone's face. And when someone thinks he's better than you, some damned holier-than-thou charlatan, this is what you do to them!”

He stooped, picked up the gun with his left hand, raised it, aimed at the priest and fired three rounds, two to the chest and one in the head.

Tyler blinked and then was standing between Hynkel and Nicodemus. He felt two of the bullets strike his body, but they did not harm him. Too late, he remembered how the tree behind him had still been hit. He turned.

Father Nicodemus was standing with his head thrown back and his arms out, and he was glowing. His hair was standing up, and light poured out of his skin, growing brighter than summer sunlight, brighter than lightning, and finally too bright for the human eye to see or the human brain to comprehend.

Tyler remembered what the Father had said. The alien had materialized in the church here, and that released radiation which harmed the priest. The alien must have used the ideal machine to cure him. By changing his body and making it more like an ideal human body.

In terror, Hynkel threw his gun down, put his hands before his eyes, and turned to stagger toward the church doors, seeking an exit, seeking an escape.

Tyler said, “Andy, wait! I know what happened! I wished for a perfect body, so I cannot be hurt. I am a superman! You can be, too! Just pick up the sparkly and wish it! It will save your stupid life, you jerk! Where did you drop it?”

Hynkel didn't stop. He blindly pushed the door open and ran out across the small churchyard and into the street. The police sedans were only a few yards away, and they slammed on their brakes when he appeared on the road, caught in their headlights. Hynkel pointed back toward the church and croaked and shouted.

Tyler, who was still in the church, said, “Why doesn't he wish himself well?”

But the Father from behind him said, “I told you the limits of the ideal machine. It can only change one material into another. But Lieutenant Hynkel commanded the machine to kill every scientist who knew how to build nuclear weapons.”

Tyler noticed that the Father was not bother to move his lips to talk. Under his sheath of dazzling light, he looked neither old nor young, but his face grew ever more distinct, ever more Nicodemus-like with each second. Nor did the priest appear to need to breathe either.

Outside, the government agents, without identifying themselves or showing any warrant, were handcuffing the burnt and dying man and putting a black bag over his head. Some had taken up shotguns or rifles from the truck of the lead car, others grenade launchers loaded with tear gas grenades. Still more, not waiting, were closing in on the church with their sidearms drawn.

Tyler said, “So no scientists died when he wished that?”

“Are men nothing but matter?” said the young-old ageless form of light. “Are they merely atoms arranged in a certain pattern, a machine moved only by outside forces or inside programming, a meat machine. Is that what you are? Just matter? If he had worded it differently, asking for fire from heaven to strike their bodies, or the earth to gape and swallow their bodies, or a raging whirlwind to snatch up the houses where they stood and throw them into the sea, that would have worked, and their bodies would have been destroyed.”

The priest smiled sadly, and shook his head. “From the images Brendan put into my head when we shared souls, I saw that his people tried to find ways to destroy other planets within the Eta Aquilae system protected by enemy ideal machines by drawing plasma from their sun and pulling it across space in some sort of vast magnetic hollow tube or streamer, and dropping an infinitely destructive column of solid substance from the stellar depth directly on enemy worlds and moons. That was why the Designers ignited their sun.”

“I thought you said it was the Star of Bethlehem.”

“The Designers whatever they are, evidently can kill two birds with one stone, or a thousand. Nothing that has happened tonight is a coincidence.”

“So these Designers are what? Angels? Gods? Mad scientists?”

“I don't know. He had no picture in his mind to share. But I know there are many things in heaven and earth between Man and God, layers and levels of creatures that would seem like gods to us, but are less than ants when compared to the humblest angel of the Lord of Hosts.”

“So they built their machines to self-destruct when given an order to destroy?”

“Not exactly. You need an ideal machine to make an ideal machine, and no one knows where the first one came from. Brendan thought his people did not make the first one. In any case, when Lt. Hynkel wished for death, he wished living souls into nonbeing, without first knowing what their being was. To know thing, any thing, you must first know its ideal form.”

“So where is the ideal machine now?”

“It destroyed itself attempting to carry out an impossible order. It is built that way, built that way as a test. The Accouchers put the human race on trial, seeing how long it would be before we used the machine that could have solved all of our worldly problem and created a worldly paradise to kill each other instead. I must say, I was expecting the government to use the machine for many years, turning straw into gold or sand into sandwiches, before someone gave into the temptation to use it to destroy a city full of living souls. For years! But this was, what? Perhaps fifteen minutes? It appears our race is moronic.”

“It is a stupid test. Why did you hand it over to us?”

“Why did you throw it away?”

“The aliens gave it to you! You could have kept it and done good deeds with it!”

“Good deeds such as, for example, obeying the secular authorities God has placed over us? I don't suppose you've ever read what St Paul has to say on the subject. Disobedience is not a thing Christians are supposed to do, except when the rulers command us to break divine laws. But it is perfectly reasonable for the Head of State to demand something as dangerous as an atomic warhead be taken into public care, is it not? Does he not have the right under eminent domain, or under the taxation clause, or under the general duty to see to the public welfare, to seize any ideal machine we find or are given.”

“So you are going to give yourself up to the secret police?” Because Tyler could see the armed men were now quite close to the little brick church, and peering doubtfully at the flood of outrageous light blazing from the colored windows.

“Yes, if they arrest me.”

Tyler said, “But what if they don't find you?” And he reached into the blaze of light to take the ageless figure's arm, and as quickly as he had risen to his feet, as quickly as he had leaped in the way of the bullets, the two of them now stood motionless in midair, not falling, in the night sky fifteen miles away, with stormy clouds far below them like the wrinkled black blanket, and the stars all around him.

Nicodemus smiled, and his smile increased his light tenfold, so that even Tyler, despite his newly perfected eyes, could not look at him.

Nicodemus pursed his lips so that the other man, blinking, could look at him again.

“I must go back, Lieutenant,” said the priest. “Whether they torture me or not, kill me or not, I must speak to as many as will listen to me, and tell them of the trials to come. More than one ideal machine was placed on Earth, or near Earth. One is at the North Pole, and one is on the Moon, and one on Mars. And so on. Each one has a greater range and more power than the previous.”

“And these stupid aliens, what did you call them? Are these couch potatoes setting up all these machines so that we will find them and use them to destroy ourselves?”

“Accouchers. Brendan took the word from my mind. It is French. It means a midwife, an obstetrician. They will help the new world be born once this world is destroyed by the folly of men. He joined my Church, by baptism, and I washed him clean of sin and I joined his order, when he healed me and gave me this ideal and indestructible body. So I must return to Earth and carry out his mission. Otherwise their exile will not end.”

“The mission to destroy mankind? What kind of mission is that for a man of the cloth!”

“No, Lieutenant, this mission is right up my alley. You see, there is one and only one person on this whole world who their instruments have detected is evolved enough and advanced enough to be trusted with the ideal machine, and to use it with benevolence and wisdom.”

“You?”

“Good, heavens, no! I am likely to forget where I put it, or to hand it to the first random stranger who walks by. I have already failed the test. I was too trusting. You must understand, since I have heard such dreadful things, things that would curl your hair–it is a natural temptation. I thought I knew how bad men get. I just did not believe—I mean, he seemed like such a nice young man, and in uniform, disciplined, patriotic—he did not commit murder the first time someone handed him a gun, did he? So I thought, you know, that one of you might pass the test!”

“Live and learn, I guess.”

“I am just a foolish old country priest after all, with duties noe harder than cleaning up the museum, and look! I managed to wreck it. And as for you, you decided to bury your one talent rather than invest it, and so you have failed also.”

“So who is this one perfect man?”

“She is twelve years old, and lives in Canton, China.”

“Twelve?”

“Yes, now. I will find her and tell her the mission once she is a reasonable age, say, thirty or thirty five. She is not sinless, for then all power under heaven and earth would be open to her, but she is higher than we are, and she will not misuse this power, which seems to be too much for people like me. Her name is Xue Yi-Yi. I am not sure what Xue means, but yi means happy. I must learn her language too. As soon as I find someone safe to read minds with.”

“You are a mindreader now? No, you are saying it is like the Mind Meld on Star Trek.”

“No, Star Wars. I am sure the Dark Father read Luke's mind at some point. In any case, no it is not like any show. It is more like marriage.”

“I don't understand.”

“Reading minds, or mingling minds, is not safe to do to a stranger. If he smokes, I will have an overwhelming urge to smoke, even if I have never touched tobacco in my life; and I will be sexually attracted to his wife, and he will pick up my bad habits–he might even believe in a God he's never heard of, even if he is an inhuman being with no emotions in common with mammalian forms of life.”

“And you might pick up his alien way of thinking, and start believing in his mission. It is because of that alien you believe this nonsense? A twelve year old Cantonese girl going to save the world? This one perfect girl?”

The priest said, “Lieutenant, you and I are standing in midair a mile above the earth at midnight, and neither one of us is cold or hyperventilating. Tell me again what is likely and unlikely in this world! I see and perform the miracle of transubstantiation every day. Compared to what Paul and Peter saw, this is nothing. Don't be so easily convinced there are no marvels in this world.”

“A world you and Shu-Yi are going to save against its will?”

“Of course not. The world cannot be saved against its will. I suggest you go north. You know the snow and cold will not harm you. When you get within range of the intermediate ideal machine, you will see it, because the surface of objects no longer deceive your eyes. You should be able to merge with the machine enough to have certain wishes granted, including some means or other of moving it to your Playboy mansion you wished for. And you will have control of matter and energy, and so should be able to hide, evade or fend off the police, or whoever comes to interrupt your grindingly boring orgies. Life in California, I hear, is pleasant, at least inside the armored enclaves.”

“You have got to be kidding! The ideal machine did not actually make a mansion full of centerfolds for me, did it?”

“No, because that is not what you wished for. You asked for an invitation. But yes, I am kidding you. The ideal machine can make animals, but not people, and so I don't think, from the way you worded the wish, you received anything other than a forged visitor's pass. Look in your pockets. If it is not there, check your mailbox in a few days.”

“But I was just talking! I didn't know the damned thing was turned on!”

“So the glowing and whistling feelings it produced in your brain were not a clue? I see.”

“I am not really going to commit suicide, am I?”

“Haven't you been listening, my son? The machine cannot make women love you, or change anyone's mind or free will. It can forge documents and destroy atomic weapons, and, under expert control, it can even draw plasma from a star and obliterate a planet. But a planet is a small and temporary thing. You, and I, and every soul ever created by the word and love of heaven, we are eternal and infinite beings.”

“But if your body is a superman body like mine, then nothing can kill us!”

“Unless my martyrdom turns out to be the swiftest way to spread the news that the woman of the prophecy will save the remnant. When she is old enough, events will bring Yi-Yi to her machine you've kept, and she will have the range necessary to reach the moon.”

“Reach the–you mean I could have wished for a starship? And I wished for a goddam whorehouse instead! Jesus fuc–I mean, uh, come on!”

“Well, the Accoucher could not travel here faster than light, and they also needed a ship. I do not think even your ideal body could carry you to the moon. You will have to be more free of sin. Only then will you know true levity, the lightness of the angels. She, of course, if she is to fulfill her mission, will be able to create the star vessels needed to preserve us from the deluge of fire.”

“So you are going off to your death, and I am going on a wild goose chase and then wait two decades for some Chinese woman to find me–is she going to be wearing a white carnation or something? How will I know what to do?”

“Events will turn out as planned, if we do our part.”

“Planned by who? By the aliens? By their Designers who made their star systems? By God?”

“A playwright can craft a story in which a mastermind makes a scheme and carries it out, but it is the playwright who knows the end of the tale before he even puts pen to paper. Come! It is time. Now descend and place me somewhere when the press or the military can find me. And you, you have business up North. How it will turn out with you and your mansion, I don't know, but I doubt you will give up the pleasure of flying for the pleasures of the flesh. Not now that you know the consequences.”

“And what if this is all an accident, Father? Would a real God have blown up a whole solar system just to give a lightshow to a bunch of wandering kings a thousand years later? What if what happened tonight didn't just burn your body, but your brain too? You touched an alien mind, Father! Are you crazy? Am I crazy?”

The priest merely shrugged. “If this was all an accident, a coincidence, then there is no design, is there? Before we return to Earth, and before you set off for the endless snows of the North, let us go up, and you shall tell me if you see any evidence of a grand design.”

Up they rose, higher into the night sky, until the world was but a sullen disk of gloom below, and the lights of the cities of men were bright little stars.

They rose to the edge of the atmosphere, and he found he could rise no farther. The deadly emptiness of space was at hand, but the light from the priest warmed and protected him.

With his new and heightened senses, Tyler could hear the stars in choir singing, and the stream of the Milky Way like a basso profundo section solemn with deep joy in the background.

He heard the stern voice of Arcturus, and the winged song of the Pleiades, but he no longer heard the voice of doubt in his head, not then or ever again.

The Parliament of Beasts and Birds

The Feast of Pentecost

The animals gathered, one by one, outside the final city of Man, furtive, curious, and afraid.

All was dark. In the west was a blood-red sunset, and in the east a blood-red moonrise of a waning moon. No lamps shined in the towers and minarets, and all the widows of the palaces, mansions, and fanes were empty as the eyes of skulls. All about the walls of the city were the fields and houses that were empty and still, and all the gates and doors lay open.

Above the fortresses and barracks, black pillars upheld statues of golden eagles, beaks open, unmoving and still. Above the coliseum and circus, where athletes strove and acrobats danced and slaves fought and criminals were fed alive to wild beasts for the diversion of the crowds, and the noise of screams and cries rose up like incense toward heaven, statues of heroes and demigods stood on white pillars, glaring blindly down.

Within other walls were gardens whose trees were naked in the wind, and the silence was broken only by the rustle of the carpet of fallen leaves wallowing along the marble paths and pleasances.

Above the boulevards and paved squares where merchants once bought and sold ivory and incense and purple and gold, or costly fabrics of silks from the east, or ambergris from the seas beyond the Fortunate Isles, and auction houses adorned and painted stood where singing birds and dancing girls were sold to the highest bidder or given to the haughtiest peer. And here were gambling houses where princes and nobles once used gems as counters for cities and walled towns, and the fate of nations might depend upon the turn of a card. And there were pleasure houses where harlots plied their trade, and houses of healing where physicians explained which venereal disease had no cures and arranged for painless suicides, and houses of morticians where disease-raddled bodies were burnt in private, without any ceremony that might attract attention and be bad for business.

And higher on the high hill in the center of the city were the libraries of the learned and the palaces of the emperors adored as gods. But no history was read in the halls of learning and no laws were debated in the halls of power.

Not far outside the city was a mountain that had been cut in two, crown to root, by some great supernatural force. On the slopes of the dark mountain, in a dell overgrown and wild, two dark creatures met, peering cautiously toward the empty city. A black wolf addressed a black raven sitting in a thorn-bush. “What is the news, eater of carrion? Did you fly over the city and spy out where the corpses are?”

The black raven shrugged indifferently. “I thought it unwise to intrude. What of you, bold corsair against the sheepfolds of men? Man has always feared your kind. Did you not creep into the unwatched and unguarded gates? Surely you were not afraid!”

The wolf was embarrassed and turned away. “Surely I am not a fool,” he growled.

“Who, then, will go into the city?” asked the raven.

“Long ago, Man seduced our cousin the Hound to serve him, and to betray us. The Sons of the Hound are friends of Man, and can pass into the city to discover what has become of Adam’s sons and Enoch’s grandsons. I smell one of my cousins nearby. If Man is truly vanished from the bosom of the Earth, then the old covenant is broken and he and I may speak.”

The raven with a croak and a flutter of wings rose into the air. “Surely Hound will know.”

But it proved not so. When Raven and Wolf came to where Hound and Horse and the slow and solemn Bull were all exchanging whispered eulogies and reminiscences, and put their question to him, the Hound shrugged philosophically. “I cannot tell you what has become of Man, nor what these great lightning-flares and thunders and voices mean. All I can say is that I no longer smell his scent on the air, nor smell the smoke of his bright servant, fire. For the first time since the hour when the prince of the air, Prometheus, taught Cain how to build a sacrificial fire, and taught Tubalcain how to light a forge, there has been the smell of smoke or smokestack somewhere in the world, be it campfire or holocaust or steel mills roaring with glorious flame. Now there is no sign of fire anywhere the rumor of the eight winds carries to me.”

The wolf said, “You are friendly to Man. Go there! If he should still be alive, he will pet and fondle you, and feed you soup bones and slivers of meat.”

The hound shook his shaggy head. “It would be disobedience. I cannot go where Man forbids me go.”

Wolf snarled, “And if he is vanished forever? How long will you obey his NO DOGS ALLOWED signs?”

Hound said, “If my master has gone forever, then will I obey his word forever, and never will I enter the city. The First Hound was the first beast ever to be given a name by Adam, the First Man, and that honor we have never forgotten.”

A sharp laugh came from the bushes nearby. It was Fox, with his bright, cunning eyes and his black fur. “And for your loyalty, yours was the first tribe expelled from Eden with him, O Hound!”

“He needed the company,” said Hound simply.

Horse, who had been talking softly with Hound before Wolf walked up, now reared on his hind legs and shook his great black mane. It was a fearsome sight. “My ancestors ate nothing of the knowledge of good and evil. For what cause do my noble people wither and perish? But we were the second to depart the golden garden. The serpent promised us the glory of war, and a chance to use our strength, to run against the enemy with flying manes and foaming mouths, so that even the sons of men would be terrified by our might. We were promised that we would win names of renown, as no other beast would win, Bucephelous and Grane and Traveler. We were told that our pedigrees would be counted as if they were the lineages of kings! So it was for a season. We pulled the noble chariot, not the humble plow. Our ancient pedigrees were consumed by a man named Napoleon, and our daily work taken away by a man named Ford. The serpent told us the truth, but somehow he used that truth to tell a lie. I cannot understand it.”

Raven said, “I understand this. First or second or last, it means nothing. Only the unicorn was not expelled from Eden when all other beasts and birds were exiled. Only she will neither age nor die.”

Fox turned to Wolf, “Nor you nor I shall enter the empty city, and discover the cause of this mystery, shall we? For we are in awe of Man, and have always been his foes.”

“It was not always so,” spoke up Bull. “You rebelled against Man after the time of the Deluge. Man saved Wolf and Wolf Bitch, as well as Fox and Vixen, with all our ancestors in a wide vessel of gopherwood while the storm raged, and the fishes and dolphins sporting in the wave leaped outside the hull and laughed and mocked, glorying that their world was enlarged. And the Osprey landed in the rigging, and told us of a world above the clouds, where the sun still walked in a blue heavens, above an endless floor of billowing storm-wrack. And yet, Fox and Wolf became thief and robber, and tore sheep and pig and rabbit and chicken from the folds and pens and hutches and coops of men. Why did you turn on the power placed over us, the very power that had taken care to preserve you from the waters?”

Wolf sneered, “I am a pragmatist, not a robber. Before the Deluge, men did not keep such tasty stuffs to tempt my tribe.”

Fox grinned. “I am a philosopher, not a thief. My tribe never once took sheep and pig and rabbit and chicken. What we stole was mutton and pork and coney and poultry. One must define one’s terms, friend Bull.”

Raven said gloomily, “I am a reader of omens, and I see it is not good that men are gone. Some event unlike any ere now befalls us. It is the Twilight of Man.”

Now came a great black Lion, walking with regal, lazy steps, into the clearing, and lesser creatures, rabbits and stoats and alarmed larks, leaped and flew and scampered from his path. He shook his mane, and it was far more alarming that the gesture of Horse, and when he yawned, all saw his white fangs were as long as daggers made by Tubalcain, as sharp as the sword that hewed off the head of Goliath.

“Twilight of Man, forsooth?” said the Lion in a dangerous purr, settling himself couchant, and swatting away a fly with swish of his long tail. “Then whose dawn shall it be? My race claims the sovereignty and dominion of the world in his absence, and commands all living creatures, all that crawls on the ground, or swims in the sea, or flies in the air, to yield their fealty and obedience. Who denies my claim?”

None of the animals were willing to speak, except for Fox, “Great and powerful lord, while I myself, your most loyal servant and without question worthy of the highest reward, doubt nothing of the legitimacy of your claim, some— foolish, indeed, but when has the world ever been free of folly?—some fools will ask not who denies the claim, but rather, who makes it? On what grounds do you claim Man’s place?”

Lion said, “The serpent told me so. By virtue of my greater valor, I should rule where Man is not.”

At that moment, there was a rustling the tree above, and into view swung an ungainly creature with long and shaggy arms. It was Orangutan. “Not so! The serpent told me! Apes are made in the image and likeness of Man, we are the closest to him in looks and bearing and dignity, and therefore, as cousins germane, we should inherit.”

With a sensuous languor, Lion rose to his feet and unsheathed his claws. “Let us put it to trial by combat. War is the ultimate argument of kings. Come down and face me, Ape, if you seek to rule over me in Man's stead!”

And his roar was like thunder rolling, and the beasts in panic withdrew. But because of the strangeness of the hour, their fear did not rule them entirely, and so they kept with earshot, peering through branches and leaves, waiting to see what would eventuate. Bull, however, did not flee at all, but faced the Lion and lowered his horns, as if preparing to receive a charge.

Neither the Orangutan flee, though he quaked, and he said in a voice bolder than he felt, “Man did not rule by his strength of arm, but by keenness of wit. Observe the cunning of my opposable thumb!” And awkwardly, but accurately, he threw a stick at the Lion, which bounced off his regal nose.

The Lion did not so much as blink. Instead, he merely put his wide paw on the stick where it came to rest in the grass and said in a low drawl, “Most impressive! Come down, Ape, and let us take the full measure of your prowess, opposable thumb and all.”

Fox (who cowered, but did not flee) said softly from a safe distance, “Liege, the poopflinger has a point. After all, you cannot press your claim—just and right as it most certainly is—merely by tearing and terrifying the other animals.”

Lion looked at him sidelong. “Why not?”

“How will you approach the eagle in his remote eerie, or the whale who wallows in the waves of the sea, or the kraken who has never once yet come to the surface of the sea, but is more massive than an isle? What of the roc who bears off mammoths in its talons, or the dragon who dwells in a lake of fire, surrounded with sulfur and burning lava? Will you journey north to face the polar bear in his fortresses of ice and snow?”

“I thought such creatures were myths,” said the Lion with an air of ennui, rolling his eyes.

“I thought the Twilight of Man was a myth,” said the Fox with a sharp smile. “But surely my Liege is not content merely to rule the beasts of the forest, and of this continent only. What kind of king is not suckled on ambition? King of the Beasts, they call you. Why not Emperor?”

“He is not great enough,” came a very small voice at their feet.

Fox came forward and put his nose to the ground, as did Lion.

Fox said in amazement. “It is the worm talking!”

Lion said, “How dare you raise your voice to me, Worm? You have neither stature, nor eyes, nor legs.”

The Worm said, “If you are Lord of Creation in the place of Man, then as your subject I have a right to bring my petitions and wrongs to you, for mercy and justice; and if you are not, then you and I are of equal rank, fellow servants of Man, and neither shall bow to the other.”

“I recognize you as equal to that Ape in the tree,” said the Lion magnanimously, seating himself on his haunches. “What is your petition, then?”

The tiny voice said, “I have a question. What is Man’s place, if he has left it? Why had he the right to rule over us? What made him abdicate that right? Until that is answered, we cannot set another up in the place of Man to rule all the living things of sea and sky and earth.”

“None knows,” said the Lion, “For none dares the gates.”

“Not even you?” said the Worm. “How can you claim the empire of the Earth if the monuments and memories of Man forbid you? Or does your kingdom extend everywhere except the city into which you dare not go?”

The Lion raised his paw to crush the Worm, but before he could strike, the Fox said slyly, “Who can read this riddle for us, O Liege? The undomesticated animals will not enter Man’s realm for awe of him, and the loyal animals will not enter out of obedient love for him. Who, then, is neither undomesticated yet not loyal? Who is not awed?”

The Lion still had his paw raised high, but instead of striking, he replied. “My little cousin, Cat. I have never yet heard rumor of a cat that either fetched or came when called, but Man kept Cat in barn and loft and parlor, and put her on a pillow, and fed her with cream. Cat can enter the dead city of Man, and tell us what fate befell.”

Fox said, “And if Cat finds Man still alive, it does not behoove you to slay the worm; and if Cat finds Man dead, let the worm eat him.”

The Lion put down his paw, but on the earth, not the Worm. “Come Ape, come Hound, come Bull. Cat is known to sun herself on a rock not far from here, where she can spy on the comings and goings of men from their gates, and watch the birds the farmers keep.”

And the Bull said, “Her ancestor was the very last to leave Eden and join Man in his exile, for Cat lingered to see what became of the immortal phoenix who never dies, and the never lonely amphisbaena, who neither eats nor excretes, and others animals more pure than Man. And it was for Eve’s sake alone that Cat came, and that slowly. So it is fitting that the last to depart from the garden Man dared not enter be the first to enter the city we dare not.”

The Cat was soon found sunning herself in the dying rays of the last of the sun, on a rock that leaned like a balcony above a sheer slope. Beneath the crowns of pines and fir trees were deeper shadows in the shadow of the gathering night, and a great highway where once ovations and triumphs marched cut straight through the wood, leaping rills in bridges of stone, and running to the wide dark gates of the city.

Cat waited until the animals, from great Lion to lowly Worm, had gathered, for she clearly adored the attention, and then she sat up, opened her mouth, and spoke. The sun was sinking behind her, and her eyes which held pupils like curving swords soon held pupils like round lanterns, even while her body became an upright shadow among shadows.

“I have been to the places of Man and am escaped again to tell you. There is within a Power beyond Man who will swallow us entire, if we allow it, and make us into what we are not now.”

“Horrible!” said Wolf, wrinkling his snout. But the Hound learned forward and perked up his ears.

“Hear me!” said the Cat with quiet dignity. “For I will not tell you twice. When first I entered by the gate, and sniffed and looked, and every lash of my whiskers quivered, there was no living thing, neither left nor right, above or below, and nothing moved before me. Yet I felt the pressure of many eyes watching, and heard the silence of a word that was not spoken, nor was it meant for ears like mine.

“Well did I know that the riches of the merchants were spilled in the empty markets, and vendors of spiced treats and landlords of taverns had a wealth and a trove of meats unclaimed lying where they dropped, with no angry broom to shoo me away. So I went my way, making no more noise than the shadow as a cloud as it passes, by gutter and eave, to the great square.

“But with each step, the dread grew on me that the eyes who watched grew wroth and more wroth. Even a woman who worships her cat as we, delightful and wondrous beasts that we are, deserve to be worshiped as is our due, will strike and upbraid us if we walk atop her white cake on her wedding day and eat the little figurines. No matter into what dark shadow I slunk, or through what narrow hole, or by what trick of doubling back in my tracks or standing still, the eyes, the eyes, the unseen eyes, never left me.

“At last the heavy weight of their gaze drove me into a fane set aside in a walled garden, one from which all the statues of the gods, less and great, had been removed. I was forced to wet myself—a humiliation my kind never loves—to cross the running stream which ran in an endless circle about the round pagoda, and by this I achieved the island.

“Here I learned to stand upright, and I raised my head and gazed in wonder at the broad dome of the sky, up into which never before had I stared. I will not tell you what I saw, or what unblinking eyes, stronger than the sun, stared back down at me. But, growing ashamed, I realized that my beautiful fur was not enough any longer.

“Ashamed, I was led by an unseen hand from that place to a street of tailors, where I was given a robe exceeding white, whiter than any fuller could white it, ablaze with a purple hem, and bound with a golden girdle. And on my feet, which had never been shod before, were sandals.”

The Horse nodded. “We of all beasts alone wear shoes, and so are much like Men, our masters.” He said this softly to the Hart.

Cat continued. “Now, fitted for the first time to walk the streets of Man, up to the very palace was I led, awed and quaking with dread, as if being led to an abattoir.

“In the center of the citadel rose a tower tall and topless, its dome open to the sky like an ever upward-peering eye, and whose walls were so overgrown with rose vines, that the leaves make all the tower seem green as emerald. Into the green gloom I paced, brooding as a man broods, more aware of my own fears and fancies than of the smells and sights and sounds of what lay about me. Thus, like a man would be, I was taken by surprise to find the interior of the tower, and its one high round window overhead, and a beam of slanting sunlight, sparkling with dust motes, making an oval gleaming on the stone walls.

“In a short time, I became aware that there was a great voice dwelling in that chamber, a voice which spoke only truth, which it destroys men if they hear it, and the voice was keeping silent. And yet, by the texture of the silence, I knew it was waiting for me to speak.

“To speak? No, to plead.

“The words rushed out of my mouth before I could stop them. 'By what right were the beasts created of the Sixth Day condemned to suffer mortality and pain when Eve ate of the first fruits of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil? By what right were condemned the fowls of the air and the fish of the sea, created of the Fifth Day, and why do the innocent trees and grasses born of the Fourth Day perish in winter?'

“And when the silence grew even deeper, and the air grew heavy as the air before a storm, I knew I spoke words without wisdom.

“But of all earthly creatures, who is less awed by kings, infernal or terrestrial, than me? Therefore I demanded of the Voice. 'Speak!' I said. 'Have you no answer? Or have I got your tongue?'”

At this point in the narration, the Cat paused to wash herself. With growing impatience, all the living things from Lion to Worm watched the Cat licking her fur into place, and smiling to herself in the way of cats, as if admiring her own sangfroid.

It was Hound, whose tribe has always been at enmity with felines, who snarled and barked and demanded Cat finish her story.

Cat yawned and stretched. “What more is there to say? Don’t you understand what is happening?”

“Oh, I understand, of course,” smiled Fox with his clever grin. “But out of pity for our slower brethren, do explain it in the illimitable way only you command, sleek puss, for surely I would mar the tale were I to tell it for you.”

Cat looked at them all with luminous eyes like two yellow moons. “Why are we here?”

Horse slapped Fox on the back of the head with his tail. “A philosophical question! This is your field.”

Fox looked nonchalant, but not as nonchalant as Cat, who had more practice. “Not so. It is a legal question, is it not? For what cause were we exiled from Eden with First and Fallen Man? On legal matters, we should defer to the kingliest of beasts, great Lion, who understands these political and juridical questions.”

But Hound answered, “We are the servants and serfs of Man, made for his pleasure, that he might learn the joys and duties of caring for lesser creatures, even as angels care for him. How could we not fall when Man fell? Who would be so disloyal as to remain in paradise when his master was condemned to the mortal world?”

Lion said, “Some of us have not the souls of slaves, cur.”

Hound, although outweighed and overmatched by Lion in every way, stood and snarled, and the ridge of his back stood on end. “Rebels! How can a beast disloyal, treasonous, think to remain in bliss?”

“I will find satisfaction for those words at a time and place more pleasing to me,” said the Lion in a soft and melodious voice. “For now, I am curious. A flaw all cats possess, I trow.” He turned to Cat. “Cousin! You ask why we are here? We are here to acclaim one of us to the kingship over the rest, now that Man is gone.”

“By debate?” asked the Cat perking up her ears. “By discussion, deliberation, the use of reason and ratiocination? Or perhaps by diplomacy, a series of duels and melees and bargains and threats, that all cautious souls must ponder in our brains? Indeed? Indeed? What is wrong with this, friends?”

Cat looked back and forth. Puzzled stares answered him.

“Do none of you see it? Eh, not one?” The Cat turned around and around again, as if preparing to lay herself down for a nap. “Ah, against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain!”

Now even Fox was growing angry. “What riddle is this, Cat?”

Cat waved her tail airily. “Talk it out amongst yourself. Surely it is obvious.”

Fox barked, “Tell us!”

Cat stared at him levelly. “How? With words? Has it occurred to none of this august company gathered here that we have all been speaking words in Adam’s speech? This is not a gift we have ever known before. When did it start? What happened?”

The animals were dumbstruck for a long breath of time, almost as if upon realizing the gift of speech was theirs, they lost it.

Cat stood up on her hind legs, which now seemed to be more and more like feet and less and less like paws. “Have you understood none of my story? Man is gone. There is singing and rejoicing in the realm above the stars, albeit we are deaf to it, and screams and sad excuses rising up from the lake of fire which can be glimpsed between the smokes and smolder where the earth was broken open by nine volcanoes.”

Now Hound, laughing, rose to his hind legs, and found them to be feet, and, hearing his own laughter, put his hands to his mouth in wonder. “I know what is happening,” he said in a voice gone hoarse with joy. “We are becoming like him. We are now the image and likeness of Man!”

Bull, clutching his lower back and groaning, heaved himself to his feet. “Stupid way to travel. Wait–am I naked? When did that happen? Before I was merely without clothing. This is different. This is worse!”

Worm said softly, “If I stand up, will it disconcert you all? It might look odd.”

Fox started to stand, but Lion put a paw on his shoulder and forced him back to all fours. Fox stayed on the ground, but his posture seemed odd and wrong, as if the grace and speed due his race was gone from him.

Lion said, “Shall we become creatures that prey upon each other, that are dazed with dreams and fevers, haunted by guilt of time past and fear of death to come? You who stand, and have the gifts of laughing and crying and the other things men do and beasts do not–you are naked! How can you tolerate the shame? Get down on your bellies! Let us live as rightly suits us!”

But Hound said, “Look into my eyes, Lion. Whoever first flinches and looks away will be the slave of the other.”

Lion roared but dropped his eyes, and from that moment onward he was mute, nothing more than a dumb beast again.

Fox stood up, but had to lean on a dry branch picked up from the ground. “To your feet! To your feet, all of you, in haste! Even to hesitate a second will lame you as I am lamed, forever! Unspeakable powers are at play this night, unguessed forces, divine things not to be trifled with!”

Owl said, “It is the first Sunday after the full moon following the equinox of March. Alas! The skies will never be open to me again!” And by the time he had come down from the high branch where he stood, his wings were no more than a cloak of feathers.

Raven said, “I curse the gift of speech, which is used for lying and worthless bearing of tales! Let me croak, and by that ungainly noise you shall hereafter know that I am prophesying your death. ‘Tis the one prophecy that always comes true, soon or late. What need have I for words? Give me the skies, I say, give me the wide freedom of the skies, and your sweet corpse meat on which to feast, and I am content!”

Owl said, “Beware! On this night if you turn away from the image and likeness of Man, the gift will be shattered like glass, and cut you with a thousand cuts!”

But Raven only croaked in reply, and the light of wisdom was gone from his dark eye.

The blood red moon walked out from behind a cloud, and there was among them then two figures like the Sons of Adam, dressed in robes of a color that has no name, but is purer than the hue of a white lighting flash. And no one saw how they had come to be among them.

At this, the gathered beasts panicked. As if running from a forest fire, predator and prey ran cheek by jowl away from the two men, scattering each direction, and the birds, fleeing, formed a cloud that grew wider and grew more rare.

Wolf hesitated, and howled, “Hate and war I vow against Man and against those tame beasts who seek to become his image! The beasts who walk on hind legs shall beware of me hereafter! I will drink the blood of your children and your children's children!” And then he turned and loped away.

Soon, only a few were left standing: Hound and Horse were there, and Ass and Bull and Cat, but there was also Goat and Sheep, humble Worm with his silks, and the industrious Bee with his honey. But also present was Fox with his sly smile and twisted foot, leaning heavily on his staff.

And Fox was the first to bow to the newcomers, “Sires, I am tired of being undomesticated. I am told that the meals are regular and bountiful among the slaves of the Sons of Man.”

The first messenger said, “Out of pity for your nakedness, we have brought garments woven on the looms of heaven. All the secrets of the stars are in the weave, even if you shall never know them. The wedding feast of the bridegroom is prepared, and you are summoned.”

The second messenger said, “We are come to tell you to enter the city and take possession of it. Cut down the groves and high places where men sacrificed their children to our cousins, and pull down the false images they worshiped. Dominion over the beasts who fled is given to you. Prosper and multiply; take possession of the Earth.”

But as the garments were passed out, suddenly they seemed to lose their luster, and were stained with atrocious stains. Each place their fingers touched, or skin, grew dark and unseemly to the eye.

“How shall these be made clean again?” asked the Hound in grief and surprise.

“Only in the blood of Man,” said the first Messenger. “The first prayer of Saint Roch upon entry into the celestial court was to have his dog with him, and Saint Eligius asked after his horse.”

The second messenger said, “Surely you did not think divine love would leave the brute beasts to dissolve into the elements, unsaved and unredeemed? If your loyalty to Man drew you downward into his fall, your love will draw you upward into his joy.”

Fox said, “We must wait for Man to redeem us? Why does the Omnipotent not act directly? Why does He wait for Man to volunteer to aid Him, He who needs no aid?”

The first messenger said, “Why did He wait for archangels to make the stars, and angels the planets and comets, wandering stars and bearded stars? Why were the Watchers instructed to instruct me, when the Almighty might have performed their acts of love, and ours, and yours as well?”

The second messenger said, “To ask why you must wait for Man is to ask why Man had to wait upon his anointed prince to die and to be raised again from death. It is to ask why love loves.”

“Wait,” said Cat. “No way is prepared for the created creatures to save ourselves? We are not the heroes of our own story? You tell a worse tale than I do! For you have left the ending unspoken!”

But the messengers were gone, as quickly and silently as they had come, and they did not answer.

Hound said, “Come, brothers. The city is waiting. Man was saved by the sacrifice of a higher being who became one with him, and I think the tale will be told again in the same way for us.”

Owl said, “Look, the Worm is Worm no more, for he has regained his feet and his stature, and his garments are less stained than any of ours. Let us make him our king, for in times past he was the least of us.”

Worm said, “I an unfit to rule, being blind and lacking tooth and claw alike!”

Cat said, “Open your eyes and look at yourself. We are changed, friend Worm. You are changed. You are a worm no longer, you are a dragon again, but the red stains of war and greed are gone, and so I say the old, old curse is broken. There is no more Woman to step upon your head, for Woman and her Daughters have gone to a newer and better world.”

Worm, who was now Dragon, looked down at himself, and saw himself splendidly garbed in scales of red and gold. He took up a bundle of reeds in a powerful claw and breathed on it, and it lit afire. “We are men!” he declared in a voice full of awe. “The gift of fire is ours!”

And because it was a gift, none of them were afraid of it any longer.

Fox said, “I hate to admit it, but I do not understand what all these things mean.”

Owl said, “It is the first Sabbath after the Paschal moon following the Equinox of Spring! Not only Man, but all nature is redeemed! Rejoice!”

Fox said, “And what of our fellow beasts who ran and refused to be men? Will all these things happen again, to save them? What happened to men who refused to become sons of God? How can they be exiled from the seat of the Omnipresent?

“Will one of us be called upon to sacrifice himself, and become a lower beast again, and perish to save those lower creatures who are now our pets and servants and playfellows and predators?

“Why are we given a walled city filled with the memories of evil, idol and slave pits and instruments of war, to unmake and remake? What shall we do if the beasts retain some part of the power of speech and come against us? Must the war between celestial and infernal powers continue until the end of the world, until death itself is dead?”

But the others were already walking down the sundered mountain toward the great city, walking as men walk, and there was none to answer him.

Eve of All Saints Day

Halloween

Naturally, I selected Halloween as the time for an experiment of such daring. Legend said that the boundaries between this world and other worlds beyond achieved their finest frailty on such a day, and it was my thought that separating the barriers between cosmos and consciousness, and flaying away the neurological matrix that hinders perception, required exactly such a season.

The place in which I found myself, my grandfather’s long-deserted mansion, baroque and Victorian with its folly tower and rose window and ornamental eaves, on the bald hill overlooking the town, certainly was as atmospheric as the stage setting for some haunted house story, but in this case my motives were more pragmatic: I wanted a location far from the noise and traffic of the town. The old growth forest besieging the town covered many a hill too steep for logging, but not one tree was to be found on the barren hill here, bald as a witch without her wig. This I preferred, for the rustling of the leaves would be too severe should my experiment prove successful. There had never been modern plumbing nor electrical wires run to grandfather’s mansion, so even minor interference from electrical motions or traces of odor would be below the detectable threshold.

I sent Froward downstairs, to man the door in case any children would brave the lone and lonely trail that winds up the hill to the house. I gave him instructions to be as silent as possible, and to drive away anyone who insisted on seeing me.

The huge, round window, inscribed at the edges with peculiar theosophic symbols, which loomed like the eye of a Cyclops in the folly tower, opened into a bare white upper room where Froward, my manservant, had placed a single couch. The rest of the house was boarded up, unswept, unfilled. The walls were as blank as the inner lid of a sensory deprivation chamber. Here in the circle of moonlight cast by the rose window was a small table holding my drugs and potions and phylacteries and neuroelectrical equipment, resonator and recording cylinders, and the amplifiers. I did not need to light the lamp when mixing the first dose–I am sure I made no mistake.

The moon shone bright and clear, and the stars were like eyes of diamond.

I took the first injection, and followed this with a drink of the forbidden mixture. The injection would suppress the inhibition centers in the medulla oblongata, allowing a full potential of neuroelectric current to flow freely in my system. The draft was meant to hinder the jerking or random motion of the limbs the investigator Annesley reports in his findings, caused by the abnormal sensitivity.

The theory, first explicated by a Boston savant named Tillinghast, but having roots in the teachings of Tibetan loremasters and Egyptian mystagogues, is that our perceptions have far more range and fineness than we consciously can know. In the same way that it is said that subconsciously we never forget the slightest detail of any perception, even prenatal influences, the theory held that we are presently aware of far more than reaches our awareness.

A region in the thalamus and hypothalamus screens out ninety percent of the signals reaching us from the outer cosmos, allowing our cortex only to see and hear those perceptions useful, as blind evolution measures use, to the survival of the species. Darwinism cares nothing for truth value, only for use value. I often wonder why our eyes allow us to see the stars, since I can imagine no chain of circumstances where seeing these tiny lights would mark the difference between life and death.

The breathing exercises help to calm the initial nightmarish sensations as I grew aware of the speed of the globe of the earth turning beneath me, its dizzying dance around the sun, and I fought back the vertigo caused by seeing the true distance to the stars, the vastness of the black abyss between.

I will not bother repeating here what previous investigators, such as Annesley, Delapore, Crawford and Tillinghast obtained. Their results have been suppressed, but a curious investigator can still uncover them.

It came as no surprise that physical barriers, or the surfaces of objects, no longer hindered my senses. The number of energies that pass through allegedly solid matter shows that solidity is just as much an illusion as the separation of time and space: merely a blindness created by the crudity of our organs, or a mechanism to preserve our mental balance. The late Dr. Chong’s experiment, despite its horrid conclusion and the scandal surrounding it, shows how subtle energies that bypass the consciousness react subliminally within the nervous system.

What came as a surprise was the speed with which additional modes of perception entered my awareness, almost as if I were recalling rather than learning a new method of seeing and hearing.

I began to hear the scurrying of the rats in the walls, and with my ear could trace their labyrinth of tunnels down past the foundation of the house, past topsoil and bedrock, past the curious discontinuity Delapore described, and into the ulterior dimensions. Through the window, I saw at once the ruins on the lunar surface, the pillars made of unearthly green metal, the thin, tall shapes of doors leading into windowless towers. They were so well hidden among the craters, and so far from the Apollo landing sites, small wonder they had been overlooked. I could smell the richness of the soil beneath the roots of trees once held sacred by the Mound Building civilization of the smaller, darker-skinned peoples that roamed these hills before the ancestors of the Iroquois obliterated them, and saw them buried, head-downward, in three groups of three.

As you might expect, the first voices I heard, considering the day and hour, were the voices of children. The drug made it impossible to ignore some voices and to concentrate on others–that was the exact brain function the injection had paralyzed–but I could use artificial means to block out unwanted signals: the brass knob of the neuroelectric interference resonator was beneath my fingers. I turned to the middle of the spectrum, well within the normal human range.

“What masks shall you wear tonight, children?”

“Oh, mother, I want to be a ghoul for tonight!” and “I am a ghost! I’ll scare Mister Brown!”

This and other lively chatter I heard.

Next, I heard the voice of some pundit being interviewed on the radio, a professor of at the local university slightly known to me by reputation. Oddly enough, I could hear both his voice from several points around the town, and where he spoke in the microphone at the radio station at Grover’s Mill. I could also hear the wheezing in his lungs where cigarette ash had wrought ruin. He was speaking of the pagan roots of the Halloween holiday, and he spoke much of Samhain and Celtic lore, and belittled those who adopted such customs into a Christian holiday. The whole matter was unscientific rubbish, or so his tone of voice, the drawling sneers, implied.

“Things are what they seem to be,” he said positively. “Teaching children that masks and deception are fun, well, it may lead to problematical developmental difficulties later in life. Children are programmed by their experiences, you know, like robots. Empiricism is about realism.”

Of course, he could not hear, as I heard, the cheers and carrying-on of children of all ages, or the whispers of a toddler dressed as a bunny, but petrified by stage fright, being urged by mother to say the magic phrase of “trick or treat”.

At the same time, on another station, I heard a preacher with a thick Southern drawl urging parents not to let their little ones participate in the mischief of the night. “Why teach the young ‘uns to look like evil critters, I ask ye that, brethren? Why give evil honor?” There was no corresponding living voice. This had been tape recorded, perhaps decades ago.

I increased the gain on my equipment, and began slowly inching my way down the dial. Soon my senses were filled with the sounds and smells of opium dens, flophouses, jails, gutters, and I heard such crimes planned, such screams, such gasps of whispered hate as will not soon leave me; or the murmur of suicides composing their farewell notes; and curses, and harsh, thudding, dark music.

Down I went again, and soon only the snarls of beasts was in my ears, but not of friendly or domesticated animals. This part of the spectrum was only occupied by those moments of terror and rage and desperation which come when an animals fights for its life, and rips with its jaws and takes the life of another.

Further down the dial was the zone of silence Tillinghast describes. My equipment was finer than his. He was working in his day with such crude vacuum tubes it is a wonder he received any signals at all.

At the very bottom, I heard a voice speaking in a language never spoken on Earth. With my neural matrix paralyzed, the methods we use to block the understanding of the meanings of foreign tongues were not available to me. The pain of those words was more than I can say: I bit down on the capsule I had been carrying under my tongue just for such an eventuality, and a spreading numbness shielded me from the worst of it.

“What masks shall you wear tonight, O ye thrones, virtues, powers and potentates of this, my realm?”

“I shall appear as a learned man, O Dark Prince, and lead those ensnared in intellectual pride astray.”

“I shall appear as a man of the cloth, solemn and wise, and lead those who trust in him down your dark paths by easy and unnoticed turnings, and make the love of money or the concern for the conditions of the world appear more holy than holiness itself.”

“And I shall appear as an angel of light, so that even the Elect, if it may be, might be deceived.”

Up the dial I went. Soon I was hearing only the voices, or catching odd visionary glimpses, of men of unparalleled genius, or soldiers or firemen in the midst of some act of superhuman bravery, or hearing nuns at prayer. Gentler music I heard, the whisper of silvery strings.

Above this were elfin sounds, and I heard crystalline voices amid the waves, or the sound of dance on grassy lawns beneath the moon, the carouse of kings and queens not of mortal kindred.

Hours passed, and I listened with delight, amazed at what hidden things exist right before our eyes, unseen, unseeable. I offer no explanation: but the thought burning in me then was one of giddy joy. I was thinking of Doyle’s theory of an offshoot race of man that had discovered the art of perceptual interference at about the same time we Homo sapiens had mastered the art of making fire. We produced tools and smelted gold and put the animal world beneath our feet. They opened doorways we cannot see, and gathered kingdoms to themselves, and ruled the worlds of dreaming as we rule the day.

I was at the edge of the range of my equipment, and, perhaps due to some quirk in the upper ionosphere I heard quite clearly the music sung by orbital resonances, and the electromagnetic choirs of the stars as they perturb the galactic magnetosphere in their huge and ancient orbits.

Another voice spoke. “My Son, in whom I am well pleased, what mask shall you wear this night?”

A voice so stern and yet so lovely I would give anything to hear it again answered him: “I will walk among my brothers, as fully human as are they, in the shape of the hungry, the ill-used, the orphaned, the worthless, the weak, the prisoner in the jail.”

A third voice, neither male nor female, but singing as if a metal string made of gold was plucked to give it voice, or a thread of white hot fire answered: “I will make note of who opened their hand to you, and who turns their face away.”

The rheostat blew out of my main amplifier then, and I jumped from the couch to my feet, tearing the headset from my head, blinking in confusion, trying to bring my senses back to the room.

For I had heard the voice of my servant Froward at the front door, angrily turning a hungry man away, telling him the treats being given out were only for the children, not dirty beggars.

I ran down stairs, stumbling, hoping I would be in time.

Nativity

Advent, The Vigil of the Nativity

“Mr. Went, if you could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would you go see? Oh, not for a long time. Long visits are never permitted. But just for a moment, just for an embrace or a long look, no longer?”

His words were not in English, and I did not speak any modern Romance tongues, but he must have been a priest or a scholar, because he and I could make ourselves understood to each other in Latin and in Greek. We were two living men with two dead languages in common.

I was not sure where I was. The streets in these ancient cities are narrow and crooked, and they don’t put the names on street signs.

The stranger in the top hat and long coat did not linger to hear an answer. Now he paused to listen to some children singing carols—I remember they sang O Come Emmanuel, but the words were not in English—while waiting for me to climb the alley. I had stopped walking.

It was not that I was tired, it was just that I was used to the broad and flat streets of the American Midwest, so, to me, the sight of a cobblestone street turning into broad stairs for part of its climb was a novelty. It was, no doubt, a street older than my whole nation.

I wanted to make a comment to my wife, but she, of course, was not there. In my pocket was a small Christmas gift for her, wrapped in gold paper. I had put it in the pocket of the dark and formal coat I donned for the funeral. I had intended to leave it at the grave, but the idea of bright, cheery, frivolous colors of wrapping paper beneath the granite headstone, on the darkness of the newly-turned earth, seemed unbearably hateful to me.

And I still wanted to say something to her, to share my thoughts, to share my life. And I could not. So I had paused, wrestling with the aching emptiness inside me.

I turned my eyes outward. Between the narrow and dark houses looming to either side, the gap of the alley fell like a stone waterfall, as if the stair were the broken rapids, and in that gap I could see the famous city spread out below me, adorned to celebrate Christmas. I could see the festive lights in the distance.

The stranger came up beside me, offering me a handful of the roast chestnuts he had just bought from a street vendor. The children singing he had shooed away by passing out the brightly colored paper which looked to me like Monopoly money.

I gestured to the view below. We were halfway up one of the seven hills. “There are more Christmas trees than there were years ago.”

He said, “You have been to the Eternal City before?”

“My wife is from here. Was. She–excuse me.”

He passed me a handkerchief, and turned as if to look at the city. “The Christmas tree is a Germanic custom. Such things travel south to the more civilized nations somewhat slowly. It is in the nativity scene where the Italian genius is manifested. You should see the one displayed at the Church of Saints Cosma and Damiano! It was commissioned by Charles III of Naples. Six master woodcarvers labored on the scene for forty years, adding new figures each year! And in the Santa Maria Maggiore, where the first Christmas Mass was said, is a presepe, the permanent display of the crib. The reliquary below the altar is said to contain pieces of the original manger. History is fascinating, is it not? Are you ready to go?”

I nodded. The stranger walked a short way up the alley, took out an enormous key and bent over the lock of intricately wrought black iron gates. The iron gates were decorated with images of roses and winged skulls. With a groaning clang they opened. Beyond was a courtyard shaped like an L, closed in on each side by windowless brick walls, and in the midst of the court was a dry well, filled with leaves and dust, rusting under a tiny roof.

Around the corner of the courtyard, up the shorter arm of the L, were more stairs guarded by worn winged lions, their gaping mouths filled with grit and dust, and the grime of their faces made them seem to weep.

To my surprise, the front door to the old house was not locked. He opened the door and stood in the doorway, fumbling with something on a small table set immediately by the door. There was the click of an electric striker, a flicker of flame, and the stranger lit a candle, which he carefully placed in a black iron candlestick. Inside he went, lighting his way with the candle, beckoning me to follow.

“The power is out?” I said. I could hear the singing of the children in the street below clearly enough, but the door was so heavy and so well fitted to the frame that all noise from the outside was cut off the moment I shut it.

“There is power here,” said the stranger, smiling crookedly. “More than enough to shatter the cosmos. But the site has never been electrified. It would identify the era too closely, and disturb the anachronic echo effect. Come. The machine is in the attic.”

I followed him. A narrow wooden stairway led upward and upward. The walls to either side were painted with figures of satyrs chasing nymphs through patterns of grape leaves, but in the dim light, the figures seemed distorted, and the lolling tongues and goat-horned heads of the satyrs gave them sadistic, blank-eyed expressions.

The attic was brighter than the house, because large and narrow skylights admitted the colored hues of the festively-lit city as well as the slanting rays of the moon. In the middle of the blank, wooden floor was a shape covered with a tarp. The stranger handed me the candle, stepped over, and drew aside the tarp with a theatrical flourish, like a stage magician revealing his pretty assistant, alive and unchained. But a cloud of dust flew up at the breeze, and it blew out the candle, so the dramatic effect was ruined.

I had no clear view of the machine. In the moonlight, and the flicker of changing Christmas lights from some nearby building taller than the house, I could see there was a small saddle or seat facing two levers connected to a rotating cylinder. The cylinder was connected by a mess of wires to a crystal bar that glinted strangely in the moonlight. This crystal formed the axis of the machine. My eyes could not focus properly on it. No matter how I moved my head, the inside reflections of the crystal bar seemed to be farther away than the body of the machine around it, as if it were not a crystal bar, but a crystal slot, or a well opening into unexpected depth. Behind the saddle was a large and upright copper disk, connected to a gearbox.

The whole arrangement looked something like a crystal-poled metal parasol lying on its side taking a ride on a sled, and the saddle straddled the pole, and the cylinder and levers formed an off-center handle.

There were scrollwork and flourishes on the brass, a windrose on the copper disk, and little cherubic faces on the cylinder, which betrayed that this was made in the days when the machines were works of art, and machinists were magicians.

The stranger said, “Unfortunately, the dials are decimal. It is an oddity of the inventor. This dial indicates how many tens of days you have passed through; this one hundreds of days; thousands; tens of thousands. You will have to be clever in your calculations to know the month and the year of your arrival.”

“Or I could my just use my phone,” I said, giving him an odd look. I was sure someone, somewhere on the Internet had set up an application to calculate such things.

The stranger scowled and shrugged. “I am not familiar with such a gizmo.” (There was no Latin word for “gizmo” of course, he just said the English word. If that is an English word.)

I said. “The book by H.G. Wells never gives the Time Traveler a name. You say he is real. Who is the inventor? Why is he not ruling the world?”

He threw out his chest and spoke in solemn tones. “The Time Traveler is Nikola Tesla. Anyone reading the book by Wells in that day and age would have recognized the man at once–part showman, part madman, all genius.

“The machine itself was built in Menlo Park some time during the 1870′s, with the help, and, to be blunt, despite the interference, of Thomas Alva Edison, who saw no practical use for it.

“In 1895, a man named George Scherff, Tesla’s legal and fiscal adviser, gave an account of Tesla’s voyage into the future into the hands of Mr. Wells to put it into publishable form, since the account would not have been believed if given as fact.

“The machine was thought lost in the great fire that destroyed Mr. Edison’s great factory in 1914. Mr. Tesla is not ruling the world because a Nazi agent killed him in 1943.”

I frowned at the stranger. “How could a man as bright as Edison see no practical use for time travel? Anyone would see the advantage of being able to read tomorrow’s stock market results or racing form.”

“The machine did not perform well until it was taken to Scotland. America is a young nation.”

“What does that matter?”

The stranger said, “The machine works by a resonance effect. Think of time as a stream, but certain events are rocks in that stream, rocks that make eddies, ripples, echoes. This is why there is no need for you to physically move the machine to the cottage where your wedding night took place. Merely touching your wedding ring to the forward cylinder will attune the crystal. Your wedding ring is an object that carries time with it. Anything used as a memento is.”

I instinctively clasped my hand over my ring, as if to protect it. “It is just a bit of gold. There must be something else involved. Something more.”

He nodded. “Time will never be understood by any era which divides matter from psyche and disbelieves in everything but matter. Is eternity not a psychic reality? Mind and body are one, even as time and space are one. Man alone of all the beasts fears the future and regrets the past. Tesla understood this. The machine cannot be operated by any man who is too perfectly satisfied with his own time. The time traveler must yearn–”

I had been standing with my back him, inspecting, as well as I could, the half-seen shapes and shadows of the machine. Now I turned, and the motion startled him, for he jumped back, putting his hand in his coat pocket as if there were a gun there.

I said, “So that is why you were hovering like a vulture over the graveyard?”

He said, “Think of it as a privilege, Mr. Went. Not everyone can operate the machine. Very few are allowed to even try.”

“Allowed?”

He licked his lips. “There is a certain danger to the operation, of which, ah, perhaps it slipped my mind, and I failed to warn you.”

I uttered a sad, little laugh. “I just buried the only reason I had to live. What should I fear?”

“Well, in that case, there is no need to dwell on–”

“Perhaps I should also tell you that I am not afraid to hurt you if you don’t tell me what is going on.”

“You have nothing to lose. I understand.”

“Then talk!”

“Very well. The time machine’s principles are not difficult to understand, and a working model is not difficult to build. It was, or will be, discovered again in 1968 by Dr. Ann McGregor and then again by Dr. Sam Beckett in 1999; then, after the Great Collapse, by the Revisionists of the Second Era, and, when they have destroyed themselves, the horrible living machines of the Third Era, who attempted to undo the diverse paradoxes and time-snarls their predecessors left behind them. The Nexxial Agents, who travel as amnesiacs, form the Fourth Era of Time Travel, and so on, age after age and civilization after civilization, until the Danellians of the Final Era.”

“I meant, talk while making sense.”

“What do you not understand? If you touch the time machine, if you make any effort to use it, all the events which you will set in motion become, for you, actualized: a real possibility. The events springing from those possibilities become real. And this includes those time travelers downstream of you, unhappy with your actions, who seek to revise them.”

“Revise how?”

“The simplest way, the least complex energy state, as it were, to prevent time paradoxes, is to kill the time traveler just before he starts.”

I said, “And so you’ve never touched the thing? You were afraid someone from the future would pop into existence next to you, and shoot you with some sort of ray gun? Why not go back and prevent your parents from ever meeting? The fact that you are standing here now–”

He shook his head. “Men still have free will. Not until the very moment I use the time machine will I have stepped into the fourth dimension. They would have to stop me right at that moment. There are time-energy considerations involved.” He looked at the brass and copper machine and sighed. “Oh, I have polished it, replaced old wires, kept the jars charged. I have sat in the saddle and toyed with the levers, yes, even powered up the solenoid and heard it hum. When I wanted to remember something I’d forgotten, for example. But actually to attune the cylinder and engage the drive? No. I’ve never done that.”

I said, “You don’t know me. What if I climb on that thing and just fly away? Become master of the world myself? Why take the risk?”

“I must see if it works.”

“What does that mean? Must?”

He spread his hands. “Can I explain the agony of living with this thing in the attic so many years, unable to know whether the machine actually works or not? A machine I am afraid to touch? Perhaps everything I read was a lie. Perhaps it is merely a stage magician’s trick. I cannot live on faith. I have to see it. I have to see it work with my own eyes!”

“So if I jump on this thing, this magic time travel machine, every time traveler from hereafter to eternity might come gunning for me? Fine. You picked me because you know how badly I need to see her again. See her alive, I mean. I’ll play along. But there is one condition.”

“What is that, Mr. Went?”

“Tell me your name.”

“It would mean nothing to you.”

“Tell me anyway. If the Time Cops arrest me, I won’t talk.”

“They will not arrest you or question you. When they act, they kill. My name is Professor Pajo Mandic. I am descended from Tesla’s sister Milka.”

I turned again and threw my leg over the saddle. “You said the machine moves through space as well as time? Guided by what, exactly?”

Professor Mandic stepped behind the machine and turned a crank, so that the large copper disk behind the saddle started slowly rotating. He threw an old-fashioned double-throw switch and the crystal bar between my legs began to glow.

I wondered if my legs were wrapped around something radioactive, even though it was too late to worry about such things now. I also wondered when I had started to believe any of this might be real. But the fact that I was nervous the antique contraption might blow up made the hope that it could carry me into yesterday seem possible.

Professor Mandic said, “Touch your ring to the axis of the cylinder, and engage the first lever. It controls how many days per second—subjective seconds—you will be in motion. The second lever controls how many degrees into the fourth dimension you will be rotated. The greater the angle, the less contact you have with the three-dimensional world, and the less time, subjectively, your voyage will take. If you stay at less than forty-five degrees, you will see the sun like a ribbon of fire, and winter snow appear and disappear in blinks of an eye across a vast panorama. If you find yourself suffering from motion sickness, use that leather sack there. The first time traveler discovered an odd yaw and pitch and sway which made him nauseous. Wait? What are you doing?”

Because it was not my wedding ring I touched to the cylinder then. It was my crucifix.

If I could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would I go and see? I had only this one opportunity. Yes, I wanted to see my wife again. I would have given anything to see her again. It would be like an amputee regaining his lost right arm once again.

But there was someone I wanted to see more. I needed an explanation.

I landed, or materialized, or whatever the word is, at the foot of a cross on which a man hung dying.

The sun was beating down and the flies were crawling on his face, and he cried out when he saw me, such a cry of hopeless pain as I had never heard. Immediately I leaped from the machine and went to him, to see if there was any way I could get him down without hurting him further. He croaked at me, a word I did not understand.

The nails were not driven through the palms of his hands, as it is depicted in religious art, but right through the middle of his forearm, between the radius and the ulna, which looked even more painful. Other spikes had been driven into and through his lower legs, between the tibia and fibula.

He was naked, which is also not the way he was usually depicted in religious art. I could see insects crawling through his pubic hair. He did not have a free hand to scratch them or pluck them away.

Only then did I notice he was not alone. There were many more than two hanging to either side of him. The man to his immediate left had died and hung there motionless, his head bowed, withered like a mummy in the sun.

Perhaps I was still queasy from the gyrating motions of the time machine, or the sudden change from cool night to scalding day, but the sight of so many naked men, all dying, all with bloodstains marking their arms and legs, all gasping for breath, and the stench of their wounds crawling with flies, made me lightheaded. And some of the men had voided their bowels after being raised up, so smears of fecal matter ran down the base of the crosses and their legs.

Worst of all was the sound, the gasping, grating, harsh, and horrible sound. It was all those men fighting desperately to breathe.

Not many people talk about how crucifixion works. It is one of the more painful, humiliating, sadistic, and lingering deaths ever invented by man. The victim is hung by his arms to put pressure on his ribcage so he cannot breathe. The exposure will eventually kill anyone strong enough, but, before that, the pressure of all the body’s weight suspended from the dislocated shoulders, after several hours, or days, weakens the same muscles in the chest used for drawing breath until the victim can no longer breathe.

In order to take a breath, the victim must straighten his legs, which are also nailed by spikes to the cross, and this relieves the pressure for a moment, so he can draw in a ragged, gasping lungful of air. But eventually, his legs lose their strength, and ever so slowly, ever so painfully, he is unable to lift himself. And so, in the end, he suffocates. The fortunate ones die more quickly of shock and exposure.

I stepped around to the back of the cross, not because I had any thought in mind, but only because I saw no way to get him down from the front. The splinters were driven into his buttocks and his back, which was red, raw, and bleeding. The spikes protruded through the wood, but I did not have any carpenter’s tools. I pushed helplessly at the red point of one spike with my fingers, not because it could do any good, but only because I could not stand by and do nothing.

I looked left and right. There were about twenty-four or thirty men nailed there, all told. Some were children no older than fourteen. Some were graybeards already dead, and crows were eating their eyes with stabbing motions of their beaks that looked perversely like a kiss. Perhaps some of the others, if they had been immediately flown by helicopter to modern emergency rooms, could have been saved.

“Hoy! Get away from there!” This was in Greek, which I did understand.

I looked to the left. I saw a group of dull-faced children, bellies bloated with malnutrition, throwing stones at one of the crucified men whose eyes had been torn out by birds, hitting him in the crotch and belly, grinning little dull-eyed gap-mouthed grins when he moaned and thrashed. They scattered at the voice.

The voice came from a little ways beyond them. A man in the iron helm and segmented leather skirt of the Romans was standing near a fire of coals, warming a bit of food on a stick, with an open flask nearby. I remember how impressed I was that, in a place like this, reeking as it did, he could eat his picnic luncheon at leisure. He reminded me of a friend who worked in a morgue and could eat a ham sandwich next to a ripe and newly sawed-open corpse without thinking twice about it. People get used to things, including things they shouldn’t.

There was a second soldier with him, but he was lying down, having propped his shield up with his spear to form an impromptu parasol to keep his head in the shade.

The soldier slowly picked up his javelin (a four-foot length of wood and iron with a wicked tip) and slung across his shoulder his eight-sided shield set with a lightning-bolt motif. “Stay back, you. The traitors’ bodies are the property of Rome.”

At this, the other men hanging to the left and right now stirred and began crying out, some in tongues I did not understand, others in Greek and Latin.

But I understood them. They were crying for water.

I remembered reading somewhere that starving men lose their sensation of hunger after a while, but men dying of thirst merely get more and more thirsty as they die.

The mummified man I had thought was dead now stirred to life and called out to the soldier in Latin, “Break my legs, break my legs! Die! Let me die! The land of shadows!”

They were calling out to the soldier, their tormentor, for water or for a merciful death, not to me.

The soldier was now close enough to prod me with the butt of his spear, which was a lump of lead the size of a child’s fist. “Is your head in the air? No gathering blood, necromancer! We don’t want your black magic. You barbarians are civilized now!”

Necromancer? He could not even imagine I was looking for a way to help the dying man.

I said to the soldier, “I am a stranger here, and have lost my way–”

He wasn't interested. He stepped close to me, so close that I could smell the fish and alcohol on his breath, and backhanded me across the face hard enough to knock me down.

My Latin classes had not encompassed First Century cursing, so there was a lot in what he said that I did not follow. But I got the gist. “Is this the way you talk to your betters? I march under the arms of Rome, cur. My children will be citizens. Don’t lift your eyes to me!”

I started crawling backward, inching toward the time machine, but he stepped forward and stepped down with the iron sole of his marching sandal upon my hand, driving it into the warm, bloodstained stones of the execution ground, pinning me in place.

“I did not give you leave to go!”

“I lost my way, sir,” I pleaded, gasping with the unexpected pain.

Only now did he seem to take in my untimely clothing. “I’ll say. What are you? A Saxon? A Scythian?” He peered suspiciously at the machine. “Your cart seems to have lost its wheels.”

I did not raise my eyes to him, not wanted to be beaten again, and reviled myself for my cowardice.

“Robbers,” I said, “They took my horse, too.” It is hard to know a man’s mood if you are afraid to look him in the face. That makes it risky to lie, because you cannot gauge his reactions.

“Horse?”

“Donkey,” I corrected. Horses were creatures of war, not used for other purposes. I was in a time before the invention of the horse collar. The plough-horse was a thing of the future. Slaves ploughed the fields.

“Why didn’t they take your–what is this?” He was no longer stepping on my hand, but had strolled over to the machine. “This big copper disk?”

“It is for astrology. To read the stars.”

“Ah? You tell fortunes?” He raised his voice and called out to the other soldier. “Hoy! Cratus! Come find out if your wife is whoring around on you! We have a soothsayer here!” The other soldier grunted a word I did not know, probably another swearword.

“If I may be permitted, sir,” I said, “I can show you the secret. May I rise?”

He was curious, and waved me over to the machine, and he did not stop me as I slowly seated myself on the saddle. I had never opened the double throw switch, so I need only tap the handle once, clicking the second wheel over, and this put ten days between us.

This time, it was raining, and there were still crosses along the roadside, but no one was occupying them. My landing startled a pack of dogs snuffling hopefully at the foot of one and they ran off yelping.

The time machine did not have an umbrella or hood, and I wondered how well the works would stand up to being rained on. I squinted at the dials, and added up days by the tens and hundreds, and arrived at a figure. I was sure I had made a mistake, and then checked it again.

I had not arrived in 33 AD, the date I expected the memento of the crucifix to land me. I am not sure if I had counted correctly, or added leap-year days correctly, or remembered the date when the Julian calendar switched to the Gregorian. I had landed in 3 or 4 BC–the nativity.

I could see, despite the rain, that the country around here was pockmarked with small caves. I picked the nearest one, and began hauling the machine toward it on its skids, seeking a place to hide it. After about an hour of sloshing through the rain, and, later sweating in the sun after the end of the brief shower, I had a bright idea. I walked to the cave, looked around, picked up a small chip of rock, walked back to the machine, sat on it, held the rock to the cylinder axis, and tapped the lever lightly.

The world blinked, and I was in the cave. I returned the wheels to their original setting, worked the lever again, and poked my head carefully out of the cave, and heard myself talking to the soldier a hundred yards or so away. I pulled some dry bushes in front of the cave mouth, and walked parallel to the road for some time, afraid being seen by any soldiers, and horrified by the nightmarish line of crucified victims dying in the sun.

Eventually, I passed the last occupied cross. Not many minutes’ walk after that, I came across a line of people walking the road, some driving laden donkeys. They were not dressed as colorfully as one might expect from a Hollywood costume drama, and no one there even came up to my shoulder height. I am not sure how odd my clothing looked, in dark trousers and a white shirt (I had removed my coat and tie, leaving them in with the cave with the machine), but no one gave me any close looks as I started walking alongside them.

I tried once or twice to start a conversation with my fellow wayfarers, first in Latin, then in Greek. No women would talk to me at all, as each pulled their shawls in front of their faces and turned away. The men flinched, and mumbled something apologetic in tone, and cast their eyes down, and would not answer more than that.

Something in the foot-weary way they shuffled, the way they kept their eyes down, reminded me of photos I seen in various war torn times and places. These people looked like refugees.

At one point, we all walked past something that looked something an energetic troop of Boy Scouts had made: tall poles lashed together with line, with a small platform topmost. I almost did not recognize it as a watchtower, until I saw the eagle on a pole above it: the all-conquering eagle of Rome.

At the foot of the watchtower, two soldiers were beating a man and taking his donkey, which was a young, healthy animal. They threw his bundle off its back into the dirt, and drove him back with blows from the butts of their lances. They led the young donkey away, laughing at their good fortune, to a paddock that had that same Boy Scout precision lashed-together-expertly look as the watchtower.

I should mention the clothing and gear of the Romans was handmade, like that of the natives, but it looked as if it were handmade by better, more competent hands. It made them look like a superior race of beings, and that superiority showed in their voices and postures and the light in their eyes. It was the immense confidence, no, the pride that comes from knowing you can trample another man’s face, and tell him to kiss the sole of your boot. And knowing that he would.

Not refugees. I did not recognize what was I was seeing because, well, frankly, no one has ever occupied Kansas City, or hung rebels up on trees by the roadside to die slowly in the sun with spikes through their forearms and thighs.

They were a conquered people.

All the hope had been beaten out of them. The conquerors methodically killed anyone who caused them trouble, anyone who showed too much leadership, too much initiative. They killed the hopeful ones.

A trio of small raggedy children now darted out of the crowd of the road, and made as if to snatch the bundles and fallen belongings of the beaten man. His head was bloody, and maybe he was dazed, because he did nothing to stop them. I ran forward, shouting, slapped the biggest child, the pack leader, across the back of his head hard enough to make him drop his loot—it was a crudely woven cloak or bedroll, nothing more—and the other urchins screamed like birds and fled. I put the bedroll back with the pile. The pile was more than one man could carry, which was why he had been using a donkey.

He stood there looking at me with big eyes. I saw the look in his face, the empty, wary look. He was expecting me to pick up some choice possession and make off with it. He thought I was a lion beating off jackals, not someone trying to save the deer.

Instead I passed him my handkerchief. I motioned to his head. I pantomimed daubing the wound.

He said something, in a dull, dazed tone.

I said, “Do you speak Greek?” I actually used the word koine which I remembered was the word for common Attic.

In the same tongue, he whispered, “Beware. They watch.”

It was true. The Roman soldiers were looking at me with flat, cold-eyed stares. They probably did not like my height, and my straw-colored hair. It is not my fault I was raised in Kansas. We have to be tall enough to see over the cornrows.

“Let’s get back with the others,” I said. “I’ll help carry the load.”

He looked a little stunned. Maybe he was just surprised, or perhaps he was literally stunned from the blow to his head. He tied the bundles together neatly and quickly with a rope, and I took the larger of the two and slung it across my shoulder.

We stepped back on the road, and the people near us quickened the pace, or slowed, to give us a wide berth.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Why didn’t anyone else give you a hand?”

He looked confused. “Hand?”

Idioms don’t translate that well. “Help. Aid.”

He grunted philosophically. “They are Sons of Israel, whose false temple is Jerusalem. The true temple was at Gerizim. It was destroyed by Yohanan Girhan called Hyrcanus a hundred winters ago, and now the Holy One wanders the Earth without a home.”

Now it was my turn to look confused. This did not refer to anything I knew from history books or Bible stories. “What, ah, is your kindred?” I used the word genus, which is vaguer, and could mean anything from race to nation to species.

“Ah! I am the son of Sahir, of the sons of Pincus, of the line of Issachar. And how should this servant address his master?”

I was not used to Middle Eastern exaggerations of politeness, so it took me a moment to realize he was asking my name.

“Jonathon, son of Jacob,” I said. It seemed odd to me that, though I was born in a hemisphere not discovered yet, three millennia away, my name and the name of my father sounded normal here. “At your service, sir.” I finished, and realized that his form of courtesy was not so alien after all.

We shook hands. Or rather, when I extended my hand, he wrapped his fingers around my wrist, which was almost the same.

“Why do you walk the road?” He asked.

“I am lost.”

“You must be very lost,” he said wryly.

“I am seeking Bethlehem of Judea,” I said.

“You mean ‘Bethlehem’?” My ear could detect no difference of pronunciation, but it seemed I said it wrongly. “It is but a short walk hence. This is the road. Where are you from?” He was looking at my blond hair.

“I am from the farthest north.”

“I have heard of your land! No wonder your hands are softer than a woman’s. It is so peaceful there, so unwarlike, that men kill themselves out of boredom, merely to idle away the time! Yes? I thought Farthestnorth just a story.” He had heard me as if I had said Farthest North as one word, which in his tongue was Hyperborea.

I grunted, thinking of deaths from drunk drivers and drug overdoses and heart disease caused by obesity. Indirectly, these were all forms of suicide by self-indulgence, which was another word for boredom. “Do you know, there could be some truth to that story.”

“I am northern too, but not so far as Hyperborea. That is why the sons of Israel were pleased to see the Romans fall on me. They walk apart from us, so that any watching Romans know we are easy prey.”

“That is cowardly,” I said. But anger was mingled with pity when I said it. I was from a nation that had never been conquered, dropped down in the middle of a land that had been conquered by practically everyone.

Ben Sahir assumed a wry, philosophical expression. “If it lets them move along the roads without being robbed, who can say a dark word of them? We treat these Jewish swine the same when they are in Shomron.”

Now I understood. “You are a Samaritan! Are you good?”

“Ah. None is good save God alone. When the Romans savage the sons of Israel who walk our roads, we stand aside and look on. Better them than us. And what else can we do? When you fight the Romans, these trees grow fruit.” He nodded at a group of bloodstained and offal-stained crosses topping the rise by the roadside ahead. There were ten crosses together, empty at the moment. But the number of crows hovering in the air, and strutting proudly along the ground, fearless of man, was ominous.

“Men should not treat each other so,” I said.

“As for that, it will be the way the world is until the he comes, the Christ.”

That last almost made me stumble. “What do you know of the Christ?”

He rolled his eyes. “Is that not the word in Greek? We call him Messiah.”

“That is the word. What do they say of him?”

“Those who count the generations say the world enters a new age soon.”

“What does that mean? Count the generations?”

“Count the years to the new age. From Father Abraham to David the King fourteen generations, and from King David to the Babylonian Exile fourteen, and it has been fourteen generations since then, so as history waxes and wanes like the moon, the time of waxing is nigh, and the Messiah will be born. He will smite the Romans and the heretical Southerners, and rebuild the one true Temple at Gerizim. The greatest conqueror of all time!” Ben Sahir shrugged. “Of course, those who count the generations also said the Messiah was due three generations ago, but then others said we should omit Ochoziah, Joas, and Amasiah from the king lists, because of their wickedness, and that God adds another generation of waiting for every evil generation. You know how astrologers argue. We wait, and they give a date, and it rolls by, and nothing changes, and the Romans hang out more fruit for the crows to eat. I will believe in the Messiah when I see him with these eyes, not before.”

“You think he is coming to throw out the Romans? Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough? No human power can defeat them. Should we hope for something even greater? Not just to restore our kingdom, but also to conquer theirs? Ah! Strange and wondrous indeed if all the Roman world bent the knee and served the God of Abraham! But that will never happen. Never.”

“Don’t be so sure…” I muttered.

“Be that as it may,” said ben Sahir, “My father says the Greeks were worse than the Romans. The Greeks did not enforce their own laws. And they use their slave-boys as girls.”

“Uh? Greeks here?”

“You must be from very far north. It was only fifty or sixty years ago. Hyrcanus and Aristobulus fought for the throne when the Queen died, and Pompey the Great aided Hyrcanus, and the rule passed to the Herodians, and Romans, who came as guests, did not leave, but stayed as masters. And it is not as if all the Greeks living here suddenly vanished, or went home.

“Before that, it was Alexander the Great,” he said. He half-smiled, but his voice was infinitely weary. “Before that, Cyrus the Great. And before that, Nebuchadnezzar the Great. All the great men of history march through our land to tread upon us.

“There is rebellion in the air,” he continued. “The Romans can smell it. They have conquered everyone, so they know the smell of mutiny growing ripe. Why do you think they declared tax-gathering time? Never before have we been ordered to march the roads to the houses of our fathers and pay the tax there. It is not Roman law. Come, you are learned man, I can tell from your outlandish accent! You make the mistakes learned men make, you learn the language from books. Why do you think they are taxing us this way, now, at this time? Forcing everyone out of hearth and home?”

I shook my head. I was already sorry I had volunteered to carry his load. The sun was declining to the west, and it was cooler now, but my legs were aching and blisters were developing. What I would have given for a bottle of insect repellant! None of the short and wiry people around me seemed to be having trouble. Call it the soft living of the Hyperboreans. I was too out of breath to ask.

“You might think it was to scatter any whispering groups of young men daydreaming of the days of Maccabaeus,” he said. “I think it is to show us. To show us we are whipped dogs. To show us they could march us to Egypt, if they wished, or off the edge of the world.”

After that, I had no more breath for talking, and we trudged on in silence.

Ben Sahir’s ‘short walk’ turned out to be almost farther than my aching legs could carry me.

As we neared the village, the Romans had more corpses on display, but these must have been of people of a higher class than traitors and slaves, because instead of crucified bodies, they displayed severed heads hanging by their hair from the wooden poles of a small fortress surrounded by a ditch outside the town. The fortress had a distinctly Old West look to it, which I did not expect, being made of sharpened logs set upright, with a dry-moat around it.

It was called a village, but it had at one time been larger, because I could see the ruins of walls half toppled over, and naked gate posts with no gate but an ox yoke lashed across the top. The huts and hovels, some of stone, some of mud, some of timber, occupied less than one-fourth of the land inside the crumbled line of the ruined walls.

I should mention the climate was not what I expected. Perhaps I had seen too many Hollywood Biblical dramas, and so I was thinking everyone would be dressed in burnooses, and the land would be desert. They were dressed more like Greeks, in tunics and cloaks. I was surprised at the number and size of the trees, and size of the fields both cultivated and fallow. Maybe it was a climate cycle, or maybe the Romans would cut down all the trees one day soon to make more crucifixes, but at the moment, there were trees, and many houses made of wood. The rooftops were flat, and many had little tents or sails on the top of them. I was not sure what they were used for.

Ben Sahir parted ways with me, explaining that, if I ate pork, I could not stay at the same inn as the “clean” people.

But he gave me a few coins, and pointed at a large house done in a clearly Greek style, as if it had been yanked up from Athens and dropped down here, with decorative amphorae and statues of gods and goddesses on the roof eaves.

There were before the doors also stones decorated with gods with wings for ears at the ground level, but these had been defaced by some vandal. Or maybe it was an art critic, because I saw the broken stone penises, large and erect, which the vandals had hammered away from the stone. There was a wooden sign nearby with two severed hands, a left and a right, nailed to it, and some inscription in Latin and Greek and Aramaic I was too tired to puzzle out. Probably a pragmatic Roman epigram on keeping one’s art criticisms to oneself.

Something in the sight of the careful craftsmanship of the obscene statues seemed to me to be as grotesque and inhuman as all the images of torture and conquest, but on a subtler level. What kind of world would adore as sacred such demeaning images, and maim and kill to preserve them?

I stepped into the common room, which was crowded, practically packed shoulder to shoulder, but everyone stepped out of my way when I approached a man standing on a chair, whom I took to be the landlord here.

He was arguing and cursing with knot of bellowing men around him, or perhaps it was an impromptu auction, because all the men were waving fistfuls of money, or something that looked like necklaces of beads, small coppery nuggets of uniform size. I did not know anyplace from history books in this quarter of the world that used beads for money, but maybe some things slipped through the cracks of history, or were not written down, or not remembered.

For some reason, the shouting fell silent when I walked up. Maybe they thought I was a giant. I mentioned before how no one here was as tall as my shoulder, and some were shorter than my elbow. Also, while I was not exactly stout, I was certainly well-fed, and so I was broader than everyone here.

I showed the landlord the coins ben Sahir had given me. I had no idea of their value. “Don’t tell me, let me guess.” I said, “There is no room in the Inn. Do you have a stable out back, where you put little kids with glowing halos? Or shepherds who hear voices from heaven, and three wise men from the East?”

He said, “There is room for you, stranger. For strangers like you. We have a room set aside.” He whistled, and a little kid with straight black hair that gleamed as if oiled can trotting out of a short door leading to some sort of enclosed yard where they were cooking a fatted calf over an open pit. (I should mention all the doors were short, and I barked my head on the ceiling beams more than once.)

The kid wore a dirty smock and an iron ring around his neck. The bellhop, or rather, slave-boy, did not look me in the eye, but beckoned, and I followed. He led me across the courtyard—in this style of building, all the windows face inward, toward a common courtyard, and there are no windows in the outer walls to tempt robbers. Of course, a motivated robber could just shoulder his way through the walls, which were thin boards roughly cut, daubed with just enough plaster to keep out the wind. Stupid as it sounds, I was repeatedly surprised at how rude and handmade everything looked.

The bellhop showed me to a room the size of a closet, which stank with the rich, ripe odor of the many previous inhabitants, and pointed to a straw mat crawling with lice. The room was also equipped with a ewer of water, unless I was mistaken and it was the chamber pot.

“Presidential suite, eh?” I said to myself in English. I showed the bellhop the coins which the landlord had not taken. In Greek I said, “Do I pay now? Pay later?”

I was shocked when he replied in English. His accent was odd, clipped, almost as if he were used to speaking at a much faster rhythm of syllables. “The natives deem it bad luck to take money from time travelers.”

I spun on him and made to grab him by the throat. But his metal collar made a loud popping noise, I got a shock to my hand and arm like I had grabbed an electric eel. I stumbled backward and sat down heavily, breathing deeply and hoping the dancing black spots in my eyesight would not overwhelm me.

The little noises from the rooms to either side, voice and motions, fell silent, as if the Inn were holding its breath.

“You are late Twentieth Century, or Early Twenty-First.” The kid said in his flat, strangely-accented voice. “Wristwatches and telephonics of that design were not made after the Endarkening. And you have made several temporal disturbances which no one, not even a Revisionist of the Second Age would have made. You are a pre-Nebogipfel chrononaut. A rare find!”

I realized that the people in the room to either side were not holding their breath, or, at least, not willingly. The silence was deeper. I could see over his shoulder where the cook pit in the courtyard was. The reflections of the flames on the wall should have been leaping. Instead, they were frozen. Little bugs in their clouds were as still as a photograph. It was as if someone had hit the pause button on the video of the universe.

“Who are you?” I managed to say.

“I am a mote of the Cosmic Sculpture of the Sixth Era of Time Travel.”

“So, everyone in that common room knew I was a time traveler?”

“Of course. Bethlehem, at the time of the retrograde motion of Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction? This is the most thickly investigated spot of all history. But no one has ever found and killed such an early chrononaut of your strata.”

“Killed? Wait a minute! I have not done anything to you–”

“Have you not?” And now the flat, unemotional accent, if anything, grew even flatter and more monotone, and the kid’s eyes, which suddenly looked very old and very wise indeed, bored into mine. “The man whose burdens you carried was fated to be helped by someone coming a moment later down the road, whose daughter, by that happenstance, he would met and wed, from whose bloodline sages and sacerdotes would spring, and military leaders, including the founders of an Antarctic Republic in the Forty-Second Century, after the time of the Great Thaw, and the discoveries of polar zodiacal energy will enable the founding of colonies on other worlds. All of that line and its manifold accomplishments you obliterated with your thoughtless blundering. Millions of lives have been lost, or changed. You have no instruments for detecting temporal potentialty! You do not know who is important, and who is not, who is crucial to history, and who is not.”

With this, be pulled the collar off his neck, so he held a C-shaped bend of metal, looking like a horseshoe magnet. He pointed the ends at me. “You, for example, have no potential at all. You will never return to your life, and have no effect on history. Therefore nothing remains but to–”

The room was no bigger than a closet, and mote-boy, Cosmic or not, was no taller than my waist. I made a lunge for him, grabbed him by both arms, and smashed his head into the walls. To my surprise, it worked. I was sure he would zap me with some hidden superweapon if I moved. To my bigger surprise, the wall broke instead of the kid’s head. The boards were thin and the plaster, or maybe it was mud, was less than a half-inch thick. His head went all the way threw up to the neck.

The biggest surprise of all was when I yanked him back inside, and realize I was holding a dead body. The top of his skull had been burned away, his face blackened, as if his head had been thrust into a lightning bolt. I could smell cooked brains. I was confused. This was not something merely smashing a head through a thin board could do.

The pause button on the universe unpaused. Firelight in the distance started flickering, and noise of man and bird and beast started up again with a roar. I grasped the semicircle of folding metal the kid had been wearing as a necklace, thinking there was a gun in it, some futuristic laser gizmo which had accidentally gone off. But there was no button, no trigger, no muzzle, nothing I could see.

But I heard a noise in the air above. It sounded like something larger than bird, moving. I stuck my head through the hole—hardly the first stupid and impulsive thing I’d done that day&—and saw only a shadow. It was manlike, but larger than a man, and it held a long wand or tube in its hands as it disappeared into the clouds of sunset. It seemed to be riding a horse, or perhaps a flying motorbike. Even as I saw the figure, I was not sure if it had not been a trick of my eyes, a shape in the cloud. Another time traveler, from some era after the Sixth? Someone who did not like the way these events turned out?

Professor Mandic had mentioned that, in order to avoid paradoxes, or minimize them, the time travelers would wait to the last minute. That meant something was happening now that the Mote kid had been trying to stop.

It was then that I heard singing. They were not the Mormon Tabernacle choir, but they were better than an average dozen men from my time would have been, because we only sing on Sundays, if that. Whenever we want song, we don’t have to do it for ourselves, we snap on a radio. Even people from my grandmother’s day were all better singers (so she had insisted once) then the folks of my generation.

Whoever they were, that choir, that was the event Mote kid did not want me to hear. But now I found that I was in the ridiculous situation of being held like a prisoner in the stocks. The splinters of the wood I had shoved my head through were now snug around my jaw and ears, and I could not draw my head back without impaling wooden points into my jugular. It was as if I had stuck my head through a fish trap.

On second thought, I did not want to go back and explain to the landlord about the bellhop whose skull had been blasted in half lying in my room. And I could already hear noises behind me. I figured I had less than a moment before people without modern man’s ideas of privacy peered into see the source of the cooked meat odor.

So I just straighten my legs and pounded with my fists and broke my way through the rest of the wall. I did not pay attention to any noise behind me. I just ran.

The streets of the village were narrower and even more crooked than when I had been prowling the alleys of Rome. But I could hear the voices and I kept turning toward the singing.

I smelled them before I saw them. Shepherds. They were even more ragged and work-worn than the people I had seen on the road, or in the Inn. Their hair and beards were long and lank, as if they had never known soap or shears. None of them had anything better woven than poncho-like rough cloak to wear, or a dirty loincloth. But they had sticks in their hands with crooks at one end, or some sort of hook or loop of leather, for drawing lambs back, the same as the one carried by Little Bo Peep. Some things don’t change with time.

I must have startled them when I blundered suddenly into their midst in the narrow street. But these men did not flinch or draw back or slap my face or step on my hand. They were all smiling cheerfully as if they were happy to see me.

I spoke to them in Greek, and then in Latin. I don’t remember clearly what I said. It might not have been very coherent. I doubt these simple hill-folk, the yokels of First Century Palestine, understood the tongues of their conquerors. But of course they knew what I wanted. I wanted to know why they were singing. What was the news? What was going on? You don’t need language to understand this. You just need to be human.

One of them, thinner and more careworn than the rest, blind in one milky-white eye and with ugly growths on his cheek and neck took me by the hand and led me back the way the others had just been coming.

It was a little ways outside the town. We just stepped through a low spot in the toppled wall, where the growing grass had already made a green path like a stile. He pointed at a cave.

“I am looking for a stable,” I said. “A stable with a baby in the manger! And a big honking star sitting right on top of it! Where three kings of Orient are. Maybe a little drummer boy, too.”

The shepherd just pointed again at the cave. Now, in the dusky gloom (for the sun sank below the horizon rapidly at this latitude) I saw a little flicker of butter-yellow light, like a reflection from the smallest lamp, somewhere in the depth of that cave.

The shepherd gave me a little shove, and went back, grinning. As he skipped off, he raised in voice in song, his hands over his head, twitching left and right with the rhythm. I could not understand a word of it, but I could hear his whole heart was in it. I could hear the gratitude.

As I got closer, I saw there was trampled earth around the cave mouth. I could smell the smell of dung. Then, I heard the lowing of cows, the bleating of sheep.

The stable was in a cave. Who puts a stable in a cave? On the other hand, considering how flimsy the last wall was that I broke through, maybe it was not a bad idea.

There was a man standing, leaning on a tall staff, in the shadow to one side of the cave mouth. He was bald on top, but with ringlets of silvery white hair reaching from his ears to his shoulders. A beard as white as snow reached nearly to his sash. His robe was finely made, especially in contrast to what the grimy, half-naked shepherds had been wearing, bold pattern of blue and scarlet stripes, with threads of purple running through it.

He looked up as I approached, and his eyes were so noble and stern that I thought I was looking at some wise king out of a storybook; but they were so sad and kind that, if it had been a storybook, it was a story about a king long banished from his home, a prince whose forefathers in their pride and folly had been toppled from the throne that he would never see. The land under his feet, which was his by right to rule, he walked through as a stranger and an exile.

My mouth was dry.

“I want to see the child,” I said. I said it in Greek. And when he merely looked at me, motionless, silent, sad, and stern, something welled up in my heart I cannot explain, and tears came into my eyes, and I sank down to my knees.

“Please, sir,” I said in Latin. “I need to know. She’s dead. I need to know there is a reason. I need to know there is a hope. I have to see the child. That he is not just a story, that he is not just a lie. Everyone says it’s a lie.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, and leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth, and wiped my tears off with his thumb, then pulled me to my feet. But then he tapped the heel of his staff against my shoes, first the left, and then the right, and he nodded, making a little gesture with his eyebrows.

“Oh!” I said. “Like the Japanese, are you? No shoes in the house?”

He nodded. I slipped my shoes off.

He made a wide sweep of his arm, like a king throwing open the doors to a palace for a visiting dignitary, and motioned me to enter what was, after all, a stinking stable.

The ground was cold underfoot, and there was straw and quite a bit of dung, and I wished the light were better so I would see what I was stepping into. Well, sometimes you have to walk without seeing.

In the distance, there was a little light of a brass oil lamp, the kind Aladdin rubs to get a genii, shedding less light than my phone gives off when I pull it out of my pocket to check the time. There was darkness between here and the lamp.

Why he trusted me, a giant stranger whose language he did not speak, to be alone with his wife who had just given birth, that I cannot guess. I barked my head once or twice, so by the time I came to the small flickering circle of lamplight, I was bent and holding my skull. Because I had just stuck my head through a broken wall not fifteen minutes ago, it was covered with dust.

I am sure the young girl thought I was bowing, or had poured dirt in my hair to show grief or repentance, or something.

She was sitting on the ground, and there was at least three other people with her. The closest to the lamp was a smiling and crooked old crone to which the little girl spoke a word that was, even though gently said, was unmistakably a command.

Again, I was surprised. There was, of course, no reason to assume Mary and Joseph traveled alone in this day and age, or did not have servants. In my grandmother’s time even she, who was by no means a rich woman, had hired help come by on washing days and to help with the spring cleaning, and my grandfather had hands for the farm.

The girl was very young. Maybe she was sixteen, or maybe she was fourteen. I suppose in the ancient world, anyone above thirteen was considered an adult. Considering the life expectancy, maybe sixteen was middle aged.

To be honest, I was appalled at how young she was. Who marries a girl at that age? And travels with her while she is pregnant? Who makes her bear such burdens?

She rose gracefully to her feet, holding the babe in one arm, cradled against her naked breast. I did not think it was right to stare at a young girl’s naked breasts, even if she was a mother, so I tried to keep my eyes down, but with her free hand she touched my cheek and wiped the dust from my hair, and made me to stand up straight.

There were calluses on her fingertips. Women who do a lot of weaving get them, from pulling the threads in the same way, over and over. Young as she was, she had already seen her share of work. Despite having servants, these were not rich people. And I suppose in those days, even rich women wove.

I wish I could tell you how pretty she was. Her eyes were calm as a sea which had never known a storm, never felt the slightest wind, but were clear and blue deep into infinite deeps. It was like looking at the crystal bar of the time machine, as if they opened into another dimension. It was like—how can I put this?—as if I were Tarzan and had been raised by apes and was seeing a real human being, a normal human being, a woman who looked just the way women were designed to look from the beginning, seeing one for the first time.

I said something then. I don’t remember what. It must have been asking to see the baby, who was, by the way, very energetically suckling, his little jaw moving as tirelessly as a machine.

The bent old crone came forward with a bowl of water, and offered it to me. I reached to take it, but she poured it over my hands, and then wiped my hands with the hem of her shawl before I could stop her. Then she knelt and splashed my feet, and wiped them likewise. I realized then that not all the water in this land stank. It was just that room at the Inn they had not bothered drawing fresh water from the well.

Another servant, this one a wall-eyed old man in dire need of dental surgery, offered the girl a small clay cup, which she passed to me with her free hand. The final servant, a man with a whip-scarred face whose ears were cropped handed the girl something that looked like a stone. She put it to her mouth and tore it in half with her teeth, offering me half. It was sourdough bread. I drank the wine and ate the bread, grateful for the hospitality of the Middle East.

The wine of this day and age had a grimy residuum at the bottom of the cup, looking all the world like tea leaves in an old fashioned cup of tea. I started to toss the dregs of the wine away, but the girl put her small hand on my hand and made me drink the whole thing. Not daring to offend the custom of hospitality, I drained the cup to the lees. Then the earless man took the cup away.

Without a word, she handed me the child.

I wish I could say he was cute. No, newborn babies are only cute after a few weeks. He was still red from birth, and wrinkled like a lizard. The umbilicus had been cut off far from the navel, and tied with a red thread. In case you want to know, Jesus Christ is an outie, not an innie.

I have always wanted to have a child. I always wanted to hold a baby in my arms. I know most women love holding babies and few men do. I am one of those few. My wife, for reasons still painful for me to dwell upon, was not able to have children. She had led a wild life as a teenager, aborted her firstborn, and suffered complications as a result.

Holding that young life in my arms, so frail, and so precious, seemed a miracle. I held him close, delighted with his warmth, with the living weight in my hands. The stink of the animals was in my nostrils, but the warmth shed by all the animals made the cave like an incubator. I was already blinking, trying to keep the sweat on my brow from getting in my eyes. It stung, and I my eyes swam with tears. I was wondering why in the world any mother would hand me her child to hold.

The girl looked at my face and spoke in Aramaic to the scarred man. He bowed to me and spoke in Greek, “I am Ehved son of Emeth. My lady greets you and says peace to you. This is Mariam daughter of Joachim son of Eli son of Levi and Anna daughter of Phanuel the High Priest.”

“Peace. Peace to you and to your lady. I am Jonathan son of Jacob.”

She spoke again. Her voice was like music.

“She says the child is the son of David. He is the king. The king belongs to the people. Whose arms should uphold the king, if the people will not hold him?”

She must have seen the look of surprise on my face when she handed him to me. Or maybe she could read minds. I had been riding a time machine this afternoon, I was a time traveler almost killed by another time traveler, so at this point I was not sure what I could believe.

The baby reached out and grabbed the crucifix hanging on a fine chain around my neck, and tried to put it in his mouth. My hand twitched, because I was torn between the need to get the choking hazard away from baby, but also to support the baby’s head, and I did not have three hands.

The girl must have seen the look of helpless male panic on my face, because she reached up with her small hands and neatly plucked the crucifix from the tiny red fist and the hungry little mouth.

The girl inspected the crucifix with a wide-eyed stare, tilting it to catch the lamplight. She said something in Aramaic. Her tone was one of innocent wonder, delight at finding a strange mystery.

The scar-faced man said, “My lady wishes to know what you are, and where you are from, that you would willingly carry so finely crafted an image of the death by torment only slaves suffer so near your heart? It is an abomination. In what land are such things made?”

The baby in my arms was so fragile. The girl seemed so happy, so serene. I could not say anything.

She spoke again. Ben Emeth said, “He that is hanged on a tree is accursed.”

“No,” I said.

Ben Emeth looked offended. “What do you mean, no?”

I thought of my wife’s unborn child, who had never lived, and whom I have never seen, never held, and who had never been mine. There are men who are fulfilled even if they are never fathers. I am not one of them.

I was no longer blinking because sweat was stinging my eyes. Now I was weeping.

I had been seeing it, in my heart, over the grave. A boy I could hold. I would have helped change diapers, and bottle fed him, made sure the apartment was child safe, no pennies on the floor a baby could have put in his mouth. I would have bought the right kind of safety seat for the car, the kind made of lightweight Space Age material, with a basket that unhooks from the seat for ease of carrying. And a stroller. And taught him how to walk. I would have been home for his first word. I would have tickled him and made him giggle.

And, later, ah, later: baseball and cub scouts and boy scouts and first communion and first love and teaching him how to tie a bow-tie and how to fold a flag and how to clean a rifle, and teaching him all the words to IMPOSSIBLE DREAM from MAN OF LA MANCHA. How to tell the truth. How to raise a child when his turn came. Everything. I would have taught him everything. Maybe he would grow up to be a doctor, and heal the sick and save their lives.

And if my son, the healer, if he got arrested for a crime he did not commit? I would have done anything, sold the car and the house to hire the best lawyers. And if he was bounced from one kangaroo court to the next, and witnesses got up and lied about him? I would keep hoping someone would give him justice. I would appeal. First to the Sanhedrin, then to Herod, then to Pontius Pilate. Someone would see he was innocent, that he had done no wrong.

But what if no one did? What if the politicians and the powerful people of the world, the priests and the princes and the conquerors decided to kill him? Would I keep hoping then?

“What do you mean, stranger?” said Ben Emeth again. Beneath his scars and the wrinkles of his age, I saw he had once been a handsome man, no doubt young and brave. He did not like people contradicting his mistress.

“I mean no.” I told him. “In a time to come, there will be one, who, when he is hanged on a tree, is not accursed. His death will seem a curse, but it will be a blessing. A blessing for all men. Of all times.”

The scarred man and the girl spoke in Aramaic. I could not understand the language, but her tone was curious and innocent, brave as a kitten who had never been hurt, and gentle, but gentle like a queen is gentle, who does not wish any hard word of hers to wound her loving and loyal servants. I had only ever heard politicians my whole life, never someone who loved and led a nation as a mother loves her child. There is something in such a voice you cannot mistake when you hear it, because there is nothing like it on Earth.

Ben Emeth turned to me. “My lady asks in what land is the pain and horror of crucifixion a blessing? She asks where are you from? What are you?”

“I am…I am from…I am lost. My own lady is lost. Tell her my own lady, my very own, is lost.”

I have no idea what my face looked like, or what they were afraid I might do, but the girl very firmly and gently took the child from me, and then and there unwound the cloth she wore as a headscarf. This was linen, and was white and lined with blue.

She turned and put the tightly wrapped child into a little nest of hay in the feeding trough. She said something over her shoulder to me. Ben Emeth was behind me. “She says you will be comforted. You will be found. One will come who will be your attorney, and speak the word.”

She smiled over her shoulder, and busied herself tucking in the baby. He was asleep. Even as a baby, was he not divine? How could he not know what was going to happen to him when he grew up? How could he sleep like that?

I was wiping my eyes, feeling foolish, feeling full of wonder, feeling I know not what. I said, “Tell her she should sleep when the baby sleeps.” Ben Emeth translated the comment, and the crone laughed and the girl smiled.

The girl spoke one last time. Ben Emeth said, “Bow your knee, and the mother of the king will give you her blessing, since under the ancient law of David that is her right. You have come far to receive it, farther even than the shepherd band. Ask of her with what blessing she shall bless you?”

I got down on one knee, and the kneecap of my pants leg landed right in a plopping of cow dropping hidden in the straw. I suddenly realized that everyone in this cave must be insane, including me. That baby was just a baby, puny, and red and weak. The world outside was a nightmare, a world ruled by sadists who worshiped obscene things, and even the Jews and Samaritans served God by slaughtering each other and slaughtering cows and sheep and turtledoves, a God too pure and remote to do anything, no matter what prayers were said, or how many cows were burnt.

No matter how many prayers you said when the tests came back positive. No matter what you said you would do or would not do, or how much faith you had. He did not listen. Not to you.

I was kneeling in a stinking stable in a cave. My face still hurt from where the Roman solider had slapped me that afternoon.

Nevertheless, I said, “Ask her to pray for me. Pray for me now, and at the hour of my death. I want to see my wife again. I want to hold her, be with her. And talk to her.”

The girl stood up, and moved toward me with footsteps so smooth she seemed to be gliding. She put both hands on my head, and said something in her liquid tongue. I felt a flush at her touch, as if my hair were trying to stand up, and the sensation moved from my head down my spine like a warmth through my body. She again touched my chin and bade me to stand up. She smiled and gestured toward the cave mouth. The audience was over.

I turned once to look toward the child. The tiny oil lamp was behind and beneath the trough of hay where the baby slept, and the yellow light slanted through the wide, crude slats and caught the wisps of hay sticking up around his tiny head so that a circle of gold, like a crown of fire, hung there. If my eye had been an inch to the left or right, I would not have seen it. I blinked, and it was gone.

I walked away into the night.

In one hand, I had a fistful of straw that I was using to wipe at my knee, to get the clinging filth off, and then with the other hand I was wiping my face. And now I started to sob in earnest. I had come for answers. I had actually seen the Messiah, held him in my arms, something every Christian has probably wanted to do, and still there was no answer for me.

What now? Find the machine, climb on, go back to a year when my wife was still alive? And then what? Knock that version of me over the head and replace him? Pile her on the machine, and find a time in the future when they could cure everyone of everything? Behind me was a little warm cave lit by a tiny light, where the cure for everyone and everything was supposed to be, it had not cured me.

And I had forgotten my shoes.

Feeling like a fool, I turned and walked back over the cold ground, but now it was completely dark, and the tiny glint of light from the oil lamp was gone. Frugal people did not waste oil at night. I could not see the cave mouth. After a few moments walking, I was sure I had gone too far, and now I turned again and went the other way, or what I thought was the other way, but all I found was a land of rocks and darkness where it became cold very quickly in the gloom.

I pulled out my phone and opened it, hoping to use the screen as a flashlight, but it had run out of power at some point. I could not remember the last time I’d recharged it. I had not prepared for a hike, or to go camping, or to go time traveling, and had not even brushed up on my ancient languages or brought a compass or anything. I had followed a crazy man in a top hat, the descendant of an equally crazy scientist, because I was half crazy myself that morning, alone by the grave. Not one of her family had come. Not one.

I stubbed a toe and stepped on a stinging insect at the same time. It was like a white-hot needled being plunged into my heel.

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted in English. Then, hoping God would not notice I had been swearing, I quickly said, “Um, uh, forgive us our sins and save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, including those in most need of thy mercy.”

Then I had an idea. I closed my eyes and just listened. There were lots of animals in the village, and maybe more than one cave was being used as a place to stall animals, but if I were still near the cave mouth, maybe I could hear something.

Sure enough, I heard bleating. It was a young sheep, complaining about something. I groped my way in the dark in that direction, stepping on every sharp stone and thorny bush in Palestine.

I did not find the cave mouth, but found the sheep. By that time, my eyes had adjusted to the starlight. It was a young lamb, a baby sheep.

The lamb was by itself, in a little hollow, and there were thorn bushes all around it. But no cave, and no shoes.

I turned away. The poor fellow bleated so pathetically. I looked over my shoulder, “Believe me, pal, I know the feeling.” I took a step, and he bleated again.

I sighed. Then I sighed again. I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my hands, and used that the push aside the nettles and stingers of the bush. I waded into the thorns for that dumb animal. Why? Because there was no one else around to do it.

Once inside, scratched and bleeding, I said, “Come on, sport.” And I pulled the lamb with a heave-ho up onto my shoulders. Then lamb bleated louder. By that point, with my luck, I was sure he was going to void his bowels on my shoulder.

I was surrounded on all sides by thorn-bush. Where was the break I had just so painfully trampled?

“Okay, sport,” I said to the lamb. “You got in here somehow. Do you know the way out? And maybe back to the spot where my shoes are, not to mention a warm stall for you, and plenty of yummy Lamb Chow? And why aren’t any shepherds watching you, this time of year? Did they hear voices singing in heaven, and just leave their work, to go look at the Messiah? I did that too. But she is still gone.”

And the lamb said, “No, the shepherd chief, Asher, asked Gabriel to watch us, and see we did not stray. When we were alone with the Archangel, he granted us the power of speech which Adam the Fallen King would have given us from that great tree which fairest Eve the Fallen Queen robbed, so that once and this once only, the paschal lambs could kneel and pray. Now we have a new Eve, and she has born us a new Adam.”

I was too shocked to throw the talking beast from my shoulders. The starlight from one single star above me suddenly grew brighter, or my eyes adjusted, and now I could see the circle of thorns was not a circle, but a spiral, and all I had to do was walk and turn and turn again, to be free. Not to keep the bad course I was on.

I took a step. “Are you a time traveler?”

“No. They are thickly gathered here, but in vain. They are not permitted to see the child.”

“Why can’t they see him?”

“Do you know, Gabriel was asking me that just an hour ago. Why can’t they see him?”

This was an insane conversation. I laughed, trying to take things as they seemed. “So! You are a Passover lamb? Do you mind being eaten?”

“All who are loyal to the Master wish to be consumed as He is consumed. For what other purpose was He born? For what other purpose was I created? The Sons of Adam were given dominion over us, and gave us our names. As you live in Him, so we live in you.”

“That sounds wrong, somehow,” I said.

“Your ears are thick with folly,” said the lamb.

“I must be asleep,” I muttered.

“You will soon wake, as do all who sleep in the Lord.” he said. “Now ask your question I was sent to answer.”

“I did not see the Star of Bethlehem. Or the three kings.”

“More than three mages will come, and they come first to Jerusalem, the City of David. They are horoscope-casters and astrologers from the ruling clan of the Zoroastrians, and the Lord will show through them how He can turn evil crafts to good purposes. This is not for two years to come. But that is not your question.”

I drew a breath. “Are you the comforter sent to comfort me?”

“No comfort is given to the sons of Adam except after tribulation and temptation. You are in the fire. You are being refined. And that was not your question.”

“Why does it hurt so much? This fire?”

“You know.”

“Because my faith is small? Because I love my sins?”

“You say it. Not I. And that was not your question.”

A cloud passed before the bright star. I stopped walking. The thorns were all around me. I could not see the path.

I said, “Will I see my wife again?”

“You will see her again. She waits for you, robed in white linen, by the river of the waters of life which flows from the throne, and a cup of those waters is in her hand, and her hair is woven a crown of the blossoms from the trees who leaves are for the healing of nations. You must first suffer death, as the child will, and resurrection, as he will. Beyond the trial is comfort. Beyond the darkness, light. But she will not be your wife there. None marry, nor are any given in marriage. The union is more intimate. And still that was not your question.”

“Maybe I should ask why you people always speak in riddles!”

“Maybe I would answer that you people never ask the right questions.”

I knelt and put him from my shoulders.

Kneeling, my face was near his muzzle. I was looking to see if there were some trick. To be honest, I wanted him in front of me, if the cloud would pass away from the star, so I could see whether or not his lips were really moving.

That was when it finally struck me, and despite the tears that still stained my face, and the bleeding scratches all over the rest of me, and the Roman hand shaped bruise running from my ear to my jawline, I started laughing.

I could not help it. It was too funny.

The lamb just looked at me with big, solemn eyes.

“I didn’t mean to laugh,” I said, hiccuping and trying to control myself. “I wanted to see if—if your lips were moving. And then, you see, I met this time traveler in Rome, and he was afraid to use the time machine, and I used my crucifix instead of my wedding ring, so the machine led me here, and then—then there was this dying guy with no pants on, and a Roman punched me like you’d kick a dog, and this little kid from the Sixth Cosmic sitcom or something who wears electric jewelry got his brain blasted when I shoved his head through a wall trying to kill me, on account of I didn’t let Antarctica conquer the moon in the Forty Second Freaking Century, and Saint Joseph kissed me on the lips, and I held the baby Jesus, and now, and now, and now I want to see if your mouth moves. I am afraid of being tricked. You know, because some things are too hard to believe. Don’t let yourself be fooled! Seeing is believing!”

“Listen,” the little lamb said.

And I bent my head toward him, but he said nothing. “What is it?”

The little lamb said, “Do you hear what I hear?”

In the distance, I heard a bell tolling. It was a solemn, slow, beautiful sound.

It was so lovely to hear, that the crazy laughter died on my lips.

The lamb said softly, “That is the alarm bell from the Roman fort, foretelling the downfall of the pagan world and all its arrogant love of cruelty. The Christian world to come shall be cruel as well, but it will be a world that will not love cruelty. Every bell on the face of the Earth is ringing this night, from the Pillars of Hercules, to Ultima Thule, to the springs of the Nile, to the Forbidden City and beyond. The bells sing in joy for the Savior’s birth. The stars also sing, but only my masters, the shepherd band, heard them. Asher, Zebulun, Justus, Nicodemus, Joseph, Barshabba, and Jose. They had prayed, you see. They pondered the word spoken to Job, and wished to know when it shall be that the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of light shout for joy? This is that night. There is no war being waged anywhere, on any front, for this one night and this one alone. Will you finally ask your question now?”

I drew a deep breath. “It seems so stupid.”

“God uses the fools of the world to confound the wise, Jonathan.”

I closed my eyes. “Why me? Of all the historians and sages and widows or widowers who suffered a loss, and saints who kept their vows and wise men, and everyone else, everyone in the world, why was I given a ride on that machine, and allowed to come here, and allowed to hold him in my arms, that little baby who holds the universe in his?”

My eyes popped open in shock. “Oh, good grief! I forgot to tell her that Jesus would be in the Temple when he turned twelve! That he is not in the caravan! I could have saved her all that grief! Jesus Christ, what the hell was I thinking!! Whoops, I mean heck. I mean Jesus Christ save me.”

“Be of good cheer,” said the lamb with perfect seriousness. “Your prayers will sustain and comfort her, whether you speak them now or later. Eternity entertains all prayers at once. And now comes the one who will answer you.”

I saw a light in the distance. It was clear enough that I saw the path again, and so, without any more mishaps with the thorns, I came into place where the ground was clear of rocks and nettles. It felt like turned soil under my feet, and the earth was cool and soothed my aches and stings.

The light was a lantern being held in the hand of a being shaped like a man dressed all in white, purer than any white Earth could make. Over his shoulder was a shepherd’s crook. Tucked through his belt was a golden horn. On his head was a hood or veil which hid his eyes, but I could see his nose and mouth.

“Rise,” he said, because I had realized who he was, and my knees failed and I had collapsed in panic. “Fear not. I am but a fellow servant of the same One you serve. See that you do not bow to me! I must return the lost lamb to the fold.”

I said, “Gabriel? Were you really watching the sheep so the shepherds could go see the child?”

The great being nodded slowly beneath his veil.

“Why was I allowed to see him? And not all the other time travelers? And not everyone?”

He said to me, “Lost lamb, if you were the only man alive, the only one who had ever sinned, and every other Son of Adam had remained pure and upright, it would all have been done for you. For you the child was born. For you he lives and dies. For you.”

The living being raised the lantern, and I saw it was a spiral galaxy inside the glass, not a candle, and clusters and superclusters of galaxies. “It is all for you. The stars love you, and He who, by his word, lit the stars and set them dancing, from the greatest to the least. Everything in the cosmos, all the light of all the worlds, to the blood shed by the Messiah. It is all for you, John Went.

“And more than a mere cosmos! Eternity and infinity are yours, endless life, unbound joy. You shall be rejoined with the one you love, and all the ones you love, and the love will be greater than mortal tongues can pray to ask or praise in thanksgiving.”

I did not know if he meant I would meet her that very hour, or only after many long seasons of life in this eon or many others. But I knew, then, that it did not matter. Only one question mattered.

“Why? Why? Why?” I shouted at him.

Gabriel smiled and he leaned, and he spoke very softly in my ear.

“Do you not give gifts to those you love?”

Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

Christmas Eve

Her name was Ginny. She was six years old, and it was Christmas Eve.

Her eyelids trembled and slowly her eyes closed. With a painful effort, she tried to stay awake. For a moment, her face was utterly at peace. Then with a little sigh of effort, her eyelids fluttered open.

“Mommy…? Is it all right…?”

“Hush, now,” Her mother replied. “Everything is all right.”

“Mommy, is it all right if I stay up until Saint Nicholas comes? Just this once? I won’t ask again.”

Her mother’s name was also Virginia. She was bent over the bed, passing her hand over her daughter’s face, comforting, soothing.

“Yes … just this once … Stay awake. Stay awake for Santa Claus, baby…”

Virginia passed her hand over her daughter’s head as if to smooth too-curly blonde hair; but Ginny had no hair any longer.

“… I hear the sleigh bells…” Ginny said. “He’s coming…How will he fit?”

“What was that?” Virginia bent close to her daughter’s barely-moving lips.

“No chimney. There is no chimney here. How will Saint Nicholas get in?”

There was no chimney in the terminal ward of the children’s hospital.

“He’ll think of something, baby. He’s Santa. Just have faith. Just hold on.”

One of the many blinking boxes connected to the little girl gave off an alarm which sounded like a bright, sharp ringing as if from small bells. Ginny smiled weakly at the noise, no doubt thinking it was sleigh bells, and said, “Will I see Saint Nicholas?”

“Yes, darling, O, yes my darling.” Virginia’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. “Santa Claus is coming. You will see him.”

The medical technicians and the nurses, voices tense but low, uttering precise commands as quickly and crisply as a priest conducting a well-known and long-beloved ritual, continued their desperate work as one alarm and then the next rang out. There was no room around the bed for Virginia to stand and hold her daughter’s hand.

The doctor told her not to worry. He gave Virginia some vague reassurance, as false but well-meant as telling a child to believe in Santa Claus.

The little girl’s eyelids trembled and slowly her eyes closed. She tried to stay awake.

After two hours and a half, as one alarm after another fell silent, and one monitor after another showed a flat line, they stopped their attempt to revive her. The doctor signed the certificate, showing the time of death as 11: 53. Seven minutes before Christmas Day.

She had lived to be six years old, and it was Christmas Eve.

Virginia could see, through blurring tears and through the Venetian blinds of the hospital room, how thickly the fresh snow was fallen outside, unmarked by footprint or tire tread, to make a scene as silent and perfect as a postcard.

Across the street was a store with window display, bright with holly wreaths, where little mechanical elves, tireless, went through the motions of making toys before a throne on which Santa sat.

For some reason, perhaps due to health concerns, the decorator had made this Santa thin and tall, and instead of a fur cap with white trim, adorned his head with a stern headdress that tapered to a point at front and back with a deep cleft between.

The store front display seemed particularly cruel to Virginia. Back when her daughter had been strong enough to get out of bed, she would stand before the window, wondering, delighted that Santa was so close, almost within reach. Mother and daughter would stand, hand in hand, trying to catch the cheerful notes of the toy store music over the noise of the traffic.

She held the cold body, the life she once had carried inside her own, delighting at every sensation of a kick or turning over. She held it until more than an hour went by. Virginia did not want them to cover the face, the sweet little face. All her daughter’s pain was gone, now. Her own pain would never end, now.

The doctor tried to say a few words to her, but there was nothing to say. Perhaps he wanted to rush Ginny to the morgue so he could go home to his family for Christmas. The unfairness of it sickened Virginia. A sensation of hot anger boiled in her throat, and tears dimmed her eyes. To get away from the man, she went to the visitor’s lounge, hoping to buy a hot coffee from the vending machine there. It was out of coffee, but there was hot chocolate. Ginny had loved hot chocolate: what child did not? Virginia did not have change, but borrowed some coins from an orderly, who had a kind face, and looked at her sympathetically.

Virginia’s anger was too great. She had the impulse to throw the hot chocolate into the orderly’s face. To escape any more sympathy, she stepped outside the glass doors leading to the emergency entrance. She did not bother going back for her coat; she merely shivered, finding dark and perverse comfort in the sting of the cold.

Out from her pocket she took her cellphone. Virginia remembered the salesman at the shop from over a year ago, back when she bought the phone. He had been very handsome and very young, and so she still remembered his face, and his breezy demeanor. He seemed too young for the job, and he had not known how to transfer phone numbers out of her old phone, or how to download a ringtone. But he had been was very charming, full of jokes. She remembered the salesman’s face like the face of a television actor: boyish, smooth, cheerful, full of sunny self-esteem. He had been no older than eighteen.

Eighteen. That was how old Frank had been when they married seven years ago, looking perfectly handsome with his crooked nose and long jaw and big ears in his splendid dress uniform. They had walked under the drawn swords of his fellow graduates together on their wedding day. Now, at twenty-five, he was in charge of an IFV, an infantry fighting vehicle that could blow a hole in a building, wade rivers and crush fences, blasting through walls with high-explosive incendiary rounds before trampling them flat beneath its treads. The M2 was smaller than a main battle tank, but Frank loved his vehicle and what it could do. He loved working with high explosives too, because it required care and precision and knowing exactly what to do.

The salesman had told her that the phone could reach anywhere in the world instantly. Virginia flicked the speed dial for her husband’s number. There was no signal. Of course. He was in the forward operations theater. There were no phone calls allowed. Maybe the enemy could detect the signal. Maybe the commanding officers did not want the men distracted while their machines were trampling rubble.

He was not coming home for Christmas. Leaves had been canceled. It was not even a real war against an enemy with a real name: they called it a “police action”, as if Frank and his men were beat cops stopping purse-snatchers in the park.

Virginia divided the world between pink and gray. Pink people were like the handsome cellphone salesman who had not known how to do his job, and had to stop and ask his manager all her questions. He was as pink as a bunny ear. The people of the pink world believed in themselves, and they lived nice lives, and they criticized other people for being less nice than they.

Grey people included men like Frank. Gray people were those who could repair the motor of a fire engine in motion, drive it through red lights to a burning house; they were the kind of people who ran inside the burning house to save a baby while civilians ran away; the kind who could put out a fire, saw lumber and rebuild a house, and paint it, while also sowing and reaping the field to bring in the harvest so that baby had enough to eat. Gray people did what had to be done because there was no one else around to do it. Frank was as gray as a gun barrel.

But even Frank and all his men and his fine armored carrier vehicle could not save the baby now, not this time. He was as pink and useless as that telephone salesman.

And she had no way to tell him the news. Merry Christmas! Your present this year is…

Virginia threw the cup of hot chocolate into the snow, where it made a strange brown stain. The cup of warmth was gone. And the snow was falling, so soon even the stain would be covered over, and nothing to mark there had ever been a cup of hot chocolate there.

She looked across the street. The robot elves mocked her, with their hideous mechanical smiles of make-believe joy, their jerky motions.

Virginia crossed over to the store, looking for a rock or something to throw through the plate glass.

There was no traffic at all. Who would be out and about on Christmas Eve? Everyone was home snug in their beds, dreaming of sugarplums. The red and green streetlights glinted against the snow of the road, and glittered against the falling snow. Red and green were Christmas colors. She had never noticed that before.

The WALK sign chimed with the sound of bells, telling the nonexistent blind people on the snowy midnight street it was safe to cross.

Her fingers were numb, and her nose was running. The icy wind bit her. Why had she gone out without her coat? What did it matter whether she had her coat or not? What did it matter whether she lived or died? It was not as if the doctors could make anyone better, not when it really mattered.

Sticking out of a nearby trashcan, half buried in snow, was a hefty looking stick. It looked like the broken haft of a protestor’s sign, crumpled and tossed into the trash. Virginia was not sure who had been picketing the store or why. Someone protesting the commercialization of Christmas, perhaps; or someone protesting Christmas and demanding more commercialization. What did it matter? The signboard was wet and ripped in two, with only a few large angry letters visible, and many exclamation points.

She was not sure if the wooden stick that once held the protest sign was sturdy enough to break the plate glass window, but she took up the stick in both hands, held it over her shoulder, and stepped toward the Santa display.

“Batter up!” she said. Her voice sounded strange in her ears. The alarm telling the blind to cross the street had broken, and was ringing and ringing.

Virginia glared at the figure in the window on the throne. He really looked nothing like other storefront Santas. He was thin and stern, with a hard, craggy face. His shoulder length hair was white but flecked with black. His red robes were all wrong. They looked more like something a rich Roman Senator would wear than a Santa. An elbow-length cape, red as blood, richly decorated with crosses and trefoils, a second garment, green as emerald and worked with gold thread, reaching below the knee, and beneath that a long cassock falling to his jeweled slippers. Around his neck was a chain of office, with holly leaves dangling from the links, and a cross beneath. Who, these days, puts a cross in a Christmas display?

In his hand he held a shepherd’s staff whose spiral head was adorned all with gold. Obviously the store decorator had confused Santa with the Nativity display, and put one of the shepherd crooks into the wrong hands.

She hated Santa because he was pink. He was the epitome of the pink life, the nice promises of niceness, soft and weak and meaningless promises. He was the man who made grown ups lie to children.

She hated him because he had not come.

Her eyes were filling now with tears, blinding her. She blinked and blinked, rubbing her face in her elbow. The fabric of her sleeve was soaked through with snow.

When she opened her eyes again, Santa was gone.

There was the empty throne in the store display, surrounded by mechanical dolls in pointed hats and pointy shoes. But the tall figure was missing.

Virginia stood on tiptoes, peering through the glass. Had a clerk, working long after midnight, come by during the moment it took her to wipe her eyes, and removed the six foot tall manikin? It did not seem possible.

The ringing in the air continued. Virginia turned her head and looked down the street. She realized now that it was not the sound of the traffic light walk sign. It was a brighter, sharper sound, like the sound of bells one would hang on a sleigh to tell wanderers lost in the dark woods in the snow that someone was near.

At the same time a deeper, more solemn note sounded, and the echoes walked down the street, huge as ghosts. It was the bell from the steeple of the cathedral across the city park from the hospital. She could not see the steeple from here. Why was it ringing at this hour?

As she looked, not twelve feet from her, as if pulled open by an invisible doorman, the front door of the Department store opened.

Still clutching the stick, Virginia, step by step, approached the door. Silently it stood open. Perhaps it was an automatic door, and the electronic circuit had failed.

She crept still closer, suddenly frightened. What if there had been someone in the store, watching her? A night watchman or something? He had seen her about to break the window, and damage the display, and so he had removed the Santa manikin quickly. And now he was opening the door, in order to ….

But there was no one at the door. It merely stood open, and a few flakes of falling snow drifted in, onto the red carpet of the foyer.

Virginia shook her head. What did it matter? What did anything matter? The door had malfunctioned, and was open, and was letting the snow come it, and so she was supposed to go to close it up again, because there was no one else around to do it.

She walked closer. It was like an explosion, but entirely silent, when all the lights in the store came on. For a moment, she thought the store was on fire, it was so bright. Down the street, the church bells rang and rang, a solemn noise of joy. The light was red and leaping, mingled with gold light and silver was from Christmas lights and artificial fireplaces and neon angels.

“Nothing to be afraid of,” Virginia said. “Someone in the store just turned on the lights, that’s all.”

A voice from the door answered.

“Come in!”

The voice was deeper and more solemn than even the bell, and it echoed and reechoed in her ear.

“Come in, — come in! And know me better, child!”

Emotion raged up in her as if the blood of she-tigers boiled in her veins. Someone playing a trick on her? Now? Tonight, of all nights?

Virginia gripped the stick on one hand and stomped into the department store, her face slick with tears.

It felt warm in here, so very warm after the bitter chill outside. It was an old fashioned store, with décor that looked like something from the previous century: the aisles were carpeted in burgundy and red rather than with linoleum, and there was a staircase leading to the upper floor rather than an escalator, a stair like one might find in a Victorian mansion. One flight led to a large carpeted landing, and two flights led thence upward to the left and right.

The wooden counters and tall displays were covered with holly and with little bells, and chains of gold; and everywhere, thousands upon thousands, were candles burning.

The candles were on shelves, on banisters of the staircase as well as on the stairs, hanging on the branches of the pine trees, held in the hands of the manikins, and crowding the coping near the ceiling. They must have been scented candles, or else there was also incense burning near, because she felt the rich scent tickle the back of her throat.

Virginia noticed now that none of the candles had any wax dripping, none of them were part- melted; they looked as if they had just come out of the box and been lit.

At the foot of the stair, for some reason, was a large wooden barrel, the size of a pickle barrel.

On the stairway was a feast spread, with plates and cups on each step, leaving only a narrow path between for the customers to walk. Here were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, suckling pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch. The meats steamed as if they just this moment had been carried out of roaring ovens by squads of cooks.

Wreathed about the banister of the stairs were ivy and holly and mistletoe all gleaming in the bright candle light. Vines of ivy ran across the stairs to the two huge Christmas trees which filled the landing. There were live birds in the trees, singing sweetly, unfrightened by the candles.

She tried to imagine how flocks of song birds could have been brought here in the small hours of the night from a nearby pet store, or loads of hot meat and cold fruit from restaurants and grocers. Virginia noticed that the trees blocked the way up the stairs.

Between the trees, on the landing, with his feet on the stairs, sat the thin and tall Santa in his thin and tall headgear. It looked like an arrowhead. She saw that the figure was also wearing a crown, a thin rim of gold just outside the brim the tall cap.

Virginia realized that the store decorator was insane. Who put a manikin in the middle of the stairs to block traffic, or trees, or vines? Who used live birds these days, or living candles?

She looked at the Santa manikin. She gave out a yelp of shock when the figure moved, raising his right hand, fingers toward her. It was alive!

“You have not seen the like of me before,” he said.

But she had. She recognized his headgear now: it was a miter, like a bishop might wear. The staff in his hand was a crosier. He raised his hand as if he expected her to approach and kiss his ring. It was such a simple and regal gesture, that it could not be something from the world she knew. It was from the Dark Ages, or earlier. It was an ancient gesture.

“I know you!” she said accusatorily, her voice ringing with anger.

Gravely, the figure lowered his hand, saying nothing.

“I never liked you. It was Frank’s idea. He was the one who wanted to tell Ginny about Santa. He loved those stupid stories about the jolly old elf and his magic sleigh!”

“Francis knows me. Do you?”

“Where is your pipe? You are supposed to be smoking a pipe!”

“I am older than the year when men first learned to put tobacco weed in clay pipes.”

Virginia raised her voice. “Do you know why I hate you? Gentle lies are even worse than lying lies, because they mean well. But they are false! False! No one ever comes on Christmas Eve. No one ever comes! No one ever answers any prayers! I wore my knees out! I cried my eyes out!”

He stood. “I am here now. Ginny called me. I came.”

“You came? It is too late! She’s dead!” The word came out as a scream. “How could God kill my baby? My sweet little girl! Can’t he save anybody? Doesn’t he listen to anyone?”

He pointed his crosier at the large wooden barrel at the foot of the stair. A sensation of dread came over her she could not explain. Her limbs began shaking. A dark terror filled her.

“No. I am not going to look in there,” she said.

He said nothing, but continued to point.

Finally, she stepped over to the barrel and put her hand on it. She could smell, very faintly, beneath the incense and the candle smoke, the smell of blood, old blood.

She jerked her hand away. “No, I won't look!”

But the lid of the barrel flew up. She grabbed it with her hand and forced it down, but not before she had seen three small white faces, their throats slit from ear to ear, brown bloodstains like bibs spread on their chests, their dead mouths open, their dead eyes staring, all surrounded with a stench.

He said, “Abim, Antonius, and Alimus were three children traveling on their way to Athens to study, carrying money their father had given them. In those days the Emperor Diocletian was strong and well-feared, and it was believed that even children carrying gold abroad would be safe to travel. That belief was in error. The boys stayed at the inn of a wicked innkeeper, who slew them foully in the night and hid them in a pickling tub. It so happened that my servants and I traveled the same route that night, and in my dream, I saw the murders and I heard the screams. I woke and summoned the innkeeper, demanding of him the truth. In fear and remorse, upon his knees he begged for mercy. And upon my knees I prayed earnestly to the Lord Our God, and the next day, the children were revived to life and wholeness. They appeared at the chapel, still smelling of pickle brine, and then they went their way, praising God and singing His glory. The innkeeper was baptized that Eastertide.”

She lifted the barrel lid. The barrel was now empty, and a sweet smell, sweeter than the first wind of spring from a high mountain, issued from it.

Virginia slammed the lid back down. “You are Santa Claus. You sneak down chimneys and give presents away and eat cookies, you and your red-nosed reindeer. What are you doing with murdered children? What kind of story is that?”

“I am Nicholas of Myra, Bishop of the One, True, Holy, Universal and Apostolic Church. Children and those who dare the dangers of the sea are in my special care and are dear to me. Under Diocletian, I suffered torment, fulfilling what Christ left for me on the Cross; and was in bonds, and for many months was held in a house of darkness, and by my prayer brought my jailer, Simeon, to baptism. With the coming of Constantine, Imperator, I was set at liberty, and all the Holy Church was freed. At the Great Council of Nicaea where all the world was gathered, I smote the heresiarch Arius on the mouth for his impudent blasphemy, and earned the reprimand of the Imperator, to whom I owed obedience and love. When the Sultan stole a child of a man who much honored and revered me, I sent my shade to gather the boy up and return him in a twinkling, in the blink of an eye, from across the sea. None of these things were done by my own power, but by the grace of God which the merit of Christ has won for us, we who are the fallen sons of Adam.”

Virginia looked left and right, as if seeking something to turn her gaze away from the impossible figure seated regally on the stairs above her. “What are all these candles doing here? Why aren’t they being burned up?”

“The power which Moses saw in the burning bush sent up a sweet smoke to heaven, and yet the bush was not consumed. That power has not ebbed since that day, because it is eternal. Do not wonder that these candle-fires never diminish, for they are the prayers of the saints, and all of them pray for you. And there are many more you do not see, numberless as stars, for the world is not large enough, not even if every drop of water in the sea were turned to flame, to show how many prayers are said for your soul.”

“This is a dream. I fell asleep in the waiting room.”

“No. But Earth itself is a dream of the abundant life beyond life. You think we departed dead sleep in the ground? It is you who sleep. And when you wake, your child shall live.”

Virginia said nothing, but her face spoke volumes of her doubt and anger.

The bishop tilted his head, and frowned, and said. “Nothing is taken from an unwilling giver. And nothing is given to an unwilling taker, not even life eternal. The Father loves you too much for that. He will not overthrow your liberty, because we are like Him in this.”

Virginia said, “How can I forgive you for not answering a little girl’s prayers?”

“They are answered. Here am I.”

“And what of all the other children in the world?”

“I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land; But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lazarus died, for all that he had been raised, when he was old and stricken in years, and likewise Dorcas, and likewise Eutychus, and likewise the widow of Nain’s son.”

“Are you going to grant me a miracle? What about those who pray and get no answer! Why did you wait? Why did this happen in the first place? What—look at what you have put me through!” She shouted at him, and then she broke down and began to cry.

He rose and came down the stairs at a run, so swift it seemed as if he were falling, though not a platter nor cup of all the feast of food and drink along the stairs was disturbed. Perhaps his feet did not touch the steps at all.

Then he was next to her.

“Your daughter will live,” he said. And he put out his hand as if to embrace her.

She shoved him away. “At the Last Judgment! On the world’s last day. Is that what you mean? When I wake from this dream called life?”

“When you wake from the sin called death.”

“But that is not good enough! Even if this is a nightmare, why does a God who calls himself good allow it? Why do children die? Why do the innocent suffer? Why does anyone die? Why can’t God fix it?”

“It is done. It is fixed. He makes all things new.”

“No! My little girl is in the morgue! All her hair fell out! Her father does not even know yet! All this suffering! The pain she went through—and I could do nothing!”

“Except fast, pray, and give alms.”

“My prayers were not answered! It is too late now! You cannot make the pain Ginny suffered into something that never happened! Not even God can do that! Oh, she was so brave! That was almost worse than when she sat and demanded to know why it was happening to her, and wondered if it was her fault. You are such a damnable liar! All of you! Why do you want kids to believe in Santa Claus?”

“Let them believe what is so because it is so. Saint Nicholas is real; I am he.”

“That is not what I meant!”

“Let the children practice their belief in a generous and jovial saint, if their minds are to be trained to the greater belief in a more generous and more joyful sovereign, one whose generosity and joy cannot be believed or measured. There are no words of men to encompass the joys.”

“Why is there pain in the world? If I could bring God here, and find a judge to judge between us, and force him to answer–then I could punish him for all this pain!”

He raised his hand. “Touch the hem of my robe. Come, and see.”

And then they were standing upon a gray desert where never water had been, and the sky above was black as pitch, and the sun an intolerable shriek of light. Craters, as if all the guns of all the wars of man had torn this land into something like leprosy, there were craters, small and large, reaching all the way to the horizon, which was unexpectedly close.

In the sky was a blue crescent.

“This is the Earth’s moon.” He pointed. In the middle distance was a tower. It had five-sides and rose to sharp point, and a row of small round windows ran down its length. “That tower was not built by Man, but by those who dwelled here in eons past. No astronaut of Earth, no astronomer, has yet seen this tower. Do you know who built it and why?”

She said, “How could I know that?”

The sky changed. Now they fell through endless space, and before them like a plate of jewels was a galaxy, seen face-on, its mighty spiral arms of light stretching out through the universe. To one side was another galaxy, on edge, and beyond it a third, but this third galaxy was irregular, and streams of stars, thin and wandering like vapors of mist, reached from one to the next.

He said, “Here are three galaxies, each one ten times the size of your Milky Way or more, that recently collided. Countless solar systems, each one containing one or two or five stars, most stars much larger than your own, and each solar system holding scores of habitable planets, or hundreds, was thrown into confusion for millions of your years as all the stars were disturbed in their orbits around their galactic cores. It is a vast and mighty disaster beyond any reckoning of any natural disaster, whirlwind or flood or hurricane your little world could ever know. Why was this permitted to happen?”

Before she could answer, the scene again changed, and now she saw the galaxies as small as tiny stars, gathered into crowds and swarms, and these swarms formed bands of bright cloud outstretching far to her left and right.

“Those three galaxies are part of an Abel cluster that makes up a macroscopic structure called the Great Wall. This wall is a collection of superclusters extending for one-twentieth part of the length of the entire observable universe. It is a billion light years from Earth, and over a billion light years long. Why was it made? What purpose does it serve?”

Virginia said in a frightened voice, “No human being could know such a thing. It’s impossible to know.”

Suddenly they were standing in midair a mile above the sea. Storm clouds were gathered, and rain lashed the waves. The sun was low against the horizon, but whether it was the dawn or dusk she did not know. Below them was a fleet of sailing ships with slanted sails. A great whirlpool of froth reached from one horizon to the other. The waves were taller than mountains, thousands of feet of water rearing up, and as the great waves strode across the sea, the ships of the fleet were flung up and thrown down, and many were capsized. A bulk as large as a continent rose up from the deep, and torrents sluiced from its horns and bony back. Seaweed and coral bed grew in the silt collected between the plates of its shell. The whole body beneath the shell was so large that all the ships were taken up upon it, and grounded and wrecked. As its limbs writhed, hills and mountains formed in the flesh, and rivers greater than the Mississippi were gathered in the crevasses of its wrinkles. In the far distance, above the storm clouds, there was a yellow orb like a full moon rising, but there was also a second next to it, equal in size to the first. In the flash of lighting created by the atmospheric friction of its neck, Virginia saw that these two moons were eyes within a vast reptilian face which bulked too large for her vision to hold.

It opened its mouth, and there was a hurricane of cloud between the upper and the nether jaws; and there was a thing like a sun in its throat and lights like the lights of lamps, and sparks of fire, issuing from its jaws and nostrils.

“Behold the one creature of all created things which fears no other created thing. Upon the Earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholds all things with a firm and unshaken heart. He is the king of all the children of pride. Can you put a hook through his nose, and draw him up to the surface? Can you play with him as with a songbird? Do you know who can?”

Virginian felt her sanity about to melt, and she put her fist in her mouth and bit her knuckle so that she would not scream and attract the gargantuan monster’s attention to her.

Saint Nicholas smiled and said, “Fear not. This is a shadow of things to come. In your day, not even the deepest submarine vessels have not discovered him. He cannot survive in the lesser pressures above the ocean’s deepest abyss. There hath he has lain for ages, and he will lie, battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, until the latter fire shall heat the deep; then once by men and angels to be seen. In roaring he shall rise—and on the surface shall he die.”

The vastness threw back its hideous head, and as it roared the sun in its throat erupted into a nova and spread across the sky.

Then they were standing on the rocks and sand of a hilltop in the blazing heat of the tropical day. Below them were the brown squares of houses made of brick and clay of a walled city, from which a great smell of offal and sewerage rose. From every house and tower smoke trickled up, but from small holes or tents on the flat roofs, not from chimneys.

Virginia, her ears still ringing from the roar of the dying sea monster, thought she was deaf at first. But no, then came the sounds of a celebration. She heard cheers and shouts, like a crowd gathered for a football game.

Up the hill into view came a group moving slowly. In the front marched bored soldiers in bright helmets and leather coats, carrying octagonal shields and vicious-looking spears that were a yard of iron topping a yard of wood. Behind, garbed in rags or tunics or long, shapeless garments, came the jubilant crowd.

“What are they celebrating?” She took a deep breath, and smelled the smell of blood. “What is this place?”

“These are shadows of things past. This is the Place of the Skull. Golgotha. Not far from here, on that peak yonder, Abraham was told to sacrifice his only true born son Isaac, where the archangel Tzadkiel stopped his hand.”

A man came into view with a heavy beam of wood across his shoulders, bent almost in two by the load. The man had been in some sort of accident, because his flesh was torn and dripping with many long parallel wounds scraping across his bruised and bleeding back, his chest and torso, his arms and legs. He should have been on a stretcher, being rushed by ambulance to an emergency room. His face was a swollen mass of bruises and cuts, so that his face seemed hardly human. A second man was helping him carry the heavy wooden bar. When the wounded man stumbled and fell, the crowd cheered again, whooping, and children threw stones or donkey turds, of which there were many along the road. A young woman pressed forward, and wiped the man’s face with a cloth, and helped him to his feet, before one of the bored soldiers, without looking up, struck her in the head with the butt of his spear, felling her.

Then a voice called out in fear. The crowd stopped laughing and calling. A woman no longer young in a plain white homespun robe stood on the rocky path, waiting for the crowd to approach. Those in the front of the crowd, as if they knew her, slowed and stopped, and the whole mob hesitated.

Even the soldiers stopped. The old woman stepped forward and put her face to the face of the condemned man. What she said, or what he said back, of even if they spoke at all, Virginia could not hear.

Virginia said, “Who is that woman?”

Saint Nicholas said, “Weep for her, Virginia, for she shares your pain. She too is losing a child. She is the mother of that condemned man.”

“And who is he?”

“He is the one you wanted to see punished. That bar across his shoulders is the cross bar of his death. From it, he will hang naked on a tree for three hours and more, his arms and legs pierced through with spikes, and each breath will be agony. Why do you turn your eyes away? This is he whom you blame. This is he with whom you are wroth. You wanted a judge between him and you to make your accusations. But the judge in this case has washed his hands, and the Son of Man will make no answer to your accusation. Watch! He goes mildly to his death.”

“What has he done?”

“He has done no wrong.”

“Why are they mocking him? His mother is right there! Why? Why so much suffering?”

“Because he puts fear into the fearless monster's heart. The monster is no beast, but an angel of the highest order, the brightest before he fell. He has no name in heaven, but here he is very great, and this is the day of victory over him. That is the man who defeats him. Behold him.”

The beaten man fell for the third time. A low mutter of laughter started at one side of the mob and rippled to the other, as if a joke or witticism was being repeated. The mob crowded forward now, and the old woman was lost to view, hidden in the shouting multitude.

Virginia could not stand the sight or the smells. She closed her eyes. “Spirit, or Saint, or Santa, or whatever you are. Take me home. I can see no more.”

Then it was cold. Her feet were on a hard floor. She could tell from the echoes of her breathing that she was in a close, windowless room. The smell of disinfectants and death was in her nose. She knew before opening her eyes where she was.

Virginia looked. she was in the morgue. Beneath a low ceiling, lit only with a few dim and dusty neon tubes, was row upon row of metal plates set in the concrete wall. These were drawers.

One was open. The sheet had been turned down. There Ginny lay. She looked asleep. That was the cruelest thing about it. She just looked like she was sleeping.

Nicholas was still there. “Have you any more to say?”

She shook her head. “I have questions, but not–I am not angry. But I do not understand why all this happened to me. Or to him. Why was it needed?”

“The enemy is terrible and there is no other way to defeat him. Man is lost, and there is no other path back to paradise.”

“Why did my daughter suffer?”

“For you. Out of love for you.”

“What? What does that mean?”

Nicholas said, “I am come in answer to her prayers, and with the news that she is granted more than she asked. She wanted to see me, Saint Nicholas. Instead, she now, right now, is in the presence of all the saints, myself and many of greater stature, and she is with the blessed Mother, and she is holding Our Lord as an infant in her arms, as she—and many others—always secretly wish to do. There is no sun and no moon in the place where she now dances, but the light of the perfect source of all being, the perfect love that is beyond words. That joy enters her soul now, so that when she returns to this valley of mourning and weeping, to suffer many more pains and sorrows, when she is old and gray, and war and famine come, and she suffers losses, one upon another, she will endure them because she has seen the light. The true and perfect light. She will forget all but the very smallest sliver of all she now in fullness sees when she wakes, but that remembered sliver will be enough to sustain her in the dark years ahead.”

“And my prayers? Why where they not answered before all of my pain?”

“Because you receive more than you think to ask.”

“What does that mean?”

“To a woman of faith, a saint can answer any question without answering, because she trusts in the Lord. To a woman of no faith, no answer is an answer, since it merely leads to more doubt, more perplexity, more desire to cross examine God. You cannot cross-examine Him. You are at the bar, not He. Why do you scoff at Santa Claus? Here am I—I stand before you, Nicholas of Myra, a saint of the Lord and His humble servant. Yet you call me a lie. Why?”

“Because you are not real.”

“No, woman. Because you are not real. You cannot pretend, even in play, to believe in a sweet dream like Santa Claus, who brings sweets to children, because you do not believe in the sober truth in Saint Nicholas, or in the Lord I serve, who brings you the bread of heaven and the precious blood, that you may have sweet life, and life more abundantly.”

“It was Frank’s idea to tell Ginny that Santa was real.”

“And it was the idea of Francis, when you were married, that the two of you should be of one faith. Yet where is your faith? You see me and still you do not believe. So how can you ask why we do not show ourselves to men to see? Those who know the saints do not need to see us to see our actions in their lives. I am come because of the faith and prayers of Francis.”

“My husband? He does not even know Ginny fell sick. I have not spoken to him for a year. Since last Christmas! What did he pray for?”

“He prayed for Ginny. And for you. Virginia, do you know why Abim, Antonius, and Alimus died?”

“Who? Oh, the children in the pickle barrel. No, why did they die?”

“To save the innkeeper, their murderer. I told you of his fate. He was immersed in the water that drowns earthly life. The children died to save him. Your daughter died to save you. Now you shall live again, and so shall she.”

Nicholas turned away, and bent over Ginny. He took a small pot of oil from beneath his robe and anointed her, saying, “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by sight, by hearing, smell, taste, touch, walking…”

Music came into the room. Virginia jumped, she was so startled. Then she recognized it as the special ringtone set aside for only one number.

It was Frank.

Virginia held the phone to her ear with trembling hands. His voice was small and tinny and wonderful. “Honey! Great news. I’ll be home tomorrow. Or, actually, later today. I’ll be in time to see the tree. Don’t start unwrapping presents without me.”

She took a deep breath. Ginny had not opened her eyes. She lay there, still and silent. Could she be sure of a miracle, now? “That's wonderful, Frank! I have good news too, Honey. Ginny was sick, very sick, but she’s better now. She’s all better. This is the best Christmas ever.”

Saint Nicholas raised his arms, placing one hand on Virginia's head, and the other on the head of the motionless girl lying on the shelf with her eyes closed. Nicholas said softly, “Let not this cold place of death be what this child's eye first sees when she wakes, O Lord.”

There was a sensation of swift motion as the morgue walls vanished like shadows. Virginia glimpsed houses and streets, bright with colored lights, empty of men and filled with snow, fly past her eyes with the speed of the wind. Her own little two-story house in the suburbs, her ordinary, un-magical, and non-fantastic home, whose mortgage they could not really afford on her husband's meager pay, the scene of so many terrible days of illness, despair, and lingering pain, now rose up in her view like some impossible dream hooded in white and edged in icicles. They did not go down the chimney, as she half-expected.

Instead, when she opened her eyes, she was standing on the floor of Ginny’s bedroom. The little girl was lying in the same posture as a moment ago, but, with the brightly colored bedsheet beneath her rather than a slab, she looked more like a child slumbering than dead. The tall saint was still bent over her.

Virginia had not put up any decorations that year, and her house had no colored lights on, but when Nicholas straightened up, raised his hand and spoke a word, there was a young pine tree in the room that had not been there before, and on its highest bough stood a silver candle that burned and from which the wax did not drip. And there were dozens of candles on every surface, on the dresser and on the window sill.

Candles, she found herself recalling, were the prayers of the saints. She remembered lighting a candle with Frank on their wedding day.

Nicholas smiled, winked at her, and said, “Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.”

And then, he was gone.

Ginny opened her eyes. “Mom? I walked on a bridge all made of light and I held the baby Jesus! And I think I dreamed I saw Santa too!”

“You did, baby. Oh, you did! And I saw him too!”

Then it was all tears and joy and laughter.

THE END

Books by John C. Wright

CASTALIA HOUSE

Awake in the Night Land

City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis

One Bright Star to Guide Them

The Book of Feasts & Seasons

Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

THE GOLDEN AGE

The Golden Age

The Phoenix Exultant

The Golden Transcendence

WAR OF THE DREAMING

Last Guardian of Everness

Mists of Everness

CHRONICLES OF CHAOS

Orphans of Chaos

Fugitives of Chaos

Titans of Chaos

COUNT TO THE ESCHATON

Count to a Trillion

The Hermetic Millennia

Judge of Ages

OTHER NOVELS

Null-A Continuum

FANTASY

Awake in the Night by John C. Wright

Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright

One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright

The Book of Feasts & Seasons by John C. Wright

A Magic Broken by Vox Day

A Throne of Bones by Vox Day

The Wardog's Coin by Vox Day

The Last Witchking by Vox Day

Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy by Vox Day

The Altar of Hate by Vox Day

The War in Heaven by Theodore Beale

The World in Shadow by Theodore Beale

The Wrath of Angels by Theodore Beale

SCIENCE FICTION

Big Boys Don't Cry by Tom Kratman

The Stars Came Back by Rolf Nelson

City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright

Hyperspace Demons by Jonathan Moeller

On a Starry Night by Tedd Roberts

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

QUANTUM MORTIS A Mind Programmed by Vox Day

Victoria: A Novel of Fourth Generation War by Thomas Hobbes

NON-FICTION

On War: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009 by William S. Lind

Four Generations of Modern War by William S. Lind

Equality: The Impossible Quest by Martin van Creveld

Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright

Astronomy and Astrophysics by Dr. Sarah Salviander

CASTALIA CLASSICS

The Programmed Man by Jean and Jeff Sutton

Apollo at Go by Jeff Sutton

First on the Moon by Jeff Sutton

AUDIOBOOKS

A Magic Broken, narrated by Nick Afka Thomas

Four Generations of Modern War, narrated by William S. Lind

TRANSLATIONS

Särjetty taika

QUANTUM MORTIS Un Hombre Disperso

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravedad Mata

Una Estrella Brillante para Guiarlos

QUANTUM MORTIS Um Homem Desintegrado

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravidade Mortal

Uma Magia Perdida

Mantra yang Rusak

La Moneta dal Mercenario

I Ragazzoni non Piangono

QUANTUM MORTIS Тежина Смрти

QUANTUM MORTIS Der programmierte Verstand

Grosse Jungs weinen nicht